YOUNGSTOWN SCHOOLS Mom protests moving son to other building

To combat middle-school overcrowding, eight pupils will be moved from East to Hillman.
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Pamela Miller lost her husband in January.
She now raises her four children -- 9, 11, 12 and 16 -- on her own in the East Side neighborhood near Lincoln Park Drive.
A letter she received in the mail Friday means her job will now become more difficult.
The Youngstown city school district has informed her that her 12-year-old son, now going to East Middle School, must transfer to Hillman Middle School on the South Side, effective this Thursday. She said the letter states that the East Side school is overcrowded.
"My son's adjusting to the death of his father, and they're uprooting him, and they didn't give him the time to adjust," she said. "He's asking, 'Mommy, do I have to go?'
"... They're doing anything they want with our children, and we didn't have any say-so."
The problem
Superintendent Benjamin L. McGee said there is an overcrowding issue at East Middle School. Based on teacher-union contracts, maximum class size in the fifth through eighth grades is 27 pupils, he explained.
If classes exceed that number and teachers ask the district in writing to address the problem, the district must reduce class sizes within 20 days. At least two teachers wrote letters, McGee said. Their class sizes were three to four pupils over the limit.
McGee said eight pupils would be transferred to Hillman. They were selected based on busing issues: Those living closest to Hillman were moved there. Hillman was chosen, McGee said, because other options -- Hayes Middle School and Volney Rogers Junior High School -- are already at maximum capacity. He does not expect that the pupils would have to move again once they are placed at Hillman.
He said the district considered other options before deciding to transfer the pupils. First, because pupils often move within the district during the school year, they waited to see if the problem would remedy itself.
Another option was to hire another teacher at East Middle School. However, that option would have caused disruption to the schedules of roughly 200 pupils there.
Managing schedules
Miller said she has been unemployed since about three months after her husband died, when she stopped working to take care of her children.
With no baby-sitter, she has been trying to figure out scheduling so she can go back to work. The 11- and 12-year-old children now attend East Middle School and can walk there if they miss the bus. They get home before the 9-year-old, who attends Mary Haddow Elementary School, also on the East Side.
The oldest son goes to Chaney High School on the West Side, through an open enrollment program, and takes a WRTA bus to school. She said she might consider having the 12-year-old boy go to Volney Rogers, also on the West Side, through open enrollment, but fears sending him on a WRTA bus by himself.
"Now, I don't know what's going to happen," she said. "I think it's crazy to have four children going to four different schools all over the town."
She said she will pull her son from the public schools and look at a charter school if he is forced to go to the South Side School.
McGee said he would discuss the situation with Miller, and the decision to move her son would be reconsidered if a hardship is found.