- Quite the mixed bag of stuff today, including two staple topics of Gadfly Bites. First up: Drama in Youngstown. Community activist Jimma McWilson has been hammering on the inadequacies of Youngstown City Schools for many many years. So it seemed par for the course at first to see him on TV news this week decrying poor performance and calling on leaders to do better on behalf of students. Again. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 6/27/23) However, having been paying attention to this topic for many years myself, it seemed to me that McWilson may have been grinding some new and specific axe here, especially as he called out the mayor’s office and city council along with school district leaders. Sure enough, it seems I missed a dust up from last week where McWilson’s community support organization was denied funding by the city—from a federal Covid-relief grant—for a tutoring program to specifically help boost the academic achievement of what he terms “under-educated former students” of Youngstown City Schools “who are now in the city without the educational tools to be economically viable and qualified to acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities to legally engage in meaningful work to sustain themselves and their families.” The funding was withheld retroactively, it seems, following approval of the program back in December. More to come on all of this, I reckon. (WKBN-TV, Youngstown, 6/20/23)
- We’ve also been following this Commercial Drivers License (CDL) training facility boondoggle in Toledo City Schools for a good while now here in the Bites. The purported benefits for the district still ring false for me—particularly the projected budget savings and the “solving bus driver shortages” benefits—even as ground is (finally) broken after a good long bureaucratic and political slog. Should this all actually work as predicted and a number of students do indeed graduate from high school already having earned their CDL, won’t they all just become long haul truckers and start making bank the day after graduation, rather than languishing in a five-hours-a-day-with-a-hole-in-the-middle district bus driver job the following fall? Not to mention the fact that no one else besides me seems to be reckoning on the transformational transportation changes hopefully coming to every school in Ohio thanks to the state budget. It’s like they don’t even pay attention to the important stuff. (Toledo Blade, 6/27/23)
- Finally today, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb appointed two new members and reappointed three existing members of the board of Cleveland Metropolitan School District. They and their continuing cohorts on the board will get to work starting next week. (Signal Cleveland, 6/27/23)
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