Status of all-day preschool unknown

By Denise Dick

denise_dick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

The status of all-day preschool in the city schools remains in limbo.

“We can only have it in buildings we can fit them in,” said Stephen Stohla, interim superintendent. “We can’t do it unless we have room.”

The district has been offering half-day preschool, but the state offered funding to expand it to an all-day preschool. The problem is space.

Elementary buildings were constructed for kindergarten through fourth grade, but house preschool to sixth.

Stohla wanted to move the sixth-graders out.

A few months ago, he recommended a realignment of grades to the school board. That realignment included taking sixth-graders out of the district’s six elementary schools and putting them into the Volney Rogers and Woodrow Wilson school buildings.

The district’s seventh-and eighth-graders also would be moved to those buildings.

The school board, however, didn’t act on the recommendation and the board president told The Vindicator she wasn’t in favor of any change that would affect programs.

Stohla’s plan also involved changing Kirkmere, now a Discovery school for third through eighth-graders exposing them to music, art, engineering and languages to a preschool-through-fifth-grade school.

Three elementary schools – William Holmes McGuffey, Taft and Paul C. Bunn – may have enough room to expand preschool without moving older students out. Harding, which only has one sixth-grade class, is another possibility, Stohla has said.

That would leave Williamson and Martin Luther King.

It’s likely something the new chief executive officer will deal with. This week, the Youngstown City School District Academic Distress Commission selected Krish Mohip, a Chicago Public Schools administrator, to be the district’s first CEO.

He’ll be introduced to the community at a 2 p.m. Tuesday commission meeting at Choffin Career and Technical Center.

Although his official start date is being negotiated in his contract, Mohip is expected to be in town by late this month.

Stohla, who was appointed interim superintendent last July, says both the school board and the academic commission have asked him to remain in the district during the transition to the CEO.

Stohla’s original contract was for six months and it was extended to June 30.

It may be a good idea to gather parents’ input on the preschool expansion, the interim superintendent said.

“We may want to consider interaction with the community to see what some of the parents feel,” Stohla said.