District 7- Khamil Scantling
Q: Are you in favor of raising property taxes? Why or why not?
A: I am not in favor of raising property taxes unless there is a clear, direct benefit to doing so. For PPS school board, there is not that clear, direct benefit to doing so because the district has a budget that should be able to sufficiently support the growth and sustenance of the district. The price per pupil in PPS is a little over $25,000 per pupil compared to the state average of a little over $17,000 per pupil. We should not continue to raise property taxes if we are failing to properly manage the abundance of funds we currently have.
Q: Pittsburgh Public Schools is facing a systemic deficit of millions of dollars a year, how would you work to address the deficit in both the near future and the long term?
A: In the near future, because of the amount of spending in these areas, I would suggest (1) our superintendent and executive staff take temporary pay cuts as a commitment to the growth of the district. We have seen similar leadership measures in other public school districts as a way to balance the budget. (2) I would take measures to reduce spending in our lowest performing charter schools. If those charters are not positively contributing to the district, we should not dedicate dollars to them. Long term, I would work to enforce improving the achievement in our schools so that we meet the need for our students that many of the charter schools are meeting. This way we can reduce spending to charters by making the increased number of charters in the district unnecessary. A look at non instructional staff cuts may also be in worth exploring.
Q: Do you think Pittsburgh Public Schools current physical footprint matches the needs of the students we serve? Why or why not?
A: There is currently a heavier concentration of schools on the east and a more limited number in our central area however to answer this fully, I would need the full context of serving on the board and speaking with families in the district on this particular topic.
Q: Superintendent Dr. Hamlet has started a Student Advisory Panel to incorporate student voice into the administrations. How will you ensure student perspectives are heard and factored into board decisions?
A: The answer to this will seem overly simple but I would suggest consulting the Student Advisory Council on matters of their education and taking their recommendations seriously. They should be part of a designated number of board discussions so that they understand what goes into deliberations so that they can also make informed, well thought out recommendations to the board. The board should be mandated to make a best effort to incorporate at least one of the Student Advisory Council's recommendations. I would volunteer to be the liaison to the Student Advisory Panel because I believe so deeply in this measure.
Q: What are your top 3 priorities to improve the district?
A: 1. Improved communication: Effective communication is vital to the management of any organization. With improved communication strategies, families, school staff, and the PPS Board of Directors can make informed, well thought out decisions about how to best run our district and effectively enrich the lives of our students, faculty, and community-at-large. 2. More strategic collaborations: The Greater Pittsburgh region has a wealth of opportunity and an abundance of resources that would all benefit from having high quality education in our public schools. Investments from our governmental agencies (including the City of Pittsburgh), private sector, nonprofits, and philanthropic communities will propel our district forward through an “all-in” approach. These investments will be in the form of additional funding, resources to schools and families, as well as time and educational enrichment programming. These partnerships will create a “School to Success Pipeline” that sets our students up to thrive even after they leave our doors. 3. Engaging and Empowering families: It is difficult to make the best choices for your family when you are unaware of all of the choices available to you. My goal for the district, especially for families in neighborhoods in the south, is to share knowledge of how the district works, how to navigate our education system, and how families and students can advocate for themselves. This includes keeping families informed about school board meetings and votes, voting decisions that the board has made, and changes that are being proposed that affect them. Without input from our families, this system does not work.
Q: What are 3 things you think the district is doing well and how will you support those initiatives?
A: The CTE programs are a productive program for our students and I work work to provide even more options for programs to students so they have even more options. Suspension rates in the district have decreased and I'd like to support more productive conflict resolution in our schools to continue to see the rates decrease. The district does a good job of highlighting students who do well in the district and I would support this and ensure we can do more acknowledgements of this kind that make sure students see more of themselves and their peers achieving.
Q: Teaching in Pittsburgh Public Schools is a great opportunity. As a board member how will you promote teaching in the district so that we attract high quality diverse teachers?
A: I would highlight the work of great teachers through more public acknowledgement as well as opportunities for highly effective teachers to lead development and best practices sessions for their fellow teachers. There also needs to be an adjustment to the last in, first out method of layoffs for teachers. If the unfortunate scenario arises where teachers must be laid off, performance should be a more significant consideration into where those cuts are made. If we can ensure teachers that their job security rests heavily on their teaching effectiveness, we can encourage teachers to perform well. We also know that there has been a recent push for more teachers of color, especially Black male teachers, and if we can encourage our new teachers that being new to the district does not. mean that they will get laid off first, we may be able to attract more talent.
Q: What is your vision of a community school? How will you as a board member work to create partnerships to strengthen our schools?
A: My vision of a community school is one where the close knit community partners that are included in the school are provided students a safe, loving, and trustworthy environment where they can focus on learning and are. pushed to do so. The partner organizations that are part of the community school should be organizations that are trusted and celebrated in the community in which the school is housed. The students would feel seen and understood by the staff and faculty because the staff and faculty have the cultural competency to appropriately engage with the students. Ideally, the relationships built in the community schools would spill over into after-school activities, extra curriculars and general life because the same people who the students see in school are the same people they see contributing to community life outside of the school, forming strong cooperative bonds.
Q: What resources do you think schools need to better engage with families with limited English proficiency? How will you advocate for those resources?
A: Schools need strategic partnerships and liaisons from organizations that already assist and engage our families with limited English proficiency. We should be informed about resources available to our families that we can point them to in the event we cannot meet their needs. This not only fosters trust from our families but it gets them the help they need, making it more likely that the students in the families have less barriers to attending and excelling in school. When people's basic human necessities are met, they can focus more on education and personal development.
Q: In general how do you think the district has handled the COVID-19 pandemic?
A: I think the district has not handled the pandemic well, especially in comparison to other districts, some with more students to manage. In the beginning, it took the district 6 weeks to get remote instruction setup for students and even longer to get devices to students. Some was due a limited number of devices but families have also been told, and experienced personally, that it was a logistical and communication failure. In regard to a lack of devices, if decisions had been made sooner, we could have reached out to companies such as Google, Pittsburgh Technology Council, and our libraries in a timely manner to ensure that they could make necessary arrangements to assist the district with acquiring devices. One of the positives for the district was using Out of School Time providers as community learning hubs for families with barriers to internet access or parents who were essential employees and were not able to assist students virtual learning.
Q: How are you going to deal with the drop in grades and catching students up both near term and for the long haul?
A: We should not look at grades the same way as before the pandemic. To even frame it as "the drop in grades and catching students up" could be problematic. The students will be shell shocked if we attempt to go back to business as usual and expect them to perform and achieve "good grades" the way we expected before. We must meet the students where they are, wherever that maybe. The first year back should be dedicated to reacclimatizing students to the building and systems of in-person instruction. During this year, we should dedicate time and resources to putting students on either Individualized Education Plans or small group education plans for students who are in similar academic places. This plan to reintroduce our students to in-person instruction should then be carried out over multiple years as determined by experts in education and psychology.
Q: How can you as a board member support increased literacy? What specific programs would you support/ advocate for?
A: I would support early childhood education as a means to ensure our students begin on solid literacy foundations. Our early childcare and pre-K programs should be preparing students with the basic building blocks of reading. For those who are beyond 1st grade, I would advocate for more individualized instruction to focus on any trouble areas for the student.
Q: Will you ensure that non-Christian Students are allowed the same time off from school for major religious/cultural dates such as Yom Kippur/Rosh Ha’Shanah/Passover, Eid, Diwali, etc.
A: This is a very simple answer for me: yes. Equal acknowledgement of religious practices is only fair.
Q: The Jewish community is concerned with rising Antisemitism and a record-low baseline education about the Holocaust; what will you do to ensure that these issues are adequately taught in school?
A: I would push for more honest and well rounded curriculum tools that not only teach more about the Jewish Holocaust but also the true travesties of African enslavement and the present-day effects, the colonization of indigenous people who were on this land before it was called America and other humanitarian crisis throughout history that impact the way America operates today. Any large population of people who came to the US by way of or due to some injustices committed upon those people should have their history taught in our schools. In order to make people better neighbors and citizens, they need to be able to understand each other better and teaching accurate history in school is a great place to start.
Q: Locally - and nationwide - enrollment numbers in early childhood programs and kindergarten are down due to the pandemic. As a school board member, how will you provide leadership and support for enrollment in district early childhood programs and kindergarten? How can the district provide support for increased outreach and engagement to Pittsburgh families with young children?
A: I would use all of the communication tools available to communicate to families the benefits of early childhood education. Studies have shown that the most critical parts of brain development happen even before kindergarten, so if we can engage and began strong learning habits in pre-K or sooner, our children are more likely to carry strong learning habits throughout school and beyond. I would also be really practical with families and let them know their tax dollars are going to pre-K and early childhood education and they're essential paying double if they are paying for daycare services when their child is eligible for school through PPS.
Q: What role do you think high-quality early learning plays in providing the educational foundation for children to succeed? As a school board director and local leader, how will you work with state elected officials and other leaders to ensure more children continue to receive access to pre-k?
A: Along with communicating the personal educational benefits to students and families, I would let elected officials and other leaders know that an investment in early childhood education programs is an investment into not only out educational futures but our economic futures as well. When we can foster brilliant minds at an early age, they grow exponentially, lending to minds that will create the cutting edge solutions of the future that we need as a society. These cutting edge solutions will foster economic growth through jobs and wealth building for our region, state, and country.
Q: The 2020 A+ Schools Report to the Community highlighted the joyful learning happening in PPS early childhood education programs. The article focused on the importance of a whole child approach including play-based learning and social and emotional development. How will you support educators and administrators to implement developmentally appropriate, play-based learning in school reopening plans? Additionally, what considerations do you feel need to be made in supporting the mental health, social-emotional development, and physical activity of students during remote learning and as they return to school?
A: I believe play-based learning and social and emotional development is going to be paramount to the success of our return to in-person instruction. Some of the students will have lost much of the information and practices from before the pandemic and that play-based learning and a focus on the social and emotional development will build the confidence to learn for students. This approach also allows for educators to assess the educational needs of students without sitting them in front of a pencil and scantron to test them, possibly giving a more realistic and holistic view of the needs of our students. This supports my position that we will need to grade students differently in order to look at more than test scores but also the social and emotional adaptiveness of each student. The same way we have provided academic supports, we will need to have mental health supports in place as well.
Q: How can the Board be more transparent with COVID and schools reopening?
A: The board can make the information more digestible and accessible to families. Meetings and forums should be scheduled at times when families are most likely to be able to attend. Also, board members can make themselves more available to speak to the public and be a point of contact for the district in regard to all measures being taken for school reopening.