By ED RUNYAN

Staff writer

YOUNGSTOWN — Two proponents of a proposed college-prep dormitory to serve at-risk students say they still do not have a location for the facility or the funding to build it.

They are hoping, however, that state officials will help with the funding after they get past the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With this COVID-19, I think all of the resources are going toward that right now,” said Mahoning County Juvenile Court Judge Theresa Dellick. “Because of the extent of the people (the virus) is touching, we’re not going to be able to get funding this year, I doubt it,” she said.

Dellick and the Rev. Kenneth Donaldson of Rising Star Baptist Church on Wardle Avenue are among the members of the Mahoning Valley Children’s Task Force that proposed last summer expanding Mahoning County High School on Bryn Mawr Avenue off McGuffey Road, which accepts students from Mahoning and Trumbull counties.

The project, which would cost about $12 million, would provide students with a home during the week while attending MVHS, creating what proponents say would be a pilot program for the state. The facility, which they also call a boarding school, would serve students from Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.

The idea met with resistance from some community leaders when it was announced last August. Some complained of being left out of the planning process and others voiced distrust of children being housed there.

‘SURVIVAL MODE’

Donaldson said the goal of the boarding school is to provide stability to the lives of children in “unstable environments. If they had some stability in their lives, I think they would be able to academically excel, as well as socially. You’ve got kids in survival mode all the time, and that’s not good.”

Donaldson grew up in Youngstown and graduated in 1986 from The Rayen School. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Middle Tennessee State University and later a master’s degree in theology. He has been pastor at Rising Star since he moved back to Youngstown 12 years ago.

Donaldson said his role as pastor and his volunteer work at East High School has educated him about the need for children to have more stability.

One girl, he said, lived with her boyfriend while attending high school, but she later had to leave there. “Every time she calls me, she’s in a different place,” he said. “Given a stable environment, she could be successful.”

There are plenty of boarding schools for children from upper-income homes, and they provide a good opportunity for students to succeed. He wants that same opportunity for children from lower-income homes.

“Typically in a boarding school, you have all of your needs met there, medical needs met there, all of the things that are necessary for the needs of young people. You don’t have to worry about the instability of drifting from place to place, of being fed well.”

He said even kids who are not “drifting” can be “so distracted by what is going on in their homes or the lack of what should be going on.”

NOT DETENTION

Donaldson said critics have falsely suggested the dormitory might resemble a detention center.

“We’re not looking at the kids who are in trouble behaviorally, although there are some kids who are acting out because of the instability on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Children will be eligible for the program if they have a “certain number of risk factors” in their life. The child’s guardian would have to agree to put them in the program. Children would not be on lockdown, he said.

He said statistics show there is a link between poverty and a child’s ability to finish high school.

“These kids are in survival mode. When they are out of survival mode, they can make better decisions,” he said.

DISTRUST

Brenda Kimble, president of the Youngstown Board of Education, said she distrusted the boarding school idea when it was proposed last year because the task force did not involve members of the community, such as city school board members, in formulating the idea.

“We had no idea about this” and still don’t know a lot about it, Kimble said. She questions the idea of having children spending Monday through Friday away from their families.

“What kids need most is their parent,” she said. “If you really want to help … then why don’t you start with a program for their parents first, to tell parents how to be parents.”

Kimble said a big issue for her is that the proponents of the dormitory have not been “open and honest” about it, including the work they did to investigate in more recent months the idea of using part of the former Northside Medical Center to house the school and dormitory.

Kimble said the residents of that neighborhood should have been consulted.

“She hasn’t been honest,” Kimble said of Judge Dellick, one of about eight task force members. “Even with last year (when the dormitory project was revealed), she never told anybody. This just came out of nowhere, just like House Bill 70,” Kimble said of the state law that took control away from Youngstown Board of Education members and gave it to a school district CEO.

JUDGE’S VIEW

Dellick said the Mahoning County High School, which is a public school that opened in 2008, has graduated 300 students who were previously expelled from other area schools.

The Cleveland.com web site reported earlier this year that Youngstown had the highest child poverty rate in Ohio, and Warren was third.

There are other public, dormitory schools in the United States, such as the SEED School in Washington, D.C. On its website, the school states 91 percent of its graduates have enrolled in college.

Dellick said the Ohio General Assembly would have to approve legislation to allow the creation of the boarding school. The legislation is on the “back burner” because of COVID-19, Dellick said. Earlier legislation for a boarding school in Cincinnati could be “redrafted to reflect our area,” she said.

“This is not a novel idea in the sense that there are boarding schools that are private,” the judge said. “The part that makes it novel is it’s a public boarding school.”

Dellick said she believes some of the opposition came from people who viewed the project as a “juvenile jail, and it’s not. Or they think it’s a school for people who should be in juvenile detention or juvenile jail.

“But that’s not what this is. When we talk about at-risk youth, at-risk means they are at risk of becoming delinquent, of becoming part of the juvenile justice system, of becoming homeless. These are students who don’t have access to their daily, basic needs.

“They may be living in abusive situations. They may be malnourished. They may be living from one place to another. People don’t realize there are homeless youth. They move from one house to another and sleep on the couch.”

As for the need for the dormitory, Dellick said: “We see it every day in the juvenile court. We see it every day at the Mahoning County High School.”

She said she is aware of “one student who rode the WRTA bus after school until midnight, slept at the bus station, got on the bus in the morning and came to school.”

She said poverty is not just a problem for Youngstown. “Go out to Lake Milton, North Jackson. They have poverty out there,” she said.

COVID CONCERNS

She is also concerned about the negative effects on children of not being in school for weeks or months because of COVID-19, saying it could lead to more cases of child neglect and abuse.

“What we’re having is families that were struggling before COVID, and many of those families were doing basic employment — waitressing, working at fast food, restaurants, bartending. Now we’re having those jobs close.”

“We have people dealing with their trauma. Then they have an increased trauma placed on them. We have children who are already living in abusive homes and they found their sanctuary by going to school at least,” she said.

“My concern is the trauma that is being placed on the adults and the children, the abusive situations the children are going to face is increasing. Trauma on children affects their growth, their mortality, their health, their social skills. I just see this is going to compound a lot of our daily problems.”

Dellick and Donaldson said they and other members of the Mahoning Valley Children’s Task Force recently looked at the former Northside Medical Center as a possible location for the MCHS and the boarding school, but Dellick said the task force has ruled it out. She said the facility has space for classrooms but not for dormitories.

Ralph Meacham, Mahoning County auditor and a member of the task force, said the facility is larger than what is needed for the boarding school, and it would be difficult to divide some sections off from the rest, partly because heating and other utilities are tied into the entire structure.

“There were some things that initially looked appealing (about Northside), but as we looked through it, it could offer some challenges,” agreed Donaldson.

“We are just looking at options. We don’t have a specific site,” he said.

erunyan@tribtoday.com