Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg school boards to discuss renewing partnership agreement

The school boards for Pittsburgh Public Schools and Wilkinsburg School District will hold a joint board meeting Tuesday to discuss possible renewal of a 5-year-old partnership that allows Wilkinsburg students to take advantage of several PPS programs.

Officials from both districts gathered for a virtual news conference last week, touting the success of the program thus far. Ed Donovan, president of the Wilkinsburg School Board, said the grade point averages of participants from Wilkinsburg have risen almost full point, on average.

“It’s working really, really well,” he said. “Our labor right now is to take that partnership agreement and see the areas where we can make it even stronger.”

The PPS and Wilkinsburg school boards on Tuesday will hear a presentation about extending the agreement to the 2026-2027 school year. At the 5:30 p.m. meeting, the boards will also discuss methods for strengthening monthly communications about student progress, announcements and extracurricular reports; and for improving data sharing between the districts, transition services for Wilkinsburg students enrolling in PPS and the overall enrollment process.

“We wanted to make sure it’s as easy as possible for families and students to enroll in Pittsburgh Public Schools,” said Errika Fearby Jones, chief of staff for PPS. “So we’ll enrollment processes on the Wilkinsburg side as well as on the Pittsburg Public Schools side.”

The current agreement expires at the end of the 2021-22 school year. The vote on whether to officially extend the agreement is expected to occur in June, Jones said.

Wilkinsburg’s school board in 2014 “came to admit that we were failing our students in junior and senior high,” Donovan said. The agreement officially began in October 2015 and gave students “opportunity for things we simply could not provide—in athletics, academics, honors classes, the Pittsburgh Promise, for heaven’s sake,” he said.

Students in grades seven through 12 were assigned to Pittsburgh Westinghouse Academy in the first year, and after that, access was opened for students to apply to any magnet school or CTE program in the district. The partnership also offers credit recovery and special education services.

In crafting the new agreement, Donovan said Wilkinsburg School District surveyed families and alumni of the partnership and found more than half agreed that Westinghouse was meeting all their academic needs. Almost 75%, he said, agreed the Pittsburgh teachers encouraged their kids to work hard at school, and 61% said their child was treated with respect at PPS. A similar number said their child was engaged in learning at PPS, and 56% said they were happy, overall, with the partnership.

“These are pretty good numbers,” Donovan said. “We would like to see them a little higher, and perhaps the features of the new agreement will make that happen.”

In total, 760 Wilkinsburg students have utilized the partnership in the last five years, attending school in 13 different PPS buildings. Today, 216 of the 253 eligible Wilkinsburg students are at Westinghouse, PPS Superintendent Anthony Hamlet said.

Amid the overall partnership’s potential renewal, Westinghouse Academy is also undergoing changes to improve “climate, culture and academic outcomes,” officials said.

Beginning next school year, Westinghouse Principal Stephen Sereda said students will be able to focus in one of three “pathways”: STEM, CTE or arts. Following the pathways will allow a student to take specific courses that are relevant to their strengths and career goals, he said.

Westinghouse will also expand a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, in which students – including those hailing from Wilkinsburg – are able to take college courses and earn between 18 to 21 Pitt credits before they graduate high school. New classes will be added in the next few years, including a statistics class and a Spanish class.

“It’s really just identifying with what they want, giving them a purpose,” Sereda said. “We’re just giving the kids some additional opportunities.”