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Let the Youngstown school distress panel meet, state urges
YOUNGSTOWN
The state is asking the 7th District Court of Appeals to grant a stay of a Mahoning County Common Pleas judge’s order barring the city schools academic distress commission from meeting.
On behalf of the commission, Michael T. Fisher and James D. Miller, assistant Ohio attorneys general, argued that keeping in effect Judge Lou D’Apolito’s order barring the commission from meeting would impose a continuing hardship on the city’s school children.
“The stark reality is that the children of the Youngstown City School District cannot afford to wait any longer,” the state’s filing said.
“The children in the district have been trapped for years in a failing public school system,” they wrote.
“Without immediate intervention from this court, they have no hope that anything will be different in the coming school year,” they wrote in the Thursday filing.
Academic report cards show the district has been in academic watch or distress for the past 13 years, they wrote.
The appeals court judges have neither received, nor ruled on, the state’s motion for a stay, said Jeffrey Hendrickson, court of appeals administrator.
Four of the five commission members have been appointed and are not in dispute.
Only the fifth ADC seat, appointed by the school board president, which must be occupied by a teacher in the district, is in dispute.
That dispute originated when the Youngstown Education Association, the teachers union, challenged school board President Brenda Kimble’s appointment of her cousin, Carol Staten, who is a school principal, to the commission. It said Kimble should have appointed a teacher to the ADC position.
Judge D’Apolito barred Staten from joining the commission and barred the commission from meeting until Kimble appoints a teacher to it, but stayed the part of his order requiring Kimble to make a new selection pending the school board’s appeal.
Kimble maintains Staten fits Ohio’s legal description of a teacher.
The state filing, however, said Staten hasn’t been a classroom teacher since the late 1990s, was an administrator from then until her 2008 retirement and has been a utility principal since 2011.
House Bill 70, which created the ADC, “clearly requires the input of a classroom teacher into the decision-making of the academic distress commission,” said Ira Mirkin, a teachers union lawyer.
“This is the only place in that statute (HB 70), where a professional educator is provided input into improving the educational opportunities of the students of this district,” he added.
“We believe that it is wrong for the commission to want to move forward, when it is not yet fully comprised,” and when the only teacher input into its decisions will be absent, Mirkin said.
Kimble and her lawyer, Ted Roberts, could not be reached to comment.