Volume 27 No. 11 November 2011
School board considers realignment adjustments By Kelsey Shea
Photo by Kelsey Shea Last month the Northside celebrated its 20th annual Pumpkinfest! For more photos, check out www.thenorthsidechronicle.com.
Three buyers bid on Ridge Avenue school building By Kelsey Shea After eight years of vacancy and two months on the market, the former Pittsburgh Public School building on Ridge Avenue may finally have a new occupant. Pittsburgh Public Schools currently has three bidders for the 44,000 square foot school at 635 Ridge Avenue – Light of Life Ministries, Propel Schools and the Community College of Allegheny County. The bids were made public on Monday, Oct. 17, after Schenley, Reizenstein and the Ridge Avenue schools were put on the market in August. Bids for 12 other schools, including Brightwood’s Horace
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Mann School building on Shadeland Avenue, are due by Oct. 25. The money made from the sale of these schools would offset the projected $38 million deficit the Pittsburgh Public School faces for 2012. Light of Life, an outreach program for the poor, homeless and addicted, made the highest bid at $1.1 million and hope to relocate to Ridge Avenue from their current facility on North Avenue, where they provide food, shelter and resources. “The facility that we’re in is grossly inadequate in both size and condition,” said Light of Life Executive Director Craig Schweiger, who noted that the line
See Ridge School, page 7
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For the past month, the Northside has been in a tug-ofwar battle sparked by a possible adjustment to Pittsburgh Public School’s realignment plan regarding Perry and Oliver high schools. The original realignment plan, announced August 4, called for California-Kirkbride’s Oliver High School building to close, and roughly 300 displaced Oliver students to filter into the Northside magnet school, Perry Traditional Academy in Observatory Hill. The plan was created in the hopes of filling 10,191 unused seats in the district and reducing a projected $41.2 million budget district-wide deficient. Northview Elementary is also listed as one of the seven schools proposed to close. On October 5, Pittsburgh Public Schools announced that it was instead considering continuing to use Oliver’s building as a high school and sending Perry’s students to the Oliver building. Whichever school is not used as the Northside High School will house McNaugher Education Center for troubled children. The school board will vote on the realignment plan as early as November 22 for the 2012-2013 school year. If the vote is delayed past January, any decision will not go into effect until the 2013-2014 school year. “I remain open to making adjustments to the plan and will carefully weigh the Board’s feedback … from what I am hearing from the community,” said Dr. Linda Lane, Pittsburgh Public Schools
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superintendent, who said in August “You don’t lightly go about combining two high schools.” Pittsburgh Public Schools listed several reasons for considering keeping Oliver open that included Oliver’s child care program that serves 12 students, its larger sports facilities, parking lot and auditorium and its 1,796 student capacity. If enrollment were to remain similar, the combined high school would need to house less than 1,000 students. Since the announcement, supporters of Perry High School have argued that the district recently invested $7 million into the school, the building has enough space for the combined high school, the students are meeting AYP standards and parents and students choose to come to Perry because it is a magnet school with “a tradition of excellence.” Monday, Oct. 24 at a Pittsburgh Public Schools public hearing, one wing of the meeting room was filled with Perry High School’s Commodore blue, while the other was filled with people in black T-shirts that read “Oliver High School, better than ever.” Eighty-eight speakers signed up for PPS’s public hearing on Monday at PPS’s administrative offices, where they could speak in front of the board without argument or rebuttal. The majority of the speakers addressed the proposed Perry Oliver merger, and argued in favor of one school or the other. Supporters of Oliver said that their building was larger, has a
See School Closings, page 12
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