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Austintown residents object to renewing supt. contract
AUSTINTOWN
Austintown School District parents and staff expressed extreme concern at the school board meeting Wednesday night about renewing the superintendent’s contract.
Superintendent Vince Colaluca’s contract will be up for renewal for an additional three years at an upcoming meeting – it has not yet been determined if it will be discussed at the next meeting, Oct. 11.
During the public-speaking portion of the meeting, multiple speakers urged board members to pay attention to their discontent with the way the school is being run.
“Everybody knows I am a no-vote on the superintendent’s contract,” said board member Harold Porter. “Seven years is enough.”
Porter said the schools have gone downhill during Colaluca’s tenure, and serious changes need to be made. One of those is open enrollment.
“We have students and teachers leaving our district who are our voters,” he said. “Open-enrollment parents are not, and that’s the problem.”
Porter said he would rather see people in power who live in the township and who are affected by the decisions the school board makes.
Parent Mandy Richmond agreed and said she thinks it’s worth questioning whether open enrollment is worth what’s happening to Austintown schools.
“We need some tabs on this, some accountability for the students these families are bringing into our district,” Richmond said.
Wally Ford, Fitch High School head baseball coach for 30 years, spoke about being shut out from a district he once considered family.
Ford retired from teaching due to health issues and reapplied to continue coaching.
After the summer months passed, Ford said he discovered he was no longer head baseball coach through a tweet his daughter saw from Dana Balash, 21 WFMJ-TV sports director, congratulating Joe Parish on the new position.
“The athletic director [Lewis VanHoose] did not have the guts to talk to me,” Ford said. “It had to be either incredible cowardice or just complete indifference, and to this day, I have not heard from anyone of my Falcon family that I no longer have a job.”
Ford’s sister, Dorothy Zitello, said the treatment of her brother as a long-time employee of Austintown schools was “disgraceful and shameful.”
Richmond said another shame that has fallen on Austintown schools is the loss of teachers – 20 chose to no longer work at Fitch over the past year.
“Change is inevitable,” Ford conceded. “Things are going to change; I just feel that the board better look a little more closely into what is changing and who’s causing the changes or things are going to change so much around here that pretty soon, you won’t even recognize it.”