Sep 17, 2015 2 min read

WILKINSBURG – An impoverished suburban school district plans to close its seventh-12th grade secondary school and send 200-plus students to an underperforming Pittsburgh school next year.

The Wilkinsburg School District plans to spend $10 million to renovate its two elementary schools. But there are no plans to fix the middle/high school built in 1910 and last expanded in 1940 because the district expects only 217 students to be enrolled there next year. Wilkinsburg has limited programs because of its low enrollment and is barely fielding a football team, for example, because it has only 15 players.

If both districts approve the plan in October, Wilkinsburg will become the second poor Allegheny County school district to close its high school and send students elsewhere.

Duquesne has sent it students to neighboring districts since 2007.

The predominantly black Wilkinsburg students would go to Pittsburgh Westinghouse Academy, in the city’s predominantly black Homewood neighborhood. The Wilkinsburg students also can apply for spots in Pittsburgh’s magnet schools — but only after qualifying Pittsburgh students are placed in those schools first.

Pittsburgh school board member Mark Brentley said the incoming Wilkinsburg students should be given broader access to the magnet schools.

Pittsburgh’s deputy superintendent, Donna Micheaux, said Westinghouse was chosen because its projected enrollment is only 435 for next year in grades six to 12. That means little would have to be done to the facility or staff to accommodate the Wilkinsburg students.

Roughly 30 percent of Wilkinsburg’s public school students attend charter schools, with most of them being in grades seven to 12.

Wilkinsburg Superintendent Daniel Matsook said the planned merger is good for both districts and provides more opportunities for Wilkinsburg students.

But Wilkinsburg teachers’ union President Mike Evans said the move won’t change the academic and disciplinary problems at either school.

“It doesn’t appear that they are trying to put the students in a better situation,” Evans said.