Penn Hills School Board votes to remove plaques

Penn Hills School Board voted to remove plaques commemorating the school board members who were in office when Penn Hills High School and Penn Hills Elementary School were opened in 2012 and 2014.

It was a move described by both board President Erin Vecchio and a resident opposed to the measure as “making a statement.”

“It’s petty,” said current parent and former school board member Heather Hoolahan. “It’s only there for documentation purposes.”

Hoolahan said those named on the plaques, including herself, did not vote to close the previous schools and build the new ones. She blamed the school boards prior to the one she served on (2012-15) as the ones behind the current debt problem.

Vecchio disagreed with that statement.

Vecchio blamed the members of those school boards for putting the school district in the dire financial situation that they are still in, albeit improving on as stated by an audit that was released just this past year.

“I said we should either vote to put up-top that these are the people who voted to put us in this financial recovery or remove the plaque,” Vecchio said.

The original financial situation was made public in a scathing audit released in 2016. In that audit, it said the school district’s outstanding long-term debt skyrocketed from less than $11 million to $167 million in only five years. It found that specifically from 2012-15, when the two schools were opened, the school district went more than $24 million over budget.

At the same time, the district’s general fund, which is the money that’s leftover at the end of the year, went from a positive $3.4 million in 2010 to negative $18.8 million in 2015.

“The most significant contribution to this financial disaster is the fact that the district failed to have a long-term plan to pay for the debt incurred with the construction of a new high school and elementary school, and renovations to the middle school,” said Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale at the time the audit was released.

The plaques currently sit outside both of those schools and will be sold to a scrap metal company. No company has been selected as the plaques will be bidded out, with the money going into the district’s general fund account.