Panel to mull North Elementary name

By HAROLD GWIN

VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — The city school board will look to a three-member facilities committee for a recommendation on whether the new North Elementary should get a name change and what it might be called.

A resolution that was to appear on Tuesday’s school board agenda calling for the school to be named the Martin Luther King Elementary was referred to the committee without any board action.

The Rev. Michael Write, board president, said that he and board members Lock P. Beachum Sr. and Shelley Murray will make up the facilities committee, and they will meet at 9:30 a.m. Thursday in the district administration offices at 20 W. Wood St. to take up the issue.

Three names have been proposed so far for the new North building, an $8.5 million school being built on Mariner Avenue and slated to open in fall 2008.

Beachum initially proposed in May 2006 that it be named after the late Rosa Parks, a civil rights advocate and activist, and it was Beachum who also suggested Martin Luther King as an appropriate name.

‘America’s Schoolmaster’

In August, the William Holmes McGuffey Historical Society petitioned the board to name the school after McGuffey, commonly known as “America’s Schoolmaster.”

McGuffey spent his early years in Coitsville and was the author of the famed “Eclectic Readers” which were the most commonly used reading book in American schools for decades.

Write had appointed Beachum, Murray and board member Jacqueline Taylor to an ad hoc committee for building name review and recommendation when Beachum first suggested the school be named after Rosa Parks.

Although Beachum said the committee never met on the issue, Murray said she and Taylor attended a number of community meetings after their appointment and surveyed people about possible names, suggesting Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King as possibilities.

They found that the public wasn’t particularly interested in a name change at that time but was more concerned with the district’s failing finances, Murray said.

The board discussed those findings and chose not to pursue any name change at that time, she recalled.

Richard Scarsella, president of the McGuffey Historical Society, said Tuesday that the society would be happy to have any school named after McGuffey, although North would be the most likely candidate because of its location close to Coitsville and McGuffey Road.

“The Youngstown City Schools is a large tent, and there is plenty of room under the big top for schools to be named for different historical figures,” he said.

gwin@vindy.com