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Campbell school kids get 2-year, $600K charity boost
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Springfield Township’s first police dog, Dany, pictured here with his handler Officer Glenn Corey, reported for duty Tuesday.
By Jeanne Starmack
campbell
A collaboration that began last year to boost student achievement at Campbell Elementary School worked so well it’s getting funding for two more years.
The school, its six partners in the collaboration and the William Swanston Charitable Fund got together at the school Tuesday morning to announce a $600,000 grant for Campbell Works for Children.
The Swanston Fund, which funds resources and programs for underprivileged children, awarded $300,000 to the collaboration last year. Ninety percent of Campbell’s schoolchildren live in poverty, said Tom Robey, schools superintendent.
“We’re pleased with what happened last year,” said Paul Dutton, a Youngstown attorney who is chairman of the fund’s board of trustees.
Along with the school, the collaboration includes Neighborhood Ministries, Catholic Charities Regional Agency, Community Solutions Association, D&E Counseling Center, Eastern Ohio P-16 Partnership for Education and the Help Hotline Crisis Center.
The programs in the collaboration offer not only academic support but emotional and behavioral counseling as well for the school’s kindergartners through fourth-graders. They include an after-school learning program, a summer day camp, individualized literacy training, anti-bullying instruction, teacher seminars, family support and a camp focused on kids with behavior issues.
Robert Walls, Campbell Elementary principal, said that in the past year the school has documented a significant increase in the number of second-graders reading at third-grade level.
That is significant, he and Dutton said, because reaching that level by third grade is a leading indicator of whether a student will graduate from high school.
Walls said the accomplishments of Campbell Works in its first year also include families signing up to work with specialists to prepare their children for kindergarten; improvement for students enrolled at Camp Challenge, designed for students with behavior issues; and significant improvement in test scores of students enrolled in literacy programs.
In the next year, Campbell Works plans to add an educational program for parents, a community advisory group and a more-formal evaluation of the collaboration’s results.
The fund awarded $145,000 in grants to four other programs in Mahoning and Trumbull counties.
They are Valley Counseling Services, given $65,000 to help prevent suspensions and expulsions in the Warren schools; the Eagles program, which will receive $40,000 to help students with discipline issues at Wilson Middle and Williamson Elementary schools in Youngstown; The Compass Family & Community Services Daybreak program, which shelters teenagers who run away or can’t safely stay in their homes, will receive $20,000; and the Potential Development Program’s School of Autism in Youngstown will receive $20,000 to expand educational programs for high school students.