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Youngstown school officials: Moving students will help
By Denise Dick
Youngstown
City school district officials hope that moving some students to different buildings next academic year will bolster student achievement.
Last week, the schools academic distress commission approved plans by Superintendent Connie Hathorn to move ninth-graders from P. Ross Berry Academy on the city’s East Side to East High School. The district also plans to move second- through fifth-graders from University Project Learning Center to Kirkmere Elementary School.
Sixth- through eighth-graders at UPLC, which is for students who haven’t been successful in a traditional school, will be moved to the second floor of Berry.
Doug Hiscox, deputy superintendent for academic affairs, said the plan will provide students with smaller schools while allowing them to be with students their own age.
“We had middle-school-age students [at UPLC] coming to school with high-school students and elementary-school students,” he said. “We’re trying to get them into an environment that’s more age- appropriate.”
Ninth- through 12th-graders at UPLC, housed in the former Mary Haddow School building, will remain there.
Berry includes about 635 eighth- and ninth-graders, while about 140 students attend UPLC.
Betty Greene, commission member, was happy with the change.
“I’m excited about going back and reviewing the whole small-school concept,” she said last week.
Another change is the creation of a career academy at Choffin Career and Technical Center for ninth graders who are older than their peers but have fewer than the required credits to be on target for graduation.
Those students are at Berry this school year.
“The biggest concern we have is that for some of them, it’s the second or third time they’ve been held back,” Hiscox said. “The national statistics show that if a student is retained more than once, they have a higher chance of never graduating.”
The career academy will enable them to take classes in a trade or career field while earning the credits in their core courses required to graduate.
Traditional Choffin students are juniors and seniors who spend half of the day at Choffin and half at one of the district’s other high schools. Those students have two years to earn 400 hours in their career or technical field.
Career Academy students will have three or four years to earn those hours.
“It gets back to trying to get them to graduate on time,” Hiscox said. “It’s a system for getting their ninth grade classes caught up. The career path is really what we believe is the hook.”