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Restructured Youngstown schools open with a ‘few glitches’
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Kiara Pagan, a fourth-grader at Taft Elementary School in Youngstown, checks out some of the new books Laura Sullivan, the school’s literacy coordinator, brought for the students. Kiara enjoys reading and says she’s happy to be back in school. Monday was the first day of classes for city students.
By Denise Dick
Youngstown
The first day of classes at the restructured city schools saw only a few issues, said the superintendent.
“We had a few glitches,” said Superintendent Connie Hathorn. “When you restructure a school district, it takes time to get everything straight.”
There were some problems with picking up students and taking them to school because they’d moved without notifying the district, he said.
Students at both high schools, P. Ross Berry Eighth and Ninth Grade Academy and University Project Learning Center arrived to find metal detectors at those buildings. Though the district previously had the detectors set up for sporadic checks during the school year, they will be a daily feature this year.
“We didn’t find any weapons or anything like that,” Hathorn said. “I was happy with that.”
He said the detectors are to keep the schools safe.
Earlier this year, Hathorn announced a restructuring of the schools as a way to retain students and boost test scores.
Chaney High School is now a visual and performing arts and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) school for students in sixth through 12th grades.
East High School, for 10th- through 12th-graders, focuses on business, education and law, and both schools maintain core curriculum courses.
Rayen Early College Middle School, formerly housed in Choffin Career and Technical Center, has moved to Chaney.
The three middle schools were divided in P. Ross Berry for eighth- and ninth-graders and two sixth- and seventh-grade academies at Wilson and Volney Rogers schools.
The elementary schools remain kindergarten through fifth grade, but because of the high number of students at Martin Luther King Elementary School, some of those students will go to Harding Elementary and some to Williamson Elementary.
To get accepted at the new Chaney, students had to audition or be interviewed, and about 330 students are enrolled.
Mark Leventry, who attended Wilson last year, is a freshman at Chaney this year studying STEM.
“It was good,” he said of his first day.
Some of his classes are American and world history and algebra I. He says he’s glad he opted to pursue STEM as his field of study.