Tube City Almanac

May 18, 2009

History Lesson: Students Remake Downtown for Class Project

Category: News || By


(If video fails to load automatically, go directly to the Daily Motion website.)

It's not unusual for developers to present plans to city council.

It is unusual when they're not old enough to drive themselves to the meeting.

Students from Danielle Hocko's eighth-grade American History classes at Founders Hall Middle School attended a city council meeting earlier this month to show off their plans for remaking the city's Downtown business district.

Every year, Hocko teaches a unit on capitalism and the development of the free market. This year, she says, students struggled with some of the concepts, such as regulation and competition. Some didn't understand how property was divided up for public and private uses.

So Hocko, a teacher for the last eight years, asked her students to re-design the Downtown business district to become the kind of a place where they and their families would want to shop.

About 110 students in five sections took up the challenge. They divided themselves into teams of four or five students each.

Hocko asked them to research different sections of Fifth Avenue and its neighboring streets and propose both public and private uses for different parcels.

Then, they had to justify how each business would generate revenue, or why each public space was important.

Hocko, a native of McKeesport herself, says that one of the most interesting parts of the project was that many students got their parents, grandparents and other older relatives involved. Their relatives told the students about stores and businesses that used to be Downtown.

The projects that received the highest grades are now on display at City Hall, corner of Fifth Avenue and Sinclair Street, Downtown.






Your Comments are Welcome!

Now that is good urban planning, where people get together and decide the best and highest use of the land. What a great project for those kids! They did a better job than what most planning consultants would do and this didn’t cost the city a penny.
John - May 19, 2009



To comment on any story at Tube City Almanac, email tubecitytiger@gmail.com, send a tweet to www.twitter.com/tubecityonline, visit our Facebook page, or write to Tube City Almanac, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport, PA 15134.