Principals can bring guidance staff back

By Harold Gwin

Cuts have reduced counselors’ hours in elementary and middle schools.

YOUNGSTOWN — Principals in the city’s elementary and middle schools will be able to use federal stimulus money to restore their building guidance counselors to full-time status — if they wish to do so.

The school board and administration are working on a stimulus budget that gives each building administrator some discretion on how money will be spent in his or her school.

They can use it for mentoring, tutors, literacy people and to bring back full-time guidance counselors, said Superintendent Wendy Webb.

Anthony Catale, school board president, said Tuesday that the budget proposal for the $8 million in stimulus funds Youngstown will receive over a two-year period creates individual “school allocations.”

The building principals will have the authority to decide if some of that money will be used to pay guidance staff, he said.

Webb said the total amount of school allocations will amount to more than 50 percent of the stimulus funds.

A citizens group, The Community High Commission on Closing the Academic Standards Achievement Gap for Afrikan Students in the city schools, approached the school board in January, asking that stimulus money be tapped to restore elementary and middle school guidance counselors to full-time status in every school.

Catale said spending reductions imposed by the district had resulted in the hours those counselors work at each building being reduced. The high school counselors weren’t affected.

The Community High Commission argued that the elementary and middle schools are getting counselors only half of the time. They are full-time employees but each splits their time between two buildings, spending 21‚Ñ2 in each every week.

Jimma McWilson, a commission member, told the board that the group had teams visit the city schools and learned that most of them don’t have a full-time counselor/social worker to deal with student psycho-social- emotional behavior issues that disrupt the classroom. That leaves the teacher and building administrator to deal with the problems that too frequently lead to suspensions and expulsions, he said.

Guidance counselors should be handling those issues, contacting parents