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Mahoning Valley students start 2012-13 year amid change
By Denise Dick
Youngstown
New programs and curriculum choices await Mahoning Valley students as they return to the classroom.
For example, new options and revised grade alignment will greet Youngstown City Schools students when they return to the classrooms next month.
Austintown students, meanwhile, start and end the school year early this year as the district’s building project continues. The district is building a kindergarten through second- grade school and a third- through fifth-grade school on the same campus as the high school, replacing four elementary school buildings.
Those new buildings will be ready for the 2013-14 school year, said Superintendent Vince Colaluca.
At Cardinal Mooney, nine Asian students attending through The American School are being welcomed. The American School is a program that helps parents place their children in a secondary American school in anticipation of them going to college in the U.S.
Aquaponics — the cultivation of fish and vegetation in a closed ecosystem — is a new program at Choffin Career and Technical Center this year.
“It will be the first one in the state,” said Joe Meranto, Choffin director.
Tilapia, small at first, will live in tanks in the basement of the greenhouse at the school, connected by a series of pipes and pumps to the vegetable garden beds upstairs. Waste from the fish fertilizes the plant beds, and the plant beds filter the water that goes back into the tank.
Sarah Wilhelm, who will teach the class, said students must work to ensure the water has the proper pH levels.
The fish start out small and are harvested when they reach 2 pounds, she said.
Those fish will likely be distributed to underprivileged people the first year but could be sold as the program grows.
Students worked to renovate the former horticulture building, which was vacant for about five years. Masonry students under the direction of instructor James Alexi built the tanks. Commercial art students created the fish stickers that adorn the walls, and students in construction technology, heating, ventilation and air conditioning and home and building maintenance programs pitched in to ready the greenhouse.
Meranto said no general fund money was used to prepare the greenhouse, which is across a parking lot from the main Choffin building.
The Choffin Career Academy is also new this year in the city schools. It caters to over-age and undercredited ninth graders, focusing on getting them back on track to graduate.
Meranto said those students pick their career-technical field, take core-curriculum classes and use the district’s credit recovery program when needed.
The eighth and ninth grades will be realigned again this year. Last year, both grades were housed at P. Ross Berry.
This year, Berry will be for eighth-graders, and ninth graders will attend East High School where they will learn in pods and be taught by the same teachers for two years.
The school year for Austintown students begins Tuesday — about a week earlier than in previous years — and wraps up May 17, 2013, allowing crews time to finish the two new schools.
Colaluca said the district is talking to stakeholders within the township to determine possible viable uses for the old schools once the new buildings open.
If there aren’t any, they will likely be demolished and returned to green space, he said.