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Youngstown school officials seeking options for all-day preschool
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
After a previous realignment plan fell flat, the city schools interim superintendent has another idea to accommodate all-day preschool.
“I think I can move some of the sixth-graders out [of elementary schools] and move them in Chaney and Volney,” Stephen Stohla said.
The district’s six elementary schools were constructed for kindergarten through fourth grade but house kindergarten through sixth.
Stohla wants to move the district from half-day to all-day preschool. To do that, sixth grade will have to move out.
A half-day session in the morning and a second in the afternoon use the same classroom. Expanding it to all-day requires two classrooms.
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.
That leaves Williamson and Martin Luther King where some shift might be needed.
Stohla came up with this alternative after school board members didn’t respond to his March recommendation for moving sixth-graders out of all of the elementary buildings to accommodate all-day preschool. The school board has never publicly discussed the recommendation.
Under Stohla’s draft program, Harding, Paul C. Bunn, Williamson, Martin Luther King Jr., William Holmes McGuffey and Taft Elementary schools were to become preschool-to-fifth-grade schools.
Kirkmere, which houses a Discovery program that exposes third-through-eighth-graders to art, music, science and Spanish, also would become a preschool-to-fifth-grade school.
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.
Stohla said he’s waiting for a report from the Ohio Department of Education’s Office for Exceptional Children to learn its recommendations. That’s expected in mid-June.
That review was prompted by the Youngstown branch of the NAACP. The organization’s leaders expressed concerns about the district’s concentration of special education students in a few schools, and few in other schools.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea to find out in mid-June,” Stohla said. “Then the CEO would have a whole year to plan for all of this.”
Under the Youngstown Plan, legislation approved last summer by both houses of the state Legislature and signed by Gov. John Kasich, a new academic distress commission will appoint a school district chief executive officer to manage and operate the school district.
The new commission began meeting last month and a CEO search is underway.
Although the board didn’t vote on the superintendent’s recommendation, school board President Brenda Kimble told The Vindicator in late March that she wasn’t in favor of changing any of the programs offered in the city schools.
She didn’t return phone calls from the newspaper Tuesday.