Sunday, March 17, 2019
By partnering with several agencies and organizations, we at the Youngstown City School District have been able provide our students with services they need beyond the classroom.
Many of these are services that were not in place in YCSD before the district became the first one in Ohio to come under the new HB 70, also called the Youngstown Plan. That legislation created a new academic distress commission that appointed me the district’s first chief executive officer.
Critics of the law point to the fact that it was originally crafted to create community learning centers that provide wrap-around services to students in need. Those same critics espouse the need for wrap-around services to children to improve young people’s opportunities to succeed academically.
Strategic plan
The YCSD is already doing much of that. Goal II of the district’s three-year strategic plan for improvement is “Supporting the Whole Child.” The plan was developed through input I gathered in about 100 meetings with individuals, families, employees, clergy, community leaders and organizations shortly after I arrived in Youngstown.
In some of those meetings with the heads of non-profit and community organizations, I learned that attempts by those agencies to provide services to our families through our schools had been abandoned largely because of the intransigence of the local school board.
By working with those agencies, individuals and organizations, we quickly put wrap-around services in place to meet the needs of more of our students – needs that aren’t about reading, writing or test scores. It’s not an overstatement though, to say that by having those services, our students are better positioned to perform better academically as well as in other areas of their lives.
Eye exams, glasses
Through a collaboration among YCSD, the United Way of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley, the Essilor Vision Foundation, the Sight for All United Foundation, Doctors for Sight and several other organizations and agencies, for example, more than 2,000 city school children got vision screenings last year.
Of those, 281 got full vision examinations and 180 of them got two pairs of eyeglasses, one for home and one for school.
All of those exams and eyeglass fittings happened at school. The program continues in YCSD schools this school year.
Through a partnership with the United Way of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley and the Central YMCA of Youngstown, nearly 400 YCSD second graders both this year and last, got free swim lessons at the Central Y. Many of these children likely wouldn’t be able to learn to swim otherwise, and that can pose safety risks.
The Mercy Health Dental Van is visiting all of our elementary schools this year and performing dental screenings for our students.
Collaborations with outside agencies also enabled YCSD to offer after-school programming in each of our nine pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade buildings and at Rayen Early College Middle School. YCSD’s after-school provides a combination of instruction and enrichment for our kindergarten through eighth-grade students. It runs for 2 Ω hours, five days per week.
Enrichment opportunities
Increasing instruction time for our students focuses on academics while enrichment opportunities offered by our partner organizations expose students to fun and educational events and activities. Partner organizations in our after-school program include City Kids Care, the United Way and Finer Things Academy.
Keeping those students after school also means we feed them dinner and snacks. YCSD feeds those students, as well as those involved in our athletic programs, breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack on school days. Our food service department dishes out literally tens of thousands of student meals every day.
Additionally, several of our school buildings, through partnerships they’ve formed with outside agencies, offer food pantries for students and their families.
Those include Taft and Harding elementary schools which work with Second Harvest Food Bank and Williamson Elementary which has a partnership with St. John’s Episcopal and First Presbyterian churches. Volney Rogers’ pantry is sponsored by Imani Community Programming , The DeBartolo Corporation and Christ Centered Church and East High School’s food pantry works with Gleaners Food Bank.
We also assigned social workers who are employed by YCSD to work in our schools, with our students to address still more needs of our children and/or their families. Having a social worker at school fosters relationships with students. That’s one more trusted adult students may confide in if they need to talk to or report problems.
At YCSD, we understand that many of our students deal with problems at home that many adults can’t imagine. We also understand that those home issues make it challenging for those children to focus on school. We’re tackling those issues as much as we can through partnerships. And we’re not done. We continue to implement even more strategies to address students’ non-academic struggles.
Krish Mohip is chief executive officer of the Youngstown City School District.