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MCCTC gets all A’s on state report card
By Denise Dick
CANFIELD
Mahoning County Career and Technical Center earned straight A’s on the latest state report cards.
The report cards, released Thursday, grade the Class of 2013 in four categories: four-year graduation rate, five-year graduation rate, technical-skill attainment and post-program placement.
“We were pretty happy,” said John Zehentbauer, assistant director of the center. “It looks like we hit our measures. Of course, there’s always room for improvement.”
Choffin Career and Technical Center, part of the Youngs-town City Schools, scored an A in post-program placement, D’s for both four-year graduation rate and technical-skill attainment and a C for five-year graduation.
Trumbull County Career and Technical Center got all A’s except in post-program placement, where it earned a B.
Columbiana County Career and Technical Center earned an A in four-year graduation rate, B’s in five-year graduation and post-program placement and a C in technical-skill attainment.
Zehentbauer said school personnel break down the data by subgroups of students to determine where further improvement is needed.
He’s especially proud of the A in the post-program placement category.
“Our placement is a big deal to us because we’re a career-technical center,” Zehentbauer said.
Joe Meranto, Choffin director, believes that’s an important measure, too, and it was the only A the center earned on the latest report card.
“That shows we’re placing kids,” he said. “We’re more than just a grader or a report card here.”
Graduation rates calculate the percentage of career-technical students who graduated within four or five years of starting ninth grade.
Technical-skill attainment measures the number of students who pass the Ohio Career Technical Center Competency tests or industry assessments for their respective programs.
Meranto said Choffin, the scores of which include career-technical courses at Chaney, would have ranked a C in the technical-skill attainment category, but the Ohio Department of Education knocked off a grade because a low number of students took the tests.
The director points out, though, that private-school students who take Choffin courses aren’t counted in Choffin’s total. They aren’t figured into the school’s graduation rates, either.
That includes students from Cardinal Mooney and Ursuline high schools and Valley Christian School. Because they aren’t public-school students, they don’t have a state Educational Management Information System number and aren’t counted in the Choffin data.
“I’m not making excuses,” Meranto said. “We can do better and we need to do better.”
Still, he believes the placement category is significant.
Meranto relayed the story of one student who wasn’t able to graduate last year because he didn’t pass one portion of the Ohio Graduation Test. Despite that, his welding skills landed him a job. He’ll return this school year to earn the diploma, Meranto said.
Jason Gray, TCTC superintendent, said he would have preferred all A’s but believes those targets keep the school on task.
“Targets are great because they keep us focused,” he said. “They keep us in line with the mission.”
Part of the issue with post-program placement is the difficulty of locating students after graduation to determine what they’re doing.
School employees collect students’ phone numbers and email addresses when they graduate to use along with social media to try to learn if students get jobs, join the military, go to college or trade school.
“No matter what we do, there’s always a fair amount we can’t get a hold of,” Gray said.