Youngstown schools committee demands improvement plan

By Harold Gwin

The superintendent said Youngstown already has a state-required improvement plan.

YOUNGSTOWN — The city school board’s curriculum committee wants the district administration to develop a written action plan for improving the district’s academic performance.

That plan needs to take the city schools from academic watch to a continuous improvement rating on the state’s annual local report card by next fall, the committee said in a written request presented at the school board meeting Tuesday.

Youngstown was ranked in academic watch for the third consecutive year in the 2007-08 version of the report cards issued last month.

The district met only one of the required 30 state educational standards used to measure a district’s overall academic performance.

The request from the curriculum committee (Lock P. Beachum Sr., Dominic Modarelli and Anthony Catale) said the action plan it wants must lead to the district’s passing at least four of those standards. Youngstown met only the standard for 11th-grade writing performance.

The district has five schools rated in academic emergency in the latest report cards, the lowest rating the state gives. The curriculum committee said the plan needs to move all five — East High, Odyssey School of Possibilities, Hayes Middle, Alpha: School of Excellence for Boys and Athena: School of Excellence for Girls — to a higher rating.

Neither East nor Odyssey met any of the standards applying to them, while Hayes, Athena and Alpha each met one.

The district has six schools rated in academic watch, and the committee wants the action plan to move all of them — Chaney High and Williamson, West (William Holmes McGuffey), Taft, Kirkmere and Paul C. Bunn elementary schools — up as well.

Williamson met none of its standards. Chaney, West, Taft and Kirkmere each met one, while Bunn met two.

Youngstown has four schools — Volney Rogers Junior High, P. Ross Berry Middle, and North (Martin Luther King) and Harding elementary schools — rated in continuous improvement, and the committee said the plan must address improvement in them as well.

Volney and Berry each met one of their standards, while North met two and Harding met five.

The committee offered its congratulations to Youngstown Early College for achieving an effective rating, the second-highest offered by the state. It met 10 of its 11 standards.

Dr. Wendy Webb, superintendent, said the district already has an action plan, one the state required it to adopt and amend annually to show how Youngstown will improve its test scores for the report card. One problem with the plan is that it isn’t “user-friendly,” Webb said, adding that the district is working on making it more accessible and understandable.

She said the district needs to make better use of the testing data it gathers to address areas of weakness so that those test scores improve.

One of the problems has been the 14-school rebuilding program that has had children and teachers shifted from building to building over the past several years, which hurts continuity of education, she said. Another has been the recent focus on cutting spending to deal with a budget deficit.

Once those issues are resolved, and that time is nearing, the district can again focus on academics, Webb said.

gwin@vindy.com