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Invest in city, Girard urges
Girard
After spending more than a decade under fiscal emergency, the city is riding the waves of an improved economy and now wants its residents to invest in homes and stay awhile.
“The housing stock in Girard, we believe, is for all income levels,” Mayor James Melfi said.
Melfi said income-tax receipts so far are up more than $100,000 this year when compared with this point in 2011.
And in 2012, the city is expected to collect $180,000 from the V&M Star project for treating its waste.
The city and the school district are looking forward to housing stability that Melfi and school Superintendent David Cappuzzello believe will come with the V&M expansion project. The steel-tube company expanded north in 2010 from its Youngstown site into Girard in a project that is set to create 350 jobs.
The mayor and superintendent plan to draw families to invest in Girard homes by marketing its schools.
After the closing of the city’s main economic force, Indalex, in 2008 followed by the countrywide economic downturn, many families were forced to give up their homes in the city and move into apartments, he said.
This has left the school district with an unpredictable number of students as renters leave the city mid-school year and take their children with them. So far this school year, the district has lost 43 students because of this, Cappuzzello said.
That equates to more than $200,000 lost in state foundation aid, which is based on the number of students in the district.
The transiency of the city also makes setting up open- enrollment quotas difficult because if an elementary classroom is close to the state-mandated maximum 25-to-1 student-teacher ratio and a family moves into apartments and pushes the classroom over the maximum, the district could be forced to hire another teacher, he said.
“They live in the city,” said Cappuzzello. “We have to take them.”
In February, he met with Melfi to nail down the housing issue.
“How do we get workers to invest in a home in Girard?” Cappuzzello said. “I’d like to keep them here.”
Cappuzzello has developed a rough draft of a pamphlet that showcases the school district’s new facilities and what its curriculum has to offer students.
He plans to send out the pamphlet to local real-estate agents who are showing homes to people in Girard.
“It’s to say, ‘Hey, this is the kind of school system we offer,’” Cappuzzello said.
Melfi said when the Valley was one of the steel hubs of America, the vocational courses students received in high school were directly related to work at one of the steel plants.
But in absence of the mills, he said schools were training students who eventually were moving to other locations in Ohio or across the country because of a lack of work in the Valley in their field.
Melfi said with V&M expanding, the training “can be utilized locally. That’s got to be promising to the schools.”