The Pittsburgh Report

Following is an excerpt of the Graduate School of Education's report on the secondary schools of Pittsburgh. This section of the report deals with the Ed School's concept of "educational centers."

The Graduate School of Education undertook a study of Pittsburgh's secondary schools in September 1965 at the request of the city's Board of Education. The Board was about to embark on a new secondary school building program (the last high school in the city was constructed in 1927) and wanted recommendations about the nature and locations of the new buildings. One of the major criteria, the Board said, should be the elimination of de facto segregation.

The Ed School's subsequent report, released late this summer, advised that the city build five large "educational centers" to replace all its high schools. The centers would serve approximately 5000 students each and would draw their enrollments from large districts that would cut across the borders of Negro neighborhoods. The report estimated that the student bodies of these centers would vary between 21.3 and 34 per cent Negro. Now, there are at least three high schools with student bodies more than 90 per cent Negro, and a number of other schools which are virtually all-white.

>The educational centers should not be merely clusters of school buildings, the report said. Rather they should be part of large urban developments (see text for this part of the report).

Mixing school facilities with commercial, residential and recreational buildings was related to another proposal of the report: sending students out into the community for training in vocational and advanced subjects.

"In the main," it said, "the application of learning to specific tests, complex machinery, or elaborate faciliites should occur out of schools in places such as auto body shops, hospitals, the Allegheny Observatory, and the Westinghouse labs." The report conceded that this recommendation involved a "major administrative undertaking," but contended that fair "financial arrangements could be worked out between the school department and participants in these cooperative programs."

In general, the report urged a closer relationship between schools and the community, recommending that schools be used for adult education programs, community meetings, and educational television.

The construction of new secondary facilities

To carry out the secondary educational program broadly outlined in the previous section, construction of each of Pittsburgh's secondary school buildings should be planned so as to fulfill at least four basic needs: sufficient space to bring together the necessary equipment and personnel to offer a full range of courses in science and technology, the arts, language and mathematics, social studies, and physical educaiton; efficient physical relationships between the spaces and equipment of related courses, such as science laboratories and shops for technology; provision of a means of maintaining the individual student's sense of identity and importance despite the large facility and student body; and space for non-school personnel working in collaboration with school personnel on the parts of the educational program provided within the school. Furthermore, buildings should be located so that they are within easy reach of community faciliites used in carrying out the educational program and the ancillary services.

Pittsburgh's present high schools cannot fulfill these basic requirements. The secondary plant is crowded, racially segregated, old, and lacking in facilities and sites adequate for the educational program of grades 9-12. The enrollment of Pittsburgh's thirteen regular high schools was 23,336 as of March 30, 1966. The total capacity of these buildings as calculated by the Harvard staff is 19,881. The crowding is most acute in Allderdice, Langley, South Hills, Perry, Gladstone, and Westinghouse, where there are enrollments of 3082, 1910, 2218, 1353, 1291, and 2642, respectively, in buildings rated by the Harvard staff at capacities of 2374, 1180, 1570, 1049, 1046, and 2188.

The most extreme racial segregation occurs in Westinghouse, which is 92.9 per cent Negro, Herron Hill, which is 99.8 per cent Negro, and Fifth Avenue, which is 92.9 per cent Negro and in several high schools which are virtually all-white.

Last Building in 1927

Allderdice, constructed in 1927, is the newest of Pittsburgh's high schools. Allegheny and Fifth Avenue, the two oldest, were both constructed before 1900. The average high school age is fifty-four years. The facilities within the schools are generally outdated for a contemporary education program for grades 9-12. And in many cases, the sites are not adequate for purposes of physical education at this age level.

Although the facilities in these buildings are generally inferior for carrying out an educational program for children in the ninth through twelfth grades, they would, for the most part, provide improved facilities for secondary school children below the ninth grade. Thus, the availability of such facilities as gymnasiums, auditoriums, and science laboratories recommends the present secondary buildings temporarily for the education program for these middle school children, who, in their present buildings, often lack such equipment.

Moreover, most of the secondary buildings are large enough to accommodate the assembly of services and equipment necessary to provide a broad range of courses appropriate to children in grades 5 through 8. Of course, assignment of the middle school children to those existing buildings must be done in a manner which will prevent overcrowding or racial segregation.

In certain special situations, middle school buildings will have to be constructed. There is no existing high school or other secondary facility in the entire southwestern section of Pittsburgh. Recently this has been one of the most rapidly growing areas of the city, and because it has a substantial portion of Pittsburgh's open land, such growth is likely to continue. The total enrollments to be served by the attendance district proposed for this area and a section of the Hill are very large. This single large attendance area could be further divided into two districts served by separate middle schools or it could be retained as a single district served by one large middle school appropriately divided into separate units. This report suggests utilizing separate schools and separate districts, referred to here as South A and South B. Because of the possibility of having a single large attendance area, the report does not specify how the district should be divided except that both South A and South B should include a substantially equal division of both the southwestern and Hill sections.

A new middle school is also recommended in one of the Central I middle school districts although Westinghouse High School is located within the district. Westinghouse is not the oldest or most deteriorated high school in Pittsburgh, but it is 44 years old and has many physical defects, as outlined in Appendix C. Moreover, Westinghouse has become identified as a "Negro school," and it is located within a densely Negro residential area. The new middle school will have an enrollment which is approximately half-white and half-Negro. Achieving a successful education program at a racially integrated school in this district will be much more likely if a new structure with a new image is constructed in a section of the district where whites reside, or where both Negroes and whites reside.

It is also recommended that, because of its age and condition, South Hills High School not be used as a middle school. Prospect Junior High School is a newer and better facility, and it should be used to serve the middle school district in which both Prospect and South Hills are located.

Even though most of the existing high school buildings are satisfactory for temporary use by the lower secondary grades, they are still very old on the average, and long-continued use of them is not desirable. Therefore, in preparing these buildings for the use of the younger children, remodeling should be minimized. Investment in various types of instructional aids and other equipment which can later be moved to new schools should be accentuated.

RECOMMENDATION: Five large Education Centers should be constructed to replace existing high school buildings as the centers of the education program for grades 9-12.

RECOMMENDATION: Three new middle schools should be constructed to serve Pittsburgh's middle school enrollments and twelve of the existing secondary buildings should be adapted to the same use.

RECOMMENDATION: Upon completion of the present recommneded building program, but no later than 1975, Pittsburgh should begin to develop plans for the replacement of all twelve of these adapted secondary buildings with up-to-date middle school of sufficient size and appropriate location to carry out the education program and to serve integrated enrollments.

The construction of new spaces for nearly 34,000 pupils carries a mandate to provide buildings which will facilitate the offering of not only what is new and best in education today but also what will be new and best in the year 2000. It means designing and building with the utmost imagination and flexibility. Designers should think about school structures that can be readily changed from one type of instruction to another, structures with space that might be rented out for other than school purposes during low enrollment years, structures which lend themselves to expansion and to increasing integration with the community. To describe the general characteristics of the new construction, this section discusses the proposed Education Centers, but what is said should be applied, where relevant, to the new middle schools as well.

In Pittsburgh, as in other large urban areas, educators and urban planners have begun to focus attention on the need for relating school construction to the city's other facilities and activities. We propose that Pittsburgh's five Education Centers be located in newly designed urban centers which would constitute an important part of the city's renewal. These urban centers would be linked together by rapid transit and super highways and would share many of the unique resources of the city. But each urban center should be able to serve many of the diverse needs of a substantial segment of the urban population, something on the order of 100,000 people. In such a center, citizens should be able to find employment, purchase goods, further their education, rent housing, play games, sit in the sun, attend concerts, and so on.

The backbone of these centers would be the circulation ways--the malls--where people can travel at their own pace, enjoying and participating in the activities of the day. Along and around these public ways would be grouped the various activities of the center: banks, stores, restaurants, offices, schools, housing. Care must be taken not to create monotonous concourses of commerce where people tend to become lost in the endless repetition of store fronts. Nodes of activity must be created. Scale must change from wide busy pedestrian malls to intimate little walkways. Some of these pedestrian ways should be open to the sun, some enclosed; some should have surroundings which are high and spacious, some low and confining.

Part of the space in these urban centers should be devoted to the Education Centers recommended in this report. Educational facilities should be planned and constructed simultaneously with other facilities. Such integrated planning will permit more flexible facilities and also should eliminate any tendency to duplicate or to concentrate all schooling activities in one part of the complex.

Locations

Since the individual student or teacher will not need to go to every part of the Center, all schooling locations need not be tightly grouped. Instead, they should be related to one another and to the community facilities in terms of the uses to which they will be put. For example, whereas the main library of the Center should be easily accessible to everyone, individual science laboratories and regular classrooms need not be.

In order to provide the wide range of subjects required by the education program, each Education Center will be bringing together very large numbers of students. The creation of a subsystem of student groupings will make it possible to preserve the student's identity in these large educational facilities. These groups should be small enough to permit each student to maintain his sense of individuality, yet large enough by themselves or by combination with other groups to expose the student to a wide range of educational experiences. The Education Center buildings should therefore be constructed so that these groups of students are provided with the necessary physical units of space and equipment, and these units should be so arranged that two or more of them can be combined for various educational and social activities.

Much of a student's schooling experience should be within these smaller units. Each unit would contain as few students as educational demands would allow, roughly five hundred to six hundred students, and each would have its own teachers and administrative and guidance personnel. The student population of each unit should have the same distribution of interests, ages, and races. Each unit should be planned around a common area where students and staff can gather for meetings or meet informally. Branch library resources teachers' offices, administrative and guidance facilities, and areas for

The integration of school and community in providing the education program means that many aspects of the program should not be built into the school buildings...

The Centers should be linked to the larger community, other Centers, and to the middle and elementary schools through rapid transit and highways and through telephone, radio, television, and a computer communication system. independent study should be grouped nearby.

Units might be most conveniently and economically arranged in groups of two and be accompanied by those larger or more specialized facilities which they can together fully utilize. Perhaps each unit should occupy a floor of a building with their joint facilities located in a floor between. A further refinement might be placing the five curriculum areas in the same area on each floor so that students and staff working in particular curriculum areas could have easy access to their counterparts in the other unit and to the more specialized joint resources located on the floor between the two units by simply moving vertically.

The several units which comprise a Center would share certain central resources like the main library, the theater-concert hall, and the spectator sports center, resources which must be accessible to every student or which will draw some students from each unit. Ideally, many of of these facilities would also be used by citizens who are not enrolled in the schools, thus further integrating schools and community.

The integration of school and community in providing the education program means that many aspects of the program should not be built into the school buildings, as the previous section on the recommended program for secondary education has pointed out.

On the other hand, this integration will place new requirements on school construction. The Education Centers will have to provide space and facilities for non-school personnel who come into the school from business, government, or university to participate in the in-school program or to work in the ancillary educational facilities, such as research and development. The Education Centers should be schools for adults as well as children, and they may be used for adult education at various times of day and night. Such use would require space adaptable to adult programs, and it might require some space reserved for adult day-time programs. Of course, the Centers should be planned for week-long and year-round use. This "after-school" use could include a wide variety of programs outside the regular curriculum, such as the Junior Academy of Science, which would bring together public and non-public school children with members of the scientific community in Pittsburgh.

The Centers should be linked to the larger community, other Centers, and to the middle and elementary schools through rapid transit and highways and through telephone, radio, television, and a computer communication system. For example, two-way television will be needed to facilitate such linkage and to multiply the experiences and the range of competence that can be brought into classrooms. Here, too community resources, such as WQED -- the educational television station -- should be utilized. In addition, the possibility of including Instructional Television Fixed Service on frequency bands especially reserved by the Federal Communications Commission should be explored. In order to provide two-way television, classrooms should be equipped for transmission as well as reception. With two-way television, any given classroom is part of the educational television network of the other classrooms and therefore children at one end of a hook-up are able to participate actively in a lesson originating at the other end. Where it is possible, the non-public schools should be included in the system.

Finally, although education requires some highly specialized "hardware," it does not, in general, require a highly specialized structure. Thus, it is possible to construct school facilities capable of accommodating rapidly changing educational requirements. By using such construction, the Education Center can adapt to changes in education and also be adapoted to non-school functions.

Using conventional concepts of school construction, sites of between thirty and forty acres will be needed for the Education Centers and fifteen to twenty for the middle schools. And the sites should have a substantial amount of level space for outside physical education activity. The acquisition of sites of these sizes and of this character will be very difficult. In densely populated urban areas -- particularly where topography limits available land as it does in Pittsburgh, it is possible to utilize new construction techniques to provide needed facilities on a minimum of land. Building vertically rather than horizontally, placing athletic fields on roofs, allocating several floors of a high rise structure to athletics, even creating an "all weather" sports center with movable walls which could be retracted to let in fresh air and sun in good weather, all are possible. Such construction techniques could reduce by as much as 50 per cent the land needed for school purposes. Nevertheless, every effort should be exerted to obtain the largest possible sitse for the combined use of school construction and other urban facilities. These sites should be developed so as to accommodate school and non-school activities, and flexible arrangements which would intersperse school and other uses should be adopted.

Sites for new educational facilities could be more readily obtained if land acquisition efforts of the Board of Education are coordinated with the efforts of urban renewal and other city agencies. The urban centers and the educational facilities within them should be designed as drawing points for all of the citizens of the five large large districts indicated in the following section of this report. The sites should therefore be selected to create common meeting grounds for the older, traditional neighborhoods. Innovative designing can make available sites in Pittsburgh which will fit these criteria. Parts of the centers can be built as air right structures over highways or rivers or as bridges across canyons. And such building can and should be done without marring the natural beauty of Pittsburgh's rivers, hills, and valleys. Structures which span valleys can also bring together neighborhoods long isolated by topography. Steep hills need not be barriers either to construction or to access routes. Hills and valleys can become architectural assets in planning exciting urban centers for Pittsburgh