Pittsburgh Promise offering gap year for students during pandemic

The Pittsburgh Promise will offer a gap year for recipients affected by the covid-19 pandemic, the organization announced Thursday.

Pittsburgh Public Schools students who graduated high school from 2017 through 2020 will have five years — rather than the usual four — to utilize their scholarship award.

“We know that for some students, online learning is not a viable option,” Executive Director Saleem Ghubril said in a statement. “For others, the mental and physical health toll of the pandemic will be too great to continue their studies.”

The maximum scholarship award and other eligibility criteria will not change. Ghubril said it was important to keep the general structure of the scholarship intact.

The Pittsburgh Promise had heard from a few recipients asking about flexibility in the scholarship’s four-year requirement, Ghubril told the Tribune-Review; but mostly, the change was made as a preemptive measure.

“It’s coming from a clear sense that, not surprisingly, this pandemic has impacted all lives significantly,” he said. “And has derailed some lives that didn’t have much cushion to absorb the shock.”

The scholarship normally requires recipients enter college immediately after high school and graduate in four years. Studies show that waiting to enroll or taking a break partway through college often results in students never completing their degree. But given the uniqueness of the situation, Ghubril said this change “just felt like the right thing to do.”

Ghubril said the Promise has between 2,000 and 2,200 recipients who are either in college or were to enroll in the fall. He said they shouldn’t be penalized if they want to wait for full in-person instruction, or if they need time off to deal with other challenges brought by the pandemic.

In April, the Richard King Mellon Foundation gave Pittsburgh Promise a $1.3 million grant to help high school seniors and college students navigate the pandemic. Separate from the scholarship itself, Ghubril said, the grant money helped Pittsburgh high school students and Promise recipients experiencing food insecurity, those in need of mental health services and those affected by loss of income.

Both the emergency grant and the updated scholarship terms are meant to “recognize that this was a challenging experience for the whole world, but it was a devastating experience for some,” Ghubril said.