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School changes begin 90 days after governor’s signature
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
The “Youngstown Plan,” a restructuring of city school governance, begins to kick in 90 days after it’s signed by Gov. John Kasich.
The plan, approved this week by the state Legislature, abolishes the Youngstown City School District Academic Distress Commission and establishes a new five- member panel in its place.
State Rep. Sean O’Brien of Bazetta, D-63rd, said it’s not a plan exclusively for Youngstown. It’s intended as an overhaul to the academic distress commission legislation. Right now, though, only two districts have such a commission: Youngstown and Lorain.
“We still have to come up with a Youngstown Plan,” he said. “We’re going to still get together and work on it.”
O’Brien said Kasich and others in Columbus have been concerned about Youngstown schools and want to help.
“We have a commitment from Columbus – the governor, members of the Senate and the House – to work on helping Youngstown,” he said.
Three of the five members will be appointed by the state superintendent of public instruction, one member will be selected by the mayor, and the fifth member must be a city schools teacher appointed by the school board president.
Appointments to the new commission will be made within 30 days after district notification. Within 60 days after the state superintendent designates a commission chairman or chairwoman from his appointees, the commission will appoint a school district chief executive officer to run the district.
Stephen Stohla, interim city schools superintendent beginning July 1, said he’ll do what he can to advance student achievement during his brief tenure and ease the transition to the appointed CEO.
Though the state’s urban districts are struggling, Youngstown is starting to improve, he said.
“I think the state is well-intentioned, and it’s a statewide problem,” Stohla said.
Brenda Kimble, school board president, has said she wants to explore options to stop the plan.
other options?
What are those options?
“I think that’s an open question at this point,” said Damon Asbury, director of legislative services at the Ohio School Boards Association. “Since it was legislative action, perhaps the best action is to go through legislative avenues, to modify legislation as it was passed.”
There was no opportunity for discussion about the bill, he said.
Though a handful of people knew about the proposal, city school board members weren’t notified nor was the OSBA, Asbury said.
“To my mind there should have been open discussion within the broader community including the school board,” he said.
That’s how the Cleveland Plan came about. It was a local effort and initiative.
In Cleveland, voters had the opportunity to choose between an appointed and an elected board, said Richard Lewis, OSBA executive director.
“They had the opportunity to debate the issue as opposed to it being done by special interests and a top-down approach,” Lewis said.
Asbury said elected school boards are the most effective vehicle for school districts.
Thomas Humphries, president and CEO of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber; Jim Tressel, Youngstown State University president; and Bishop George V. Murry of the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown spoke in support of the legislation Wednesday. Connie Hathorn, outgoing Youngstown schools superintendent, submitted written testimony in support.
how it started
Humphries said a group of 10 people began meeting last fall to try to devise a plan to help the city schools. He declined to identify those people.
He said he initiated that effort.
The chamber has been “looking at school performance for well over a decade,” Humphries said.
Schools in all of Ohio’s metropolitan areas have F’s on the state report card, he said.
“They have 112,000 students in those eight school districts, and they’re all F’s,” the chamber president said. “That’s 112,000 students that are less prepared for work than the other school districts, and something needs to be done about it.”
Larry Ellis, president of the Youngstown Education Association, the teachers’ union, is concerned about the loss of local control.
“It’s the people in Youngstown that want to see the schools succeed,” he said. “They have a vested interest in seeing them succeed. It worries me with Columbus sending people in, especially when we’ve had an academic distress commission for several years and we’ve not had much success.”
criticism
Some of the criticism of the new law is that three of the commission’s appointees will be made by the state superintendent and only two by local officials. “That’s not intended to imply that three people from Columbus are coming here,” Humphries said. “It’s not been decided who the three appointments from the state superintendent will be.”
Tressel is one of the 10 people who worked with Humphries.
“Since I came here, the state folks wanted to talk about how they could help raise the level of excellence,” he said.
The first thing to come out of those meetings was Project PASS, Tressel said.
Project PASS – Penguin Assistants for Student Success – is a program that matches YSU students with city school second-graders for tutoring. The aim is to increase the number of students who pass the third-grade reading tests.
YSU got a $450,000 Ohio Department of Education grant for the program. Each YSU student involved receives money if the student he or she tutors passes the test or shows improvement.
“In the time that I’ve been here, I’ve visited some of the elementary schools, Rayen Early College Middle School, Chaney VPA and STEM and East, and there are some great things going on,” Tressel said.
He said the new law is an attempt to improve the old law regarding establishment of academic distress commissions and remedy what didn’t work.
“It’s not just about Youngstown,” Tressel said. “They’re concerned about the success of the schools in all of the metro cities here in Ohio. Youngstown is just the first put into this process.”