Eliyahu Gasson | opinions editor |

Pittsburgh Public Schools is downsizing … again. But they shouldn’t have to. Charter schools continue to mooch off of the district’s resources putting unfair strain on communities who rely on their local public schools as a center of community.

PPS has closed 42 school buildings in the past two decades. The 2006 PPS Right-Sizing Plan involved the closure of 18 school buildings, reducing the number of schools in the district from 86 to 65. The most recent downsize in 2012 saw the closure of seven more schools.

PPS finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. The city’s population has continued to shrink year-after-year, sitting now at around 303,000, less than half of what it was at its peak of around 675,000 in 1950.

PPS is giving itself until Oct. 15 to finalize a plan that could see the closure of up to 16 schools and restructure others.

“It’s necessary for a variety of reasons. The first that comes to mind is the last time that the district did any reorganizing was about 11 years ago. Since then, the district has lost about 26% of the population,” Superintendent Wayne Walters said in an interview with 90.5 WESA.

The decline in student population is palpable. Pittsburgh Manchester K-8 has just under 150 students. Carrick High School’s student population has declined year-over-year, with a total of 515 enrolled students and has been experiencing a continued decline since the 2022-2023 academic year according to the most recent data from Pittsburgh Public Schools.

As it exists now, PPS is spread too thin. Having such small schools all over the city means they have fewer resources to care for and educate their students, who tend to come from low-income backgrounds.

According to Public Source, Education Resource Strategies consultant Joseph Trawick-Smith told Pittsburgh Public Schools board members that schools like Manchester were too small to provide daily access to a diverse range of courses such as art, music and foreign language learning.

But the constant closure and poor state of PPS can’t be blamed solely on the decline of Pittsburgh’s population. Some blame has to go toward the charter schools who are mooching resources from the district and spreading it thinner and thinner.

Defunding charter schools has the potential to fix PPS’s budgetary issues. According to 90.5 WESA, PPS is expected to close 2024 with an operating deficit of $834,623. PPS allocated $146 million from its budget toward charter schools. If the district was not burdened with the task of funding charters, they would theoretically have an excess of roughly $145 million.

Rather than taking care of the children, it’s tasked with educating, PPS is forced by law to pay the tuition of every student who attends a charter school in their district.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Education, “a charter school may ask Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Education to redirect a school district’s subsidy when the school district fails to pay the charter school for educating resident students.”

Past closures and reshuffles haven’t gone well. A 2016 independent review from the Council of the Great City Schools found that “the district’s magnet programs and school closings over the years have contributed to disparities in educational opportunity and the unevenness of instructional programming across the district.”

According to Education Resource Strategies, the consulting firm working with Pittsburgh Public Schools on their upcoming restructuring plan, 24% of the district’s Black students and 26% of Hispanic students would be impacted by the proposed school closures. Only 18% of white students would be affected.

There are also the issues of layoffs. With fewer schools, come fewer teachers. The 2006 Right-Sizing Plan resulted in 252 employees being laid off. There isn’t a good solution to this. The best anyone has come up with is laying teachers off based on seniority, a solution reached in the district’s 2010-2015 bargaining agreement with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

Teachers who aren’t lucky enough to be transferred to another public school would risk losing their union representation entirely. Most charter schools don’t have unionized staff, meaning teachers can expect longer hours and lower pay than what they may be used to working for public schools. The same goes for custodian cafeteria staff.

A common argument in defense of charter schools is that they perform better than public schools. But according to the Network for Public Education, this is a myth.

According to NPE, charter schools can selectively choose the students they admit and keep. They have no obligation to educate students with disabilities nor are they obligated to accept English language learners.

Charter schools are a waste of money. They don’t work as an alternative to public schools, rather, they funnel resources away from public school districts that could make better use of them.

Charter schools are leeches. So close them.