Rising up:
Stories from the pandemic 

2021 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Morgan Snyder Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council, Public Stakeholder Advisory Committee

While district leaders and teachers were struggling to adapt to virtual and hybrid teaching, student leaders were reaching out to other students and figuring out how to move forward when even the adults around them didn’t know what to do. One of those students was Morgan Snyder, a senior literary arts major at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 who lives in Stanton Heights, a small neighborhood tucked between Lawrenceville and Morningside. Morgan serves on the Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council (SSAC) and was one of two students selected for the Public Stakeholder Advisory Committee formed to advise the district on how federal pandemic relief funds should be spent. (A+ Schools Executive Director James Fogarty also serves on the committee.)

CAPA students were luckier than some when schools closed; Morgan says they’d had school-issued MacBooks for several years. “We had the technology, but we couldn’t really start until it was equitable [district-wide]. And that is the way it should have been, but it resulted in us losing a lot of learning,” she says. After virtual classes began, “My mom got me a little back pillow and I would sit on the corner of my bed all propped up,” because she didn’t have a desk in her room. She shared a lap desk with her brother, a student at Pittsburgh Obama 6-12, “and it was just like a balancing act of computers,” she says. Internet service was another balancing act. With her mother also working from home, Morgan often was bumped offline.

Over the summer her grandfather bought her a desk, but when school started again virtually, she felt her junior year slipping away into the ether. “All you ever hear about junior year is how intense it is and how important it is to your college application,” she says. With a plan to study nursing, in 10th grade she’d taken pre-calculus, but didn’t feel prepared after the interrupted year. Learning calculus was difficult “without being able to call the teacher over…and have him explain something to just me,” she says, adding, “YouTube cannot teach you everything, I’ve come to find.”

In the spring, when Morgan returned to the CAPA building, everything felt different. “I ate lunch in an empty art gallery with plain white walls and desks all in straight lines,” she recalls. During lockdown, however, she’d reconnected with the core group of literary arts majors who’d been together since 6th grade. They’d never been “super close” until they started communicating through texts and a group chat to support each other at home. Back at school in person, Morgan was glad to see those new relationships were “still right there.”

On the SSAC, where she also had friends, she had the opportunity to influence the district’s response to the pandemic. The SSAC is made up of representatives from each district school and center that serves high school students. In the past, other students have wanted the SSAC to deal with tangible issues such as cafeteria food, dress codes, and scheduling, but equity has also been an ongoing concern, Morgan says. She serves on a subcommittee devoted to students’ mental health, which became a much bigger focus for the SSAC last year. In consultation with district personnel and local therapists, the subcommittee created a set of best practices for discussing mental health that will be available to parents and students as well as school staff.

Though she was used to thinking beyond her own school, Morgan found participating on the Public Stakeholder Advisory Committee “eye-opening.” The district held a series of virtual meetings over the summer; Morgan’s role was to listen to the ideas shared and “take that back and create something” from it, she says. She sees the federal money, provided through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, as a chance to push forward work already in progress, to make pandemic-related changes, and to revisit the status quo.

In her view, “We need more social workers in the schools. We need more staff in the schools. We need therapists on hand. We need to be able to support students in these ways. We need safe spaces that students can go to. We need to be more in touch with all of that.” Teachers also need more support, she says. “They’re the ones that are getting us through this.”

The law specifies that a percentage of the funds be allocated to addressing learning loss. “I think this is a perfect opportunity to revisit outdated and old curriculum,” Morgan says. “There’s so much that doesn’t capture history from all sides…. There’s so much in the English and writing curriculum that could be revised to showcase more voices.” District communication, especially about safety during the pandemic, could be clearer, more transparent, and proactive, she feels. And she hopes the district will “embrace the way that technology is advancing” and keep the hybrid option indefinitely.

Like many people, during lockdown she reflected on who she was and who she wanted to be. “I have a lot to work on as a person,” was her conclusion. “I think when you’re in the go, go, go, wake up, go to school, just get your stuff done and come home [mode], you’re just stuck in the constant motion. As I was forced to slow down in the pandemic, I learned that I need to put more into communication.”

Though it was “a hard thing to come to” for this young leader, perhaps she speaks for more than herself when she says, “I need to reach out to people…when I know that I need help.”