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Schools plan still draws criticism
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Though opponents are quick to point out what’s wrong with a plan to appoint a CEO to run the city schools, no alternative is being offered yet.
Two rallies and a community meeting about what’s been dubbed the Youngstown Plan drew hundreds of people who voiced their discontent with the legislation signed last week by Gov. John Kasich. But twice-monthly city school board and monthly academic distress commission meetings see scant attendance.
Brittany Douglas of Youngstown graduated from Chaney High School in 2009 and said things were bad when she was in school.
Other students’ behavior was so bad, it distracted her – and the other students who wanted to learn.
“When I watched the news all those years, every time there was a parent meeting on the news, there were like six people there,” Douglas said. “Six people from the whole entire district. Are you kidding me?”
But now many people are attending events to object to the latest plan.
“Where were you guys for the last 10 years?” the Chaney graduate asks. “If you guys had come to meetings before, maybe you could have fixed it, and this wouldn’t have to happen. Your voices could have been heard before.”
The past two superintendents worked in the district for a long time, Douglas said, but nothing got better.
“Maybe we need someone else to come in with a different perspective and try to fix this,” she said. “It can’t keep going the way it’s going.”
State Sen. Joe Schiavoni of Boardman, D-33rd, one of the organizers of last week’s community meeting, said it was a first step to developing a new plan that’s more acceptable to people in the community.
He acknowledged low attendance at school district meetings although he couldn’t offer a theory to explain why.
Schiavoni said he hasn’t focused on the city school district’s academic woes before is because he was addressing “larger education issues” that contribute to what ails that school system and others. Schiavoni sponsored legislation to increase accountability for charter schools and to improve school safety, for example.
“I told the governor I wanted to work on the plan when they decided to do it,” he said. “I’m frustrated, and I personally believe they didn’t take me up on the offer because they wanted to come up with this plan and knew I wasn’t going to support it.”
Schiavoni plans to convene smaller meetings with teachers, business and community leaders and faith-based groups to develop a plan to fix the schools that all of those groups support. That plan will be presented to the CEO when he or she is appointed.
The state senator also hopes to devise supplemental legislation. Republicans who voted against the bill have promised to come to Youngstown to help work on a revised plan.
The Youngstown Plan was developed by an eight-member group that worked with Ohio Department of Education officials. The eight members are Thomas Humphries, president and CEO of the Youngstown-Warren Chamber; and Nick Santucci, the Chamber’s manager or education and workforce development; former Superintendent Connie Hathorn; Bishop George V. Murry of the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown; Youngstown State University President Jim Tressel; outgoing Eastern Gateway Community College President Laura Meeks; retired Judge Robert Douglas of Youngstown Municipal Court; and Herb Washington of HLW Fast Track Inc.
The law, which takes effect in about three months, dissolves the existing academic distress commission and replaces it with a new five-member commission.
That commission – three appointees by the state superintendent of public instruction, one by the mayor and a fifth, who must be a teacher, by the city school board.
The panel will appoint a CEO who will operate and manage the district and who has the authority to reopen collective bargaining agreements, reconstitute schools and fire administrators. The state will pay the CEO.
Larry Ellis, president of the Youngstown Education Association, the union representing city school teachers, would like a plan to fix the schools that includes wraparound services to meet students needs and those of their families.
It’s also important that whoever is appointed CEO has an education background, he said. The legislation doesn’t require that.
“This is education. We’re not rolling cars off an assembly line,” Ellis said. “We’re dealing with human beings here. You could have 20 students in a classroom with 20 different needs.”
Ellis worries about a system in which one person – the CEO – has so much authority.
He also takes issue with how the legislation was formulated without input from the local community.
“It was dirty, it was underhanded, and I think there’s an ulterior motive there,” Ellis said.
He believes it’s a plan to turn the city school system “into charter schools and give the politicians their kickbacks.”
Many of the charter schools in Youngstown have academic ratings worse than the city district, Ellis said.
There isn’t a level playing field between the public school districts and charter schools, he said.
Jackie Adair, a city school board member, hopes Schiavoni’s idea to modify the plan comes to fruition, and she’s willing to contribute.
Though she doesn’t like how the legislation was implemented, she acknowledges that something needs to change.
Adair points out that the governor said he wanted to see the schools improve.
“He said last September, ‘Send us a plan, and we’ll work with you,’” she said, “Nobody did that.”
Mayor John A. McNally, who also organized last week’s community meeting, plans to be his own appointee to the new commission.
He doesn’t think a CEO is going to solve the district’s problems. There is no one single silver bullet, McNally said.
He shares concerns of teachers, and though the legislation says the CEO will report to the commission, it doesn’t offer specifics.
“When the CEO fires administrators, does he have to notify the commission?” the mayor wonders. “Does he have to get approval from the commission to close a school? It doesn’t say.”
Tressel said the new law isn’t about Youngstown. The city school district, as the first district to see appointment of a distress commission, is further along in the process than the rest of the state. All of the state’s urban school districts are struggling, he said.
“The situation is not the best for our students,” Tressel said.
He believes the governor wants to see the school district succeed; that’s why Kasich is so interested.
The fact that the state is paying the CEO is evidence of that, Tressel said.