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City schools await state review
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
City school district officials expect the latest state review of district operations to be released this spring.
In late January, a team of six reviewers contracted through the Ohio Department of Education spent a week in the district.
“It looked at holistic systems for best practices based on the standards and indicators specified,” Toby Lichtle, an ODE spokesman, wrote in an email.
When it’s released, it will be the fourth such report for the troubled school district.
The reviews began in 2014.
They cover six areas: leadership, governance and communications; curriculum and assessment; assessment and effective use of data; human resources and professional development; student supports; and fiscal management.
The reviewers met and spoke with school board members, administrators and community members to gather input.
Stephen Stohla, interim superintendent, said the reviewers with whom he met listed many strengths.
“They were telling us how well Youngstown was improving,” he said. “I was not expecting that. They were very upbeat about the third-grade literacy and the cooperation and I think collaboration at the elementary level.”
On state report-card data released last month, Youngstown schools earned a C for third-grade literacy with 64.2 percent. The district narrowly missed a B, which starts at 64.9 percent.
The score showed a significant increase from the previous year’s 48 percent.
It also was the highest score among Ohio’s eight urban school districts. All of the others — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo — all earned D’s or F’s. The urban district with the score closest to Youngstown’s is Cincinnati with a “D” at 47 percent, more than 17 percentage points below Youngstown’s score.
Youngstown is the smallest district among the eight.
A few years ago, the district implemented the Literacy Collaborative, a reading program, to improve students’ reading scores.
Stohla said the reviewers also pointed to community partnerships, particularly the one with Youngstown State University students, as a district strength.
Others include aligning curriculum across the district so that all students in a grade level cover the same areas at the same time, regular meetings of teacher-based teams and positive student support team, the interim superintendent said.
“One of their concerns is that rigorous instruction is not in all classrooms,” Stohla said.
The previous reports for the district listed recommendations for improvement across all six areas.
But Lichtle said reviewers for the pending report didn’t look at past recommendations. Recommendations aren’t binding.
“The goal is to assist the academic distress commission in writing an academic recovery plan,” the spokesman said in the email.
The district, however, doesn’t have an academic distress commission.
The Youngstown Plan, legislation passed last summer, calls for a new academic distress commission to appoint a state-paid chief executive officer to manage and operate the schools. That CEO will have broad authority.
That process has been stalled over one of the appointees.
The law calls for three of the commission members to be appointed by the state superintendent, one by the mayor and the fifth, a teacher, by the school board president.
Brenda Kimble, school board president, appointed a substitute administrator, who has since been appointed to a principal’s job.
The teachers’ union filed a lawsuit, contending that the appointment should have gone to an active classroom teacher, and a magistrate and Judge Lou A. D’Apolito of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court agreed.
Kimble, however, appealed, and the case is still pending. Judge D’Apolito ruled that the commission cannot meet until it has all five members.