The major Pittsburgh Public Schools reorganization and the North Side's struggling Sarah Heinz House community center were the big winners as The Heinz Endowments awarded 220 grants totaling nearly $26 million yesterday.

The Sarah Heinz House board got $3.1 million -- $1.1 million for operating support and $2 million to cover unanticipated costs connected to an expansion. The aging North Side facility has grappled to serve some 800 Pittsburgh youth, about a third of whom live below the poverty line.

The next largest award, $2.1 million to advance education reform in the city's public schools, will fund neighborhood and family support systems, after-school programs and creation of an improved data-management system for the district.

The funding also will support expert planning and evaluation services, school-readiness programs and efforts to increase family involvement in the schools. Most of the grants are directed to neighborhoods at the centerpiece of Superintendent Mark Roosevelt's reform plan, the eight accelerated learning academies.

It brings to $5.1 million the total of endowments grants awarded during the past two years to support the school district plan.

Endowments' President Maxwell King said the Pittsburgh district is one of several sectors garnering special support from the foundation this fall.

He said an extensive internal assessment helped to determine "where endowments' funding can be leveraged in the community to achieve maximum benefit for residents in a reasonable amount of time."

Among the projects emerging from that review are several connected to new development Downtown.

A total of $1.5 million will go to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust -- $850,000 for operating support and $700,000 to pay for planning and pre-development work on the $460 million Riverfront Development Project, which covers six acres of prime waterfront and the Eighth Street block. The master plan and the international design team Riverparc were selected in an intensive design planning competition funded by the endowments.

A design plan key to a revitalization of Market Square at the center of Downtown will move forward next year with the help of a $100,000 endowments grant.

The grant will fund design and programmatic experiments inside the square that mesh with other development activity around it.

The Riverlife Task Force will use a nearly $1 million grant mostly for operating support but with some money reserved to develop fund raising and communications capabilities that will help it to implement the Three Rivers Park Master Plan.

Another park-related grant -- $225,000 to the Allegheny Conference on Community Development -- will support creation of a historic interpretation plan as part of the $33 million Point State Park rehabilitation.

A $132,000 grant will help fund a new Division of Public Art in city government, as well as a fellowship program for a graduate of a university architecture or urban design program. Both positions are expected to provide city officials with more expertise in evaluating the quality of art and design in proposed projects.

Grants totaling $600,000 will go to Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Consortium for the Robotics Corridor Project, which encompasses several programs for middle school through two-year community college and four-year university programs. An additional $100,000 will go to support the nationally popular US FIRST Robotics competition.

A special initiative to green the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is moving forward with $250,000 to begin a systemwide environmental health and sustainability program. The goal is to create an organizational model that can be adopted by other health care systems across the country. Included in the program will be policies promoting green building, use of renewable energy and green purchasing.

Another $500,000 will support the advancement of green chemistry through CMU.

A $300,000 grant will assist with operations funding for the university's Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, as well as funding design work for a new university curriculum on green chemistry. Added to that is a $200,000 grant that will support exploring the business potential of the chemistry group's start-up, GreenOx Catalysts.

Another collaboration will provide $250,000 to Pittsburgh's Green Building Alliance to assess the market potential of the region's green-building products industry sector.

An $850,000 grant for the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse will encourage activities designed to generate a vibrant new sector of the regional economy. Since the Life Sciences Greenhouse was established, the number of related start-ups in Pittsburgh has jumped from three to 15 per year.

The Carnegie Science Center will use a $250,000 grant to begin planning for a large-scale rivers attraction that would be built and managed at its facility near the confluence of Pittsburgh's rivers. The process includes identifying at least a dozen potential research and education partners in the project, from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to the Riverlife Task Force.

The endowments continued its commitment to early education in the region and across the state with $2.5 million in grants for a variety of programs. One of them is $1 million in support to Pre-K Counts, a multiyear, $16 million public-private funding initiative to enroll more at-risk children in Pennsylvania in high-quality pre-kindergarten programs. The partnership is co-chaired by Gov. Ed Rendell and PNC Financial Services Corp. head Jim Rohr.