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Improve academics, speakers urge Youngstown school board
YOUNGSTOWN
The Youngstown Board of Education must act with a sense of urgency to improve the academic performance of its students, speakers told the board at a Friday evening meeting.
Jimma McWilson of Youngstown, co-founder of the Family Empowerment Student Achievement Institute, asked the board to devote an hour at its meetings to discussion of academic issues, with a major focus on improving the education of black students.
In terms of academic standards, the board must ask itself: “How are we going to get to excellence, or at least to a B?” McWilson said.
“We would like to see academic policies and smart goals that would be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely,” McWilson told the board.
The city schools, which emerged in recent years from academic emergency to academic watch, are now operating under an academic recovery plan, which is updated annually by the district’s academic distress commission.
George Freeman, education chairman for the NAACP of Mahoning County, read to the board from President Barack Obama’s White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans executive order, which was issued July 26, 2012. In that order, the president challenged the nation “to help ensure that all African Americans receive an education that properly prepares them for college, productive careers and satisfying lives.”
Obama noted that nearly 60 years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously banned racial segregation in public schools in its landmark May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
“America’s educational system has undergone a remarkable transformation” since then, but “substantial obstacles to equal educational opportunity still remain in America’s educational system,” the president said.
Black students collectively lag behind their American peers by an average of two grade levels in academic achievement; more than a third of black students don’t graduate high school on time; and only 4 percent of black high school graduates interested in college are college-ready, the president lamented.
Wally Salahuddin of Youngstown, director of the United Front for Educational Justice, blasted the board for “not solving academic policy issues facing this district.”
Any academic improvement plan that doesn’t include parents “is another plan for failure,” he said.
Jacqueline Adair, board member, thanked the speakers for sharing their “thoughts, suggestions and concerns with the board” and assured them the board would take their concerns “under advisement” and try to respond to them quickly.