Schenley High School for sale

When Schenley High School opened in 1916, it was the first high school in the country to have cost more than $1 million to build. Derrick Bell, the first African-American professor at Harvard Law School, and Andy Warhol, a pioneer in the pop art movement, are just a few of the alumni who were educated at the school.

But since closing in 2008, Schenley has sat on Bigelow Boulevard in North Oakland — less than a mile away from Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning — barren and supposedly harboring an asbestos problem, according to the city of Pittsburgh School District.

This sparked an outcry in the community and among alumni, parents and students as well. Many suspected that there was more to this issue than the school board had revealed.

As a way to express their incredulity and frustration, the outraged citizens created an online petition on Change.org this year, championing an investigation behind the closing of the school.

Ben Tinker, class of ’92, wrote in the online petition that it was important to investigate the rationale behind the decision made regarding Schenley High School.

“It is critical to understand the true cost of these abatements before any further action is taken and to know if deceit was at play in the original decision-making process,” he wrote.

Annette Werner, one of the leading figures in this community-wide movement, said the main purpose of the petition was to educate board members and to investigate whether important information was withheld from the decision makers.

Werner said she held theories as to why the historic building was closed, but wasn’t comfortable disclosing them.

Werner indicated that money was wasted not too long ago when staff and students were relocated to another school at the time of Schenley’s closing, and she doesn’t want the same mistake to be repeated.

“To use Reizenstein [Middle School] for three years, they spent $10 to 15 million renovating, and moving robotics to Peabody [High School] was $3 million,” Werner said. “We rushed into things last time and wasted $20 million.”

Pittsburgh Public Schools Coordinator of Public Relations Ebony Pugh declined to comment on the renovations and robotics move.

Despite the lack of support from the community, the school board decided in September, by a 5-to-4 vote, to sell the building, with a $4 million asking price.

Jerry Tullius, the manager for this project from Fourth River Development — which is the company in charge of marketing the school — said that potential bidders will take a tour of the property on Nov. 27, followed by a conference on Nov. 28 that will address any questions or concerns related to the building. The questions and concerns posed by attendees brought up in the conference will be made available to the general public on the group’s website within one week, according to Tullius.

Although local insitutions could potentially purchase the property for their own use, officials from Carnegie Mellon University, Pitt and UPMC have remained largely silent on future expansion into the old high school.

Pitt Spokesman John Fedele and CMU Spokeswoman Alyssa Mayfield declined to comment on this topic. UPMC Spokeswoman Susan Manko said UPMC has no plans for the building.When asked about potential bidders, Tullius said: “We’ve had some preliminary calls, but we won’t know who’s involved til the tour.”

The official reason for closing down the high school was an asbestos problem, which the Pittsburgh Public School District’s Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and the Chief Operations Officer Richard Fellers touted to the media and the community in 2007.

In that same year, Fellers told to the Pittsburgh City Paper that asbestos was “in every wall, in every ceiling, on every floor.”

But that same year, when Dan Davis, a former senior project manager at a consulting agency for the district, conducted tests on the plaster samples from the school, he came to a different conclusion.

“Our results showed all the samples were less than 1 percent asbestos,” he said in the same City Paper article.

This revelation was the reason behind the public outrage, because the asbestos problem was the reasoning the superintendent had used to justify closing down the beloved school.

Despite the amount of controversy and negativity surrounding the issue, Tullius is still optimistic for the turnout at the tour and conference scheduled for later this month.

“We’re hoping we get a good mix of people on [Nov. 28],” he said.