SALA UDIN
by Rob Taylor Jr., Courier Staff Writer
Sylvia Wilson was ready—more than ready—to vote yes.
The longtime Pittsburgh Public Schools board member has great faith that the consistent academic growth of the students at Arsenal Middle School in Lawrenceville will only continue. And she is an ardent supporter of Arsenal’s principal, Patti Camper.
So when it was made public last month that the district wanted to relocate the 99 students in middle school grades 6-8 at Milliones (University Prep, or U-Prep) to Arsenal, Wilson was all in. After all, the majority African American middle school students at U-Prep are well behind the Arsenal students academically.
“I don’t think that anybody is opposed to offering students as much enriched opportunities and experience that they possibly can, and I think that is our main goal and objective,” Wilson told fellow board members during a board meeting, June 19.
But feedback from many parents in the district felt this type of decision to relocate students from one school in one neighborhood to another school in another neighborhood came at them too fast. It was just 35 days between the district’s announcement to reconfigure U-Prep and the anticipated June 19 board vote.
Thus, PPS Superintendent Anthony Hamlet, EdD, just moments before the board was to vote on the controversial proposal, told the board he wanted to delay the reconfiguration of U-Prep by a year, to the start of the 2020-21 school year. That way, everyone—parents, administrators, teachers, community members, board members—would be on one accord.
Board members seemed in agreement to delay the reconfiguration, including Sala Udin. But Udin wants to see such drastic improvement in U-Prep in the coming school year that the students won’t have to leave the school—and the Hill District—at all.
“If you’re planning on driving to New York, New York has to be your clear destination, otherwise you’ll wind up in Kentucky. So what’s important is that we make a clear intention of this board that we are planning for the success of Milliones, not planning how to get to Arsenal,” Udin said.
The board meeting featured some verbal consumer fireworks, but didn’t escalate to the big-time fireworks reserved only for Mr. Zambelli and the professionals. Wilson and Udin sparred about the issue, while board member Kevin Carter—a supporter of keeping kids in the Hill District—voiced his concerns via telephone.
Udin said he attended a meeting at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Hill District days before the June 19 board meeting, and the general consensus from residents was, “We do not want to suffer the closing of another school in the Hill District.”
The district isn’t looking to close U-Prep—by moving the middle school students to Arsenal, the district can focus on making U-Prep the early college program magnet school (grades 9-12) the district promised the community more than a decade ago.
“I do understand that the Hill District has gone through a lot, but hopefully over time, they won’t see it as we’re closing a school, we’re reconfiguring the school,” Dr. Hamlet told the New Pittsburgh Courier exclusively after the board meeting. “There’s not enough students (in grades 6-8 at U-Prep) to have a full realm of teachers, a ‘teacher team’ in that school, so now you have teachers in a hodgepodge, and they’re actually teaching several subjects, but they can’t go deep in one subject to support the academic growth of kids.”
By moving the middle school students at U-Prep to Arsenal, Dr. Hamlet said, it “gets them to a space where it’s a middle school environment, they have a well-run machine. Arsenal has high growth.”
Dr. Hamlet believes by putting additional supports and attention into U-Prep as a high school only, the students there will trend upward academically. Not only will current students benefit, but “we’re trying to get them (the U-Prep middle school students who would be relocated to Arsenal) prepared to come back to U-Prep, ready for that early college program.”
Board member Regina Holley called the reconfiguration proposal by the district “a storm that has split the African American community.”
She urged district leaders to take a page out of the book of success that Arsenal has penned, and use some of those strategies in the coming school year at U-Prep. Who knows, Holley said, by next spring there could be such vast improvement at U-Prep that “it’s not necessary to move the children, we’ve been able to turn this school around.”
On the flip side, if nothing’s working, “then there’s a valuable alternative (Arsenal), a team that is very stable, very aggressive in doing academics,” Holley said.
Arsenal has been recognized throughout the state in student academic improvement incrementally over the past five years. Wilson touted Arsenal’s diverse student population, and she believes students who are exposed to such diversity help their overall growth. “And I’ve seen that happen with my own children and grandchildren, when they have been exposed to a lot more than just those who look like them.”
Most parents Wilson and Dr. Hamlet encountered weren’t against the idea of relocating the U-Prep students to Arsenal—they just needed more time to process, more time to prepare for it.
The majority of parents Udin encountered don’t want to see any more students leave the Hill District under any circumstances. Udin believes if the district can plan to academically improve the U-Prep high school students, the district should concoct a plan to academically improve the U-Prep middle school students.
Dr. Hamlet sees it differently. He said his plan will have a win-win effect for everyone.
“We are going to make sure we cross all our T’s and dot all our I’s and make sure everything is in support of both schools, not one school, not robbing Peter to pay Paul, we’re not doing that,” he told the Courier exclusively.
“We just want to make sure all of our kids are getting well-supported public education.”
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