It was late August when Mauro Ampie, an associate with Education Resource Strategies in Watertown, Massachusetts, tried to figure out the new attendance zones for the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Based on the new zones, students who would previously have been assigned to one school would be shifted to another. Attendance zones, also called the district’s feeder pattern, will be the most contentious aspect of any district realignment because, as residents of Pittsburgh know, the schools are not evenly spaced apart.The Facilities Utilization Plan, which ERS consultants proposed, is on hold. On Nov. 15, the district announced that Superintendent of Schools Wayne N. Walters and his administration are still working on a final feasibility report on how to implement the plan. That includes reconfiguring schools so that all elementary schools will teach children from pre-kindergarten to fifth grade, all middle schools will teach grades six-eight and high schools will teach grades nine-12. The analysis also considers attendance zones, transportation and the financial feasibility of the plan, which includes school renovations.Under the developing plan, Allderdice and Westinghouse high schools will maintain feeder zones, but Obama Academy, which is an International Baccalaureate magnet, will need one; it currently sits in the Westinghouse feeder zone. The same would be true for Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy, which is now in the Milliones or University Prep feeder zone; under the plan, University Prep is slated to become a middle school.If the proposed Facilities Utilization Plan is adopted, Obama Academy, seen here during the rededication of its World War I Memorial, will need a neighborhood feeder pattern. The school is currently a whole-school magnet, so does not draw from the neighborhood. Photo by Ann Belser.Each of those high schools will be the next step for graduating middle school students and each middle school will be the new home for the sixth graders coming out of elementary schools. What that means is the feeder zone for a high school breaks down to feeder zones for middle and elementary schools as well.On Dec. 9, in an interview with NEXTpittsburgh, Walters said the problem with the feeder pattern was a nut that the Massachusetts consultants could not crack. Instead of trying to solve the problem itself, Walters said, the district is about to release a request for proposals to find a demographer who knows the city and its schools to create the city-wide feeder pattern.In response to a Right to Know request, the district provided NEXTpittsburgh with all of the emails sent back and forth between the district and the consultants as they put together the Facilities Utilization Plan presented to the board on Oct. 15.On Page 2,617 of the 2,741 pages of emails, the consultants hint at the problems they were facing creating a new feeder pattern by fitting together geometric shapes to create a sort of grid that fit Pittsburgh for attendance zones.“I looked into the process of ‘clipping’ the Voronoi Polygons to be just in the applicable city zone, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work in an automated way even after a few hours,” Ampie wrote to Theodore Dwyer, the district’s chief accountability officer. “Given that there is lots of work that would have to go into tweaking attendance zones even after cleaning the Voronoi Polygons, I’m now planning to just include the new attendance zones as a draft map in our final Board report and frame it as a ‘proof of concept’ rather than a concrete proposal — acknowledging that complete attendance zone work would need to come later in the process.”Dwyer replied that he had also been working on building Thessian Polygons for attendance zones and that building them for every possibility would be unreasonable: “Without an automated way for clipping it, it would be even more unreasonable.”Then-PPS Interim Superintendent Wayne Walters walking to school on Oct. 14, 2021, with students from Pittsburgh Weil PreK-5. Photo by Jason Cohn.Dwyer also talked about the wider problem of determining attendance zones in a city in which they have been set for so long.“Part of the concern is what the changes are going to ‘look like,’ what neighborhoods will ‘go where’… which I believe encompasses what the attendance zones will look like,” Dwyer said in his answer to Ampie.Dwyer said he thought the conversation they had been having was that all elementary schools in a feeder zone would feed the same middle schools that all wind up in the same high school.That approach, he said, “will align the consistency for students across the years that they are in the district (there will be consistency in their educational pathways across schools — the elementary Cats, become the middle school Leopards, who then become the high school Jaguars).”He also said the design would allow children to attend their closest elementary school, even though they may travel a little farther for middle school and a little more for high school.Another benefit, Dwyer wrote, is that “it removes the disproportionality that you see in the current feeder zones where there are neighborhood cut outs for what is presumably [sic] political reasons.”The downside, he noted, is that it is not how the city has approached its feeder zones in the past and that parents may be concerned that while they live closer to one high school, their children are being sent to another.The PowerPoint slides that ERS presented show some clear plans for feeder patterns. The consultants, who were paid $250,000, did not provide a written report.Slide 183 of 214 of the latest ERS plan for Pittsburgh Public School facilities. Read the full report. Photo courtesy of ERS.Brashear High School in Beechview is slated to be fed by Classical (PCA) and Carmalt middle schools. Classical would be the middle school for children who attended Langley, Whittier and Westwood elementary schools, while the students from Banksville, Beechwood, Brookline and Phillips elementary schools would go on to Carmalt.In the East End, where Obama would need a feeder pattern as a newly designated neighborhood magnet high school, the zones are not as clear.Walters said the plan is to build excellent schools across the district so that while currently parents want their elementary-aged students to attend Dilworth for its arts and music enrichment, he wants all elementary schools to offer that enrichment, which means making sure all elementary schools have designated space for those programs.A concern voiced by some parents is that they do not want their children to cross the boundaries into lower socioeconomic neighborhoods to go to school.It is a concern that, historically, has been proven wrong in the city again and again, said Lynda Wrenn, the former president of the Pittsburgh Board of Public Education.“People were beating down the doors to get their kids into East Hills, back in the day,” she said, referring to the now-closed East Hills Elementary School, which was the French foreign language magnet. “And they all wanted to go to Homewood Montessori,” which was the location of the  Montessori program that is now in Friendship and under the ERS plan slated to move to Linden in Point Breeze.Wrenn pointed out that the parents whose children attended those schools became their biggest cheerleaders.Pittsburgh Public Schools Colfax K-8. Photo by Alexis Wary.She said the concern about school locations did not just apply to majority Black neighborhoods.“Initially, parents were apprehensive about sending their children Downtown to CAPA,” she said, referring to the middle and high school for the Creative and Performing Arts that has to hold auditions because so many children want to attend.The ERS presentation left the feeder zones for the schools in the East End as “to be determined by the district.”“We need someone like a demographer to think about and to support us in what the feeder patterns look like,” Walters said. “We have some feeder pattern challenges that we have to really look at. We’ve had feeder pattern challenges for a long time but right now I think it’s an opportunity to look at those things.”He said it is important to have someone local help determine how the attendance zones should work, rather than relying on out-of-state consultants.“It’s hard for an outside company who does not know the nuances of Pittsburgh to make recommendations regarding a feeder pattern because they don’t understand the nuances of that, so that’s why one of the things we’re trying to do is find someone local to serve as a demographer who can support us in feeder pattern allocation.”Walters said the first part of his recommendations will be ready in January for the board to review, but the question of how the district’s feeder patterns will be drawn will be dependent, in part, on what decisions the board makes about which facilities will remain open and so will be resolved later in the process.The post Pittsburgh Public Schools to seek demographer to solve attendance zone puzzle appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.