The crowd in front of Lambeau Field during the NFL draft on April 26, 2025, in Green Bay, Wis.
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Perry Knotts/Getty Images
In recent years, the NFL draft has attracted hundreds of thousands of fans to the cities that host it. This week, Pittsburgh will be no exception.
And that influx of people has led the local school district to make a controversial decision: canceling in-person school.
While some adults are pushing back on Pittsburgh Public Schools for opting to go remote Wednesday through Friday this week, 11th-grader Kaya Lewis says her district made the right move.
“I personally like it, especially because we go to school downtown, so it’s just gonna be really hectic trying to get here and trying to get home,” said Lewis, a student at the district’s Creative and Performing Arts middle and high school.
The school, also known as Pittsburgh CAPA, is located in the heart of the city’s Cultural District, a corridor many buses and cars stream through every day. That traffic is expected to intensify during the NFL draft.
Like a lot of CAPA students, Lewis is also excited to get a break from in-person classes — although remote learning, she notes, isn’t always easy.
“Like I have physics, so that can be hard to try and learn online,” she said. “But especially with the AP tests coming up, it’ll be easier for us to study at home and just get as much time as we need to study.”
The event is expected to bring 500,000 to 700,000 people into the city, roughly doubling Pittsburgh’s population. All those fans will swamp the city’s bus and transit systems, which many students use to get to school.
Some of the routes students rely on have been canceled, and road closures will make travel generally more difficult.
“Hopefully, when people see the actual impact — when we are here and we have the influx of people — there’ll be some understanding to it,” said Ebony Pugh, a district spokesperson.
Pugh says the decision to move to asynchronous learning, with assignments completed independently online rather than together in Zoom classes, was meant to be an equitable one.
That way, it’s not only some students receiving in-person instruction during the draft. While many families live within walking distance to their neighborhood school, it’s also common for Pittsburgh students to crisscross the city each day to attend magnet schools.
“We understand, for some, [their] kid can go down the road, but there’s also a number of students who that’s just not the reality,” Pugh said.
She acknowledges, though, the difficulties this will create for some families.
Sour memories of pandemic-era remote learning are still fresh for many Pittsburgh families. But online classes have also become a regular, albeit controversial, part of schooling nationwide.
Many districts, including Pittsburgh, went online in the wake of January’s massive East Coast snowstorm.
Research shows that kind of short, temporary disruption to in-person learning won’t significantly affect student outcomes.
But parent Sonja Smith says the decision to go remote still raises equity concerns. Smith lives within walking distance of her daughter’s elementary school, miles from the draft events downtown.
“I feel like something like this really puts that into play … who matters and who doesn’t,” Smith said.
She adds that the big business city officials are hoping to drum up through the draft shouldn’t outweigh student learning.
At the same time, Smith says she’s relieved the district has opted for asynchronous learning, rather than requiring students to be at their laptops for live, online classes all day.
“I feel like when it’s synchronous, so much of the day is just, ‘My mute doesn’t work. My message doesn’t work,'” she said, mimicking her fifth-grader. “Really, it just turns into a time suck for everyone.”
City rec centers will open their doors to students who need a place to connect online and offer activities that bring the draft festivities to kids.
