A matter of survival
PPS must close schools to avoid fiscal abyss
There is no future for Pittsburgh Public Schools unless it closes schools and significantly reduces its real estate portfolio. That’s the clear conclusion of an analysis of the district’s budget, enrollment and classroom capacity data performed by the Post-Gazette Editorial Board.
The school capacity data, sought out and made public by the advocacy organization 412 Justice, unfortunately does not support the group’s goal of stopping school closures. Even using conservative estimates, PPS has 40% more classroom space than it needs, while the district hemorrhages cash.
The sense of foreboding among families and communities has not been helped by leadership that refuses to be straightforward about its goals and intentions. In January, the school board sneaked a last-minute resolution approving a “facilities utilization study” onto their agenda.
Consolidating schools should be a multi-year process that involves hundreds of hours of community meetings and feedback, but because of the dithering of district leadership, PPS doesn’t have years left. Indeed, according to its own budget projections, it will be insolvent by the end of 2025.
Negative balance
Pittsburgh Public Schools has flirted with insolvency for years, but time is running out. Under disgraced superintendent Anthony Hamlet, district budgets regularly projected massive negative fund balances in future years. But a combination of $100 million in federal COVID relief funds and the district regularly coming in under budgeted expenditures during the tenure of Superintendent Wayne N. Walters has staved off doomsday.
trict continues to spend more every year, and more than it takes in, even as enrollment has plunged 18% since 2017, with no end to the decline in sight.
Worse, due to collapsing Downtown assessed property values, PPS is staring at tax refunds and declining revenues its leaders haven’t adequately budgeted for. District CFO Ron Joseph has estimated the worstcase damage at $13.4 million in refunds, and similar revenue declines going forward. That would wipe out the (already dangerously low) projected fund balance of $17 million at the end of this year.
It may be tempting to blame inequitable state and local funding, and to hope for a state windfall if the Basic Education Funding Commission’s recommendations are implemented. Not so fast: According to the commission’s calculations, PPS isn’t just adequately funded, but overfunded. That’s because its state funding share is still pegged to 2014-2015 enrollment, despite huge declines.
One possibility for savings is charter school reform. PPS plans to spend $146 million in charter tuition this year, for more than 5,000 students. But the only reform currently alive in Harrisburg is for cyber charter funding, which even in its most radical form would net the district about $13 million a year. That’s not enough to fix its problems.
Too much space
PPS must spend less money. At over $30,000 per student, a Pittsburgh education is among the most expensive in the entire state, while outcomes are among the worst. The figure is all the more striking when compared with standout suburban districts like Mt. Lebanon, which spends under $20,000 per student.
The district’s biggest expenses are teacher salaries and benefits, which are defined by contract and politically untouchable. But facilities costs are nearly a tenth of the budget — around $60 million — and could be trimmed by a third or more through consolidation. Further, the district could reap significant windfalls from property sales.
To analyze capacity for 54 district schools, we used enrollment data for kindergarten and up, and discounted all designated early childhood classrooms. Then, to make the analysis even more conservative, and to account for concerns about inflated official capacities, we reduced those figures by another 15%. Here are some key findings:
Overall, nearly 40% of school capacity is going unused.
More than half of space is going unused in 15 schools, or 28%.
Only five schools, or less than 10%, are being used at 90% or higher of capacity.
Since 2018, 40 of 54 schools have seen enrollment declines of 5% of more. Of those, the average decline is over 20%.
Least bad option
Nobody can deny that school closings are painful. Most studies indicate temporary declines in achievement for students from closed schools. Consolidation also affects the entire community, as schools serve as nodes for social services, play areas, community centers and more.
Further, school consolidation invariably affects poor and racial minority communities in a disproportionate way. This will be the case in any PPS closing plan: Of the 14 schools with greater than 75% Black enrollment, ten have 50% or more excess capacity. On the flip side, all of the district’s five schools where fewer than 50% of students are “economically disadvantaged” are at or near capacity, and are unlikely to be closed.
The closure process should take these disparities into account, and try to keep as many schools open as possible in historically marginalized communities.
However, the harm done by a PPS closure process must be weighed against the much greater harm that would be done by entering the state’s Financial Recovery program. There, decisions about closures would be made without sentiment or mercy, and could even be handed over to a receiver — a single individual who assumes nearly all the authority of the school board.
None of this justifies the cloakand-dagger routine the school board is attempting in order to minimize public blowback. Sneakiness and secrecy always backfire. While the hour is late, the board and Mr. Walters should undertake as complete a community engagement process as possible in order to explain the necessity of consolidation and to solicit feedback on the decision-making process.
PPS has been a case study in mismanagement for many years now — that’s why the district is in this position to begin with. How its leaders act now will determine whether this is a turning point, or if the crisis only deepens.