High emotion at Youngstown education summit

By Denise Dick | March 31, 2016 at 12:10a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

Emotions ran high at an education summit called to rally opposition to the Youngstown Plan.

About 100 people attended the summit Wednesday morning at Choffin Career and Technical Center where representatives from the city school board, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Ohio and national school board associations and the Community Leaders Coalition for Education said the plan is harmful to the city school system.

The plan allows a new city schools academic distress commission to appoint a state-paid chief executive officer to run the city schools. The plan is stuck in court in a dispute about one of the commission appointees.

Jack Filak, regional director of AFSCME Region 8, said people agree that something needed to be done to address the problems in the city schools which has seen poor academic performance and low student test scores for years. But the Youngstown Plan isn’t the solution, he said.

“It does not address the problem in the Youngstown City Schools which is primarily poverty,” he said.

That sentiment was echoed by many in the audience and on the panel of speakers.

George Freeman Sr., president of the Youngstown Branch of the NAACP, however, disagreed.

“Youngstown City Schools’ problem is not poverty,” he said.

He pointed to the federal dollars the district receives to educate children, claiming the district gets $16,000 per student. It’s more than surrounding school districts receive, Freeman said.

Still, students in the district are without textbooks and for the first semester of this school year, East High School didn’t have enough math teachers, he said.

Those comments drew the ire of some audience members.

Michelle Whittenberger, a third-grade teacher at William Holmes McGuffey Elementary School, said the money Freeman is talking about doesn’t take care of students’ problems. Some come to school hungry, tired or not being able to see because they need glasses.

Brenda Kimble, school board president, then came in to the audience and took the microphone away from Freeman.

“This is not the time,” she said. “That’s not what this meeting is about.”

Kimble said the local NAACP branch supports the Youngstown Plan, but the national organization does not.

“It’s not a plan for our school district,” Kimble reiterated. “It’s a takeover of our school district.”

“Poverty is not in the school building ...” she said. “Poverty is in the home.”

Ayasha Gordon, a senior at the Chaney Campus, said one problem in the school district is the ever-changing alignment of programs. It changes every year, she said.

“A CEO is going to treat me like a product,” Ayasha said. The community needs to support students, she said.

“Parents need to be supportive,” Ayasha said. “There’s no reason for a parent-teacher meeting to be empty.”

Thomas Gentzel, NSBA executive director, said state takeovers have happened all over the country without success.

“Too often is affects people of color and low-income communities,” he said.

Tammy Shingleton, who has five children in the city schools, has concerns about how the Youngstown Plan will affect her children.

“We have good teachers,” she said. “I support our teachers.”

There isn’t enough parental involvement though, Shingleton said.

“Our teachers need to have more support from our parents,” she said.

She relayed a story of visiting her child’s classroom and one student who was rude and wouldn’t listen to either Shingleton or the classroom teacher.

The teacher called the girl’s mother to talk about the problem.

“She said, ‘She’s on your time,’” Shingleton said.

Eric Germann, president of the Ohio School Boards Association, said that organization is opposed to the Youngstown Plan.

“It circumvents the concept of local boards that are locally elected,” he said. “Nobody knows your community better than you do.”

Lynette Miller, a member of the Community Leaders Coalition for Education, an outgrowth of the Community Mobilization Coalition agreed saying, “It is an awful plan.”