It was pure déjà vu at the Pittsburgh Public Schools board meeting on Wednesday night.

District leaders are again deciding whether to close nine school buildings and reconfigure many more — a plan administrators failed to get board support for last fall. PPS board members are slated to take up another vote on the plan next week.

“We’ve had some conversations, we’ve had some decisions, but the plan that we’re voting on next week looks much like the same plan that we voted on in November,” said District 2 director Devon Taliaferro. “That still sits as a concern with me.”

If passed, the plan would permanently close seven buildings at the end of the 2026-2027 school year: Manchester K-8, Schiller 6-8, Friendship PreK-5 (Montessori), Fulton PreK-5, Miller African-Centered Academy, Woolslair PreK-5 and the Student Achievement Center.

Two more buildings, Spring Hill K-5 and the primary school at Morrow K-8, would close at the end of the 2028-2029 school year once renovations to reopen Northview PreK-5 in Northview Heights are complete.

Morrow’s K-5 program would remain intact, and the district plans to move Schiller’s STEAM-focused, middle school programming to Allegheny Traditional Academy, also on the city’s North Side. Officials also want to relocate the Montessori program to Linden PreK-5 in Point Breeze.

The rest of the schools on the closure list, however, would be dissolved, setting in motion a cascading series of school mergers, feeder pattern shifts and programmatic changes.

With many moving pieces and calls for more transparency, board vice president Yael Silk suggested that PPS hold quarterly updates as administrators implement the plan.

“There have been lots of questions, both from board members and also from community members, and the answer has often been [that] those answers will come once we’re in the implementation phase,” Silk said. “So I also see this as a clear promise to the community that, should this resolution pass, that we as a board will have a process in place for regular updates.”

Director Emma Yourd echoed those concerns, calling for the establishment of a temporary committee tasked with scheduling and communicating these updates.

Taliaferro said that while those amendments to the closure resolution would be helpful, they may not be significant enough changes to sway her vote.

She also urged the district to be more transparent about how it plans to utilize the buildings slated for closure. Five of the nine buildings on the closure list are located in Taliaferro’s district.

“And what I don’t want to see is that the buildings just sit there,” she said. “Although we have to still maintain those spaces at the bare minimum, they still become eyesores in [the] community.”

Taliaferro also raised concerns that selling the buildings without caution could leave room for new charter schools to sprout up in their place.

Several PPS buildings closed in the past two decades now house charter schools. On the North Side, Propel operates a K-8 school out of the former PPS Columbus Middle School. In Hazelwood, the charter network has taken over the former Burgwin Elementary School.

Kids at Environmental Charter School walk through the same halls that Regent Square Elementary School and Rogers Middle School students walked before their buildings closed in 2004 and 2009, respectively.

“My concern is that that can hit us later on down the road, should a charter school end up in one of those buildings, and now we are, um, paying for charter tuition in a building that we closed because we put no thought into what happens with those spaces,” Taliaferro said.

Board members will vote next Wednesday on whether to move forward with the closures.

The new Pittsburgh Public Schools board is once again taking up a controversial plan to close seven schools.  

At Pittsburgh Manchester K-8, one of the schools that could close, the hallways are mostly empty, and the building is full of classrooms that are seldom or never used. There are only nine kids in the entire second grade, seven students in the sixth grade and 13 in the eighth. The building has a capacity for 541 students but is home to only 129.

“That is a textbook example of an underutilized building, and we have about 15 schools currently that are below 200,” said Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Wayne Walters.

Manchester is one of seven schools and a total of nine underused buildings that would be closed under the district’s Future-Ready Facilities Plan. On the North Side, the plan calls for closing both Manchester and Schiller 6-8, consolidating those students at Martin Luther King and the Allegheny Traditional Academy. 

Walters says the plan will save the district about $8 million a year on staff salaries, utilities and maintenance costs — money which would provide more resources and better educational opportunities in these merged schools.  

“We have limited resources right now. We have a deficit, but certainly making this move will provide some savings, some savings for us to really implement the quality programming we need in this Future-Ready Facilities Plan,” Walters said.

After nearly two years of study, the board voted the plan down last November, delaying its implementation, which was planned for the 2026-27 school year. Even if the new board approves it now, it won’t go into effect until the 2027-28 school year. 

But in kicking the can down the road, the old board bent to parents and community groups like 412 Justice, who said the plan disproportionally impacted Black neighborhood schools. They’ve called for further study. 

“It’s about the plan. It’s not about keeping buildings open. It’s just that we’re not confident in the district’s ability to move 6,000 students with all these unanswered questions,” said Angel Gober with 412 Justice.   

But school board president Gene Walker says time has run out. Walker was unsuccessful in convincing the old board, but says the new members are keenly aware of the costs of overcapacity. Enrollment has dropped from 32,000 to 18,000 students over the past two decades, and the board can’t justify spending a significant chunk of its $731 million budget on half-empty schools.  

“I think we’re going to be able to get it through this time,” Walker said.  

Walters said if the plan doesn’t go through, the district could be in trouble. 

“I think we’re going to be forced to answer some really challenging questions about our future as a district,” Walters said. 

The board will discuss the plan on Wednesday night in anticipation of a final approval vote next week. The board president believes the board will do what the district says is the right thing.