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Superintendent: YEC is not changing
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
The city school district’s interim superintendent plans no changes for Youngstown Early College.
Last week, a draft of a preschool expansion program was distributed to school board members.
The Youngstown Branch of the NAACP obtained a copy and, in an email to media and community members, questioned if Stephen Stohla, interim superintendent, was planning to make Youngstown Early College a program of East High School.
He’s not.
“That’s our shining star,” Stohla said Wednesday of YEC, which is housed in Fedor Hall at Youngstown State University. “I wouldn’t do anything to change that.”
He would like to increase the number of students who attend Rayen Early College Middle School, YEC’s feeder school.
“But I’m not changing a thing at Youngstown Early College,” Stohla said.
Brenda Kimble, school-board president, went even further.
“We told the community that we weren’t going to change any of the programs that we offer,” she said.
Under Stohla’s recommendation, sixth-through-eighth-graders who attend Discovery at Kirkmere would be consolidated with the Chaney Visual and Performing Arts and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics programs.
Kimble said school board members haven’t discussed the recommendations with Stohla.
No votes have been taken, she said.
She said she’s opposed to changing Kirkmere.
The draft lists the district’s schools and the changes. Changes proposed include returning Kirkmere to an elementary school and making it and the other six elementary schools preschool to fifth grade.
This year, those buildings house kindergarten through sixth grade.
The changes are to make room in the elementary buildings for preschool, for which the school district is receiving state money.
Under the proposed changes that must be approved by the school board, Rayen Early College Middle School would continue as a sixth- through eighth-grade school.
Volney Rogers on the city’s West Side and Woodrow Wilson on the South Side would return to being sixth- through eighth-grade schools.
Programs of Promise, an alternative school at Wilson, would move to the P. Ross Berry Middle School building on the East Side. It would share space with Mahoning County High School, which has been housed there for the past few years.
This year, Volney houses Discovery Transitions to Careers at Volney, a seventh- and eighth-grade school with a career-tech emphasis.
The draft also includes reviewing boundary lines for the seven elementary and two middle schools to re-distribute students more evenly across the district.