While enrollment shrinks, challenges for schools grow

Last week, Carolyn Funk, treasurer of the Youngstown City School District, said the district had lost another 380 pupils -- a shrinkage that will mean a $6.7 million cut in state financial support. Board President Jacqueline Taylor says enrollment stands at 8,500 students. That's a figure that will presumably shrink by another 80 students when yet another charter school -- this one vouched for by the school district itself --opens in the Choffin Career Center to serve chronically failing high school students.
If 100 students or so were all the school district will lose in the foreseeable future, board members, administrators and teachers would be ecstatic.
Forty-five years ago, the city school district had just shy of 27,000 students. That is not a misprint: Twenty-seven thousand.
Enrollment began to decline, dropping 4.5 percent through the 1960s. There was a hemorrhage in the 1970s, with a decline of almost 30 percent. The drop slacked off in the 1980s, with a decline of only 12.5 percent, but returned with a vengeance in the 1990s, with a 27 percent decline.
The new millennium began with about 10,500 students in city schools, and halfway through the decade, enrollment has dropped almost 20 percent.
Reasons change
The losses in the last quarter of the 20th century reflected migration from the city. Much of the recent loss can be attributed to the growth of charter schools and the willingness of the state to shift money from urban public schools to competing institutions. This tendency has not abated, even though charter school students do no better than public school students on the tests that state legislators and officials use to measure success or failure.
Meanwhile, as the students have been leaving, Youngstown has been building new schools (the needs of which are under review) and the district has maintained enough teachers to staff a district of about 13,000 students at the state-minimum level (which is not to say that the city school district could function with the minimum of teachers allowed).
Clearly, the Youngstown City School District faces enormous challenges. It is living beyond its means, something we predicted three years ago when the board approved overly generous contracts to its employees and made no attempt to shift even a portion of the health care costs to the employees.
The board must speak clearly, loudly and soon about how it intends to cope with a looming financial disaster. We are not encouraged by the quickness with which Superintendent Wendy Webb referred to the possibility of an additional school levy, or by the response from Board President Taylor, who said last week that she was hoping that increased property tax revenue generated by reappraisal might help the district balance its books.
Bold approaches are needed. Timidity will not do.