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Old 10-10-2014, 06:23 AM
 
338 posts, read 446,686 times
Reputation: 289

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My father taught at a city high school for 30 years... he compared it to an out of control chaos center. There would be multiple fights and thefts every day and..... you need to walk through a metal detector just to enter the building. He had his car put on blocks twice and has been through multiple shootings on school grounds. If there is an alternative envoronment to this situation I dont know why you wouldn't take it. Of course you are going to get drug use and the occasional violence in suburban schools as well, but to avoid the every day distractions it is definitely worth it. Large kudos to the kids in city schools that stay focused and out of trouble.
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Old 10-10-2014, 07:40 AM
 
Location: Stanton Heights
778 posts, read 839,749 times
Reputation: 869
Quote:
Originally Posted by ferraris View Post
ATC hit the nail on the head. Assuming the school's bad reputation is legitimate, no parent is going to send their kid there unless they absolutely have to. The only way around this that I can see, besides redistricting, is if parents with children of the same age all decided as a group to send their kids to the local school. In theory this should be easy -- inserting just 10 or 20 good kids into a classroom will have a huge impact...but it's much easier said than done.

This is a topic I've heard brought up by my neighbors in Brighton Heights occasionally. There's actually enough children in Brighton Heights alone that Morrow elementary and intermediate could be filled entirely with neighborhood children. Instead we have dozens of buses enter the neighborhood each morning in order to ship kids all over the city. And the flip side of that is that many of the kids who do go to the Morrows still have to take buses or get dropped off because the feeder pattern had to expand to be large enough to fill the school.
There are enough kids in Stanton Heights to alter Sunnyside K-8's demographics markedly, too. A lot of the new arrivals' kids are not school-aged yet so we'll see what happens.

I'm not willing to send my child to a completely failing, terrible, unsafe school in the name of the grater good, but I am willing to investigate whether a school is legitimately bad or just percieved bad becuase it's mostly black before making that call. And I'm willing to try him at a "safe and just okay" school because let's face it: he's a white male with no identified special needs and two trained educators as parents and 2 PhDs and 1 Masters as grandparents. He will not be hurting for either informal education or automatic privilege. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that we need to find him the very very very BEST school in Western PA in order for him to recieve a good education. Many many studies have shown that one of the highest predictors of academic success is what goes on at home, not at school.
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Old 10-10-2014, 07:59 AM
 
Location: Manchester
3,110 posts, read 2,915,413 times
Reputation: 3723
Quote:
Originally Posted by theta_sigma View Post
There are enough kids in Stanton Heights to alter Sunnyside K-8's demographics markedly, too. A lot of the new arrivals' kids are not school-aged yet so we'll see what happens.

I'm not willing to send my child to a completely failing, terrible, unsafe school in the name of the grater good, but I am willing to investigate whether a school is legitimately bad or just percieved bad becuase it's mostly black before making that call. And I'm willing to try him at a "safe and just okay" school because let's face it: he's a white male with no identified special needs and two trained educators as parents and 2 PhDs and 1 Masters as grandparents. He will not be hurting for either informal education or automatic privilege. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that we need to find him the very very very BEST school in Western PA in order for him to recieve a good education. Many many studies have shown that one of the highest predictors of academic success is what goes on at home, not at school.

Exactly. It starts and ends at home. I heard someone complaining that they had a child in the city schools and they found out that thier fifth grader couldn't write in cursive and they were upset. 1. Who cares, cursive is dead, and 2. What parent doesn't know that about thier child? Are you that uninvolved in thier life to know basic things like that?

On a positive note, I heard a bunch of usually annoying city HS kids talking about thier college plans on the bus this morning....it was refreshing to hear them all saying they were applying to college.
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Old 10-10-2014, 01:43 PM
 
Location: North by Northwest
9,325 posts, read 12,995,234 times
Reputation: 6174
Quote:
Originally Posted by I_Like_Spam View Post
I don't think its so much fear of gang affairs that bothers the parents, but instead of fear that the children won't have the same opportunities for academic excellence largely because of the distractions that the gang children might be making. Was it last year or two years ago that the top senior at Wilkinsburg complained about the education they got out there?


When I was at Langley, many moons ago, kids would rarely look to hassle those from other neighborhoods- if a kid was going to get bullied it would be from someone in his own neighborhood. Of course we didn't have gang affiliations and all that back in the 70's.
Not just that, but also the relative dearth of resources that cater to bright, motivated kids.
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Old 10-10-2014, 01:48 PM
 
Location: 15206
1,860 posts, read 2,578,094 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tyovan4 View Post
Because most "upstanding middle-class parents" aren't willing to sacrifice their child's education to have them be social guinea pigs. Most parents are willing to bear crosses to give their future a better future, not many upstanding parents are willing to ask their children to bear crosses (dealing with poor education quality and violence) to suit the parents ideology.

Schools, and my concern for my child, are why I bought a house across the river.
Or they enroll their kids in a magnet or charter school that has the ability to boot a kid for discipline problems. Schooling is a right, but preference and choice only is guaranteed to kids who aren't a problem. If they are, they get sent back to their feeder school.
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Old 10-10-2014, 06:30 PM
 
1,183 posts, read 2,144,894 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by selltheburgh View Post
Or they enroll their kids in a magnet or charter school that has the ability to boot a kid for discipline problems. Schooling is a right, but preference and choice only is guaranteed to kids who aren't a problem. If they are, they get sent back to their feeder school.
No, haven't you heard? "Pittsburgh Public Schools" isn't a massive collection of schools of varying quality -- it's just one, uniform thing that is always terrible. You can't send your kids to the Singular PPS Machine or it will immediately crush their spirits and turn them into criminals. I was planning to send my son there, but then I read about it on City-Data!
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Old 10-11-2014, 07:32 AM
 
1,901 posts, read 4,377,333 times
Reputation: 1018
Police Increase Patrols In Hill District Following Teen’s Shooting Death « CBS Pittsburgh
Well the motive was gang-related involving three of the branches of the Hill Districk Bloods listed before.

Last edited by Uptown kid; 10-11-2014 at 07:48 AM..
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Old 10-14-2014, 07:09 AM
 
Location: Pittsburgh
7,541 posts, read 10,254,431 times
Reputation: 3510

The Homewood shooting could have occurred anywhere, it was a domestic altercation.

The rest are a lot more relevant, as they all seem indicative of gang activity on the rise.
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Old 10-14-2014, 07:50 AM
gg
 
Location: Pittsburgh
26,137 posts, read 25,957,812 times
Reputation: 17378
What a busy month for people to die in the city. Even a sanitation worker got shot dead. Pittsburgh sure seems filled with guns and people who don't mind using them to kill. I am sure all the people from the suburbs are reading this stuff telling their spouses, see honey, this is why we can't move back to the city. Just too dangerous. Hard to justify that many shootings in such a short period of time, but I am sure the people cheering on Pittsburgh nonstop will justify it somehow. That is quite a statistic.

This is from July. I wonder if they will update it for October? Kind of scary.

http://newpittsburghcourieronline.co...rgest-all-year
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