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Revised school plan headed to state
By Denise Dick
BOARDMAN
A revised plan to raise student achievement and test scores among Youngstown city school students is headed to the state.
The Youngstown Schools Academic Distress Commission unanimously adopted the updated plan at a meeting Monday at the Mahoning County Educational Service Center.
“We sent it to [the Ohio Department of Education], they had it for about a week-and-a-half, and then the message I got was they wanted us to formally adopt it,” said Debra Mettee, commission chairwoman.
Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction, the deputy superintendent and two others from Heffner’s staff are to attend a commission meeting at 2 p.m. Nov. 29 to review the plan, she said. That meeting will be at the ESC.
It’s the same group from the state that visited in September saying that the district isn’t progressing quickly enough. After years in academic emergency — the lowest designation on the state report card — the district improved one rung to academic watch on the 2010-11 report cards.
But state officials said the district remains in distress.
The revised plan, which, at Heff-ner’s direction combines seven improvement plans that had been in place in the district into one, is divided into eight components.
The components are leadership to support student success, school climate, high school, collaborative structures, literacy, math, special-education and early-childhood programming and fiscal monitoring of state and federal funds.
The plan spells out goals, strategies, indicators and action steps for each component.
Its development included input from personnel in all of the district’s school buildings as well as the administration.
The five-member academic distress commission was established in 2010 after the city district was designated in academic emergency and failed to meet adequate yearly progress on state report cards. It is the first and only such commission in Ohio.
Members serve without compensation.