Youngstown's interim superintendent preparing grade alignment recommendation
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
The city schools interim superintendent expects to present a plan on school alignment to board of education members at next week’s meeting.
The district is implementing all-day preschool next school year with funding from the Ohio Department of Education.
The city schools have offered half-day preschool for several years.
“I asked the preschool teachers to call up parents and ask whether they wanted preschool at the school where they are, or at a central location,” said Stephen Stohla, interim superintendent.
About 94 percent of those who responded wanted their children to remain at the same school building, he said.
That means upper grades will have to move out of the elementary schools, which house kindergarten through sixth grade.
Stohla declined in a Thursday interview on Vindy Talk Radio to divulge what the plan is, but he acknowledged that one option is to house some older students in the old P. Ross Berry Middle School building on the East Side.
Mahoning County High School is housed in that building, and the county educational service center leases it from the city school district. Mahoning County High School is an alternative school for students who have dropped out of school or who otherwise haven’t succeeded in their traditional home schools.
Most attendees come from the city schools.
“It’s a plan by people who are smarter than I am, who know more about the district than I do,” Stohla said.
The school board meets at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the administration building on West Wood Street.
For the past several years, the district has changed grade alignment in school buildings.
It used to have three middle-school buildings: Berry, Volney Rogers on the West Side and Woodrow Wilson on the South Side.
That changed for the 2011-12 school year under the leadership of former Superintendent Connie Hathorn, who changed Chaney, formerly a grades-nine-through-12 building to a visual and performing arts and science, technology, engineering and mathematics school for students in sixth through 12th grades.
East High School became a school for 10th- through 12th-graders, Berry became an eighth- and ninth-grade academy and Wilson and Volney became academies for sixth- and seventh-graders.
It changed again for the 2013-14 school year with Berry and Volney closing and Wilson becoming the district’s alternative school.
Kirkmere, which had been an elementary school, became Discovery at Kirkmere, offering third- through eighth-graders exposure to music, art, technology, engineering and Spanish.
Other changes in the past few years include a program for students repeating ninth grade housed inside Choffin Career and Technical Center, adding a second Discovery program then combining them.