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Youngstown schools offer students more choices
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
All city school seventh- and eighth-graders will be able to pick their program next fall as part of the district’s plan to expand choice.
Superintendent Connie Hathorn told members of the Youngstown City School Academic Distress Commission at a meeting Wednesday that those students will be able to choose from Discovery 1; Discovery 2; Discovery 3; Chaney Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics; Chaney Visual and Performing Arts; or Rayen Early College Middle School.
“Students who make a decision about where they want to go do a better job,” Hathorn said.
Discovery 1, started this school year as Discovery at Kirkmere, is for third- through eighth-graders and provides students with classes in engineering, Spanish, creative communications, art, dance, investigative science, band and choir as well as the core curriculum.
That program will be duplicated next year with Discovery 2 at the former Volney Rogers Middle School, which was closed at the end of the 2012-13 school year.
Discovery 3 will be housed at East High School but will be a separate program and will include a career component with it rather than the art and music pieces.
“A lab is being put together that will connect with some program at Choffin [Career and Technical Center],” said Doug Hiscox, deputy superintendent for academic affairs.
For the past few years, the district, at the commission’s urging, has been working to expand choices for students with the belief that giving them a say improves their performance.
In other business, the commission passed a resolution directing the school board to allocate up to $50,000 for after-school programs at elementary schools. The money is to offer tutoring to students who need it to help them pass the upcoming Ohio Achievement Assessment.
A program already was in place at Williamson Elementary School, but Hiscox said there wasn’t money for the program at the other schools.
Adrienne O’Neill, commission chairwoman, asked if a request for more money for additional help for students at other schools had been brought to the school board. Hiscox said it hadn’t.
“That was a mistake,” O’Neill said.
Hiscox said students at Harding, Taft and Martin Luther King elementary schools would all benefit from the additional tutoring, which he described as intense. The OAA is set for May.