members also argued about whether they should listen to the public’s concerns, and questioned the purpose of the task force itself. “I think we really need to hear and address what some of their concerns are,” said city councilor and task-force member Theresa Kail-Smith. “Our charge is not to fix the underlying fundamental issues,” said task-force member Patrick Dowd, a former city councilor and school-board member who now leads the nonprofit Allies for Children. “There are a lot of things over which the city has no control.” Even as the public and task-force members grapple over what the commission’s purpose is, and before it even makes its first set of recommendations, Kail-Smith has proposed making the body permanent. But without a defined focus and a willingness to deal with all of the district’s issues, parents and residents worry the group will fail to make a difference.
agrees marketing is a worthy endeavor, she says it’s equally important to tackle some of the district’s issues. “Everyone’s eager to get the good message out, but if we’re failing to address the real issues and hesitant to hear the real concerns, then we’re not going to be successful,” Kail-Smith says. “Some things we’re never going to address, but some things we can improve. Acknowledgement is half the battle.” Public safety is one of the issues the task force plans to work on. One of its recommendations to the mayor will be to put up safety zones along pathways to and from schools. Kail-Smith would also like to see expanded afterschool programs. “I think we all realize we’re in this together; we need to figure this out together,” KailSmith says. “Everybody needs to put their egos aside to figure out what’s best for our students and the city.” Education advocate Annette Werner agrees that public safety is a good place for the task force to start. But she says the focus on marketing is misguided. “It seems like everyone just wants to be really nice and really positive, but if everything was great we wouldn’t need a task force,” Werner says. “This whole idea of marketing — the district pays marketing people. I don’t think the city needs to market the district.” Werner also attended the task force’s first public meeting and says she was disappointed the audience wasn’t given more time to speak. “I expected to hear a lot more from the public,” Werner says. “For the first 45 minutes, it was members of the committee talking amongst themselves. I was surprised that the meeting focused so little on public input.” “I can definitely see how that would’ve been frustrating for someone in the audience,” says Carey Harris, a member of the task force and executive director of education watchdog group A+ Schools. “I don’t think there were any bad intentions here, but I don’t think it was entirely clear to anybody what the purpose of the meeting was.” And the same confusion surrounding the meeting has enveloped the task force itself, Harris says. “The initial legislation that created this task force may have unnecessarily
“I DON’T THINK IT WAS ENTIRELY CLEAR TO ANYBODY WHAT THE PURPOSE OF THE MEETING WAS.”
KAIL-SMITH first proposed forming a mayor’s education task force last October, after the district released a proposal calling for additional school closings. The closings were identified as a possible solution to avoiding a looming budget deficit in 2016. “The Pittsburgh Public Schools had been talking about closing additional schools, and in our [council] district we already have several closed school buildings,” Kail-Smith says. “I wanted to think about ways we could avoid school closures.” But after several newly elected schoolboard members took office in December 2013, the decision to close schools was reversed. From then on, the task force has had to develop a new mission. “I think we got the attention of the school district,” Kail-Smith says. “We continued to meet. One, because the legislation [creating the task force] already passed; and two, because there were other things we thought we could be addressing and ways we could work together. After we started meeting and talking, we realized there were definite areas where we had a shared interest.” One of those interests is to promote a positive image of the district in an effort to attract families to the city and increase enrollment. But while Kail-Smith
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