After receiving his PhD from MIT in 1982, Robert (Rock) Marra moved to the Pittsburgh area to take a job as a research engineer at Alcoa Technical Center. He continued to work at Alcoa and Almatis (a private spin-off company of Alcoa Industrial Chemicals) until retiring in February 2022. During his 40 years of employment, he held various managerial and executive leadership positions – having retired as Vice President of Global Technology.

Rock has lived in Penn Hills for 38 years. His four children all graduated from Penn Hills High School. His wife Jane has been active in the PTA/PTSA and has served for numerous years as the president of the PTSA.

Rock has been on the Penn Hills School Board of Directors for the past six years. Prior to joining the school board, he served as the District Treasurer. Since joining the school board in 2018, he has been Chairman of the Finance Committee. In his roles as District Treasurer and Finance Committee Chairman, he has worked closely with the Business Office Managers and the Chief Recovery Officer (assigned to Penn Hill School District in February 2019 when the state Department of Education placed the district into Financial Recovery) to ensure that the district’s finances were fiscally sound, the budgets were accurate and realistic, and plans were developed to enable the district to exit from Financial Recovery.

During this time, the district has been able to erase a negative $18 million fund balance; the fund balance at the end of 2022 fiscal year was a positive $14 million and it is projected that the district will end the current fiscal year with an additional $3-4 million of revenue as compared to expenditures.

Rock’s other priorities in the future include:

Ensuring the district remains financially stable especially when the positive benefit of ESSERS funds (federal money provided to public schools from stimulus programs related to the COVID pandemic) ends after the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

Enhancing the education outcomes for all students within the district.

Providing safe school environments for all students and employees.

While he believes that parents should have the right to choose where their children are educated, the current State’s funding of charter and cyber schools is not fair to the public schools. He will advocate with our state legislators to ensure that the cyber and charter schools are held accountable to the same standards as our public schools and amend the funding formulas especially with regard to special education funding and the unfair funding of cyber schools who receive the same tuition as “brick and mortar” schools while have much lower operational costs.