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Thursday, July 11, 2002

Government and community leaders across Pittsburgh said yesterday that they hope a decision by three local foundations to suspend all funding to the city schools will lead to a shakeup in how the district is run.

View the statement from Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy calling for a community-wide discussion of the ongoing problems facing the city's public schools. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader, available as a free download from Adobe. ALSO View the school board response to the funding cut-off by three regional foundations. View the original letter from the foundations announcing the funding cutoff and four pages of supporting documentation on their support for the schools. State law makes it difficult to oust school board After thorny year, foundations roared about Pittsburgh schools Online Chart: The major players

"As a parent of a child in our public school system, I am personally gravely concerned about the level of discord and acrimony in our district," Mayor Tom Murphy said in a statement. "The action of the foundation community is a wake-up call, one that I hope will force all of us to come together as a community to address the ongoing problems facing the Pittsburgh public schools."

Richard Flanagan, youth development coordinator for the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. and former school board member, agreed that the move by the Pittsburgh Foundation, The Heinz Endowments and the Grable Foundation should be an impetus for local leaders to become more involved in the city schools.

"My goal is to try to challenge my peers across the city to say this does matter and we have to get more involved in taking a look at the top leadership over at the board and helping to nurture that to become more effective," he said.

The foundations' unprecedented action has come after months of wrangling between the board's five-member majority and four-member minority factions, and what seemed at times to be a virtual absence of communication between school Superintendent John Thompson and the board's leaders.

Meanwhile, city school officials have to find ways to move ahead with teacher training in math and literacy despite the loss of more than $3.5 million in foundation funding.

Officials with the foundations said funding could be restored if enough progress is made in improving how the district is run. The three are the largest foundation contributors to the Pittsburgh Public Schools and together have awarded the district $11.7 million in the last five years.

Phil Parr, chief of staff for the city schools, said the loss of the $3.5 million would not eliminate any programs, but would affect the number of teacher coaches the district has for math and reading.

These coaches go into the classrooms and show teachers how to use the latest teaching methods with students, Parr said. They also conduct teacher training workshops.

"Providing coaching and modeling for teachers in the real classroom is the most powerful approach to professional development and yields the best results," he said.

Currently, the district has eight math coaches that work with teachers throughout the district. The loss of $400,000 from The Heinz Endowments and $50,000 from the Grable Foundation that had supported the district's math and science program will mean cutting about five math coaching positions, Parr said.

Those cuts may also cost the district $2.5 million in matching funds from the National Science Foundation.

The city schools had been awarded a $5 million National Science Foundation grant for math and science based on the district's ability to generate local funds. The second half of the grant is scheduled to be awarded in January, but only after science foundation officials visit the district in the fall to see how the program is faring.

As part of the district's reading and writing program known as Literacy Plus, the district has 44 reading coaches funded through the federal Title I program who circulate among the city's elementary and middle schools.

School officials had planned to use $2 million from Heinz and $1 million from Grable to hire 24 more reading coaches so that some could be assigned to larger schools full time.

Now that the district won't be receiving that money, the additional coaches can't be hired and some other teacher training activities will have to be eliminated, Parr said.

The loss of foundation funding also means the district will not be able to renew the $56,000 contract with a consultant who has been recruiting students and helping to run the information technology program at Peabody High School in East Liberty.

School officials also will have to delay plans for upgrading the curriculum and developing additional partnerships for the new Downtown Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts because the foundation cuts include $127,434 for that project.

While several local leaders said they are concerned about how the loss of funding could affect students, they hoped that the community would get involved in turning around the district so that the foundations would be encouraged to quickly resume their support.

"I think it's a sad day for the children of Pittsburgh but it's very understandable," said Bette Hughes, director of the Pittsburgh Council on Public Education, a nonprofit education advocacy group. The action, she said, is the foundations' "last hope to shake up the school board and the superintendent and put a call out to the community."

Thompson, who was at a superintendents conference in Lake Tahoe, Nev., yesterday, issued a statement saying the foundations' decision "highlights the need for a total community dialogue to discuss how we will move the district forward."

Allegheny County Chief Executive Jim Roddey and Harold Miller, president of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, said they've been concerned about the direction of the school district for awhile and are willing to help in some way.

Miller expects the board of his private sector leadership group to issue a statement next week after it discusses the issue.

Tim Stevens, president of the Pittsburgh Branch of the NAACP, said that at the May 9 NAACP Human Rights Dinner he called for "people of good will across the city to step forward and let this board know the decision-making processes they have been utilizing are not acceptable.

"One of the things that does concern me is the five majority members [of the board] don't seem to be affected by much of anything ... I don't think they get how inappropriate they've been."

This story was written by Staff Writer Carmen J. Lee based on her reporting and that of staff writers Eleanor Chute, Jane Elizabeth and Jeffrey Cohan.