101525...R CHOFFIN 1...Youngstown...10-15-24...Choffin students Katherine Abrego Portillo, 19, left, and Javon Perry, 17, right, learn the procedure for loading & unloading a patient on a cot from an ambulance under the watchful eye of instructor Youngstown firefighter and teacher Lt. Dan Quayle..This is the Firefighting & EMT program under the Public Safety Academy dept. at the school...by R. Michael Semple

YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown City School District’s state report card was not good, but one element stands out in all the right ways.

Choffin Career and Technical Center, considered part of the district, shines by far the brightest among YCSD’s modest two stars.

The district’s report card shows one star each in achievement and early literacy, and Youngstown dropped from four stars to one in gap-closing since last year. The district earned two stars each for graduation and progress.

Career and Technical Planning Districts like Choffin, though — while considered part of their local school district — are graded somewhat separately and on different standards. And Choffin stands tall and proud.

The school, rated five stars overall, earned five stars in achievement, career and post-secondary readiness, and post-program outcomes, and four stars for its graduation rate.

While career and tech ed has for ages carried a lackluster reputation — seen as the last education option for underachieving and socially deviant students, Director Michael Saville said “different” is now the keyword in a good way.

“We do things differently in general, because career and technical education is, for the most part, apples and oranges to traditional academics,” he said. “Even looking at the report card, a CTPD report card is not the same and that’s intentional, because the measures are completely different.”

Saville, who hails from Rockford, Illinois, has been in Ohio for nine years as a career and tech ed administrator. He spent the first two years at Mahoning County Career and Technical Center, then came to Choffin when YCSD was placed under state control by House Bill 70, to transform the school.

“And we were able to do that; we were able to do a lot here and restructure the way things were going,” he said.

Now Choffin tops the career and tech education districts of Ohio’s biggest cities. State reports showed Columbus with 4.5 stars, Akron and Dayton with four stars, Canton, Cincinnati and Toledo with 3.5 stars, and Cleveland with two stars.

Last year, 97.7% of Choffin students passed the state’s WebXam Pathway — the end-of-course online exams for career and tech ed students. Choffin’s graduation rate is 94.5%, and 96.2% of those graduates were placed in employment, post-secondary education, the military or entrepreneurship positions. Students all are pursuing up to 12 credits worth of industry-recognized credentials and 99.43% of those students — all but one — achieved that mark.

Saville said it shows exactly what Choffin – and YCSD – students really are capable of.

“The idea was always ‘if they’re not college material, send them to career and tech ed, but I would say our career and college readiness is what we provide students,” he said. “Do students take advantage of college all the time? We need to grow on that, and that’s something I’ve been pushing for. But we try to provide everything for them to be able to take advantage of that.”

ERASING THE STIGMA

Saville said the success is all about buy-in — from the students, the teachers and the state.

“Our state highly supports career and tech education, especially with this governor,” he said.

“The new way of doing business in Ohio with the career and tech ed model has really transformed the perception of it, and that’s a statewide thing — they’ve done amazing things with changing the vision of it, the assumption of it.”

Career tech is expensive, Saville said, but it’s doable with the money the state provides.

“This place is filled to the gills with so much high-end equipment, because there’s so much money coming in from the state and a good director will focus on those things,” he said.

He said the equipment is aligned with industry standards. and it provides a degree of fun — for the administrator, the teachers and the students.

“The money you spend on high-end equipment, to make a lab exciting and fun – that’s a wow factor,” he said. “When students come in and see that and it’s different from what their parents told them, now we have a shot with them.”

Saville said many students may still see career and technical education as the realm of losers and burnouts — its traditional notoriety — but the bright atmosphere of the building and the exciting career possibilities from Choffin’s programming are bringing more students in the door, and they’re staying.

“The ones that are a success coming here, they might not see the value right off the bat, but when they see programs like public safety and know that they can leave with Fire 1 and 2 certification and then go into EMT training and be certified as an EMT all in a two-year period, that draws students that may not normally come,” he said. “They might not want anything to do with other programming, but they know they want to do that.”

Choffin is a half-day program and offers little or no standard academic programming. But that does not mean students aren’t learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. Saville explained that those simply are not the standards the school is held to. Instead, the academics are enmeshed in the standards for career competencies and certification in a student’s chosen field.

For example, culinary arts students have to deal with measurements, welding students with angles. Early childhood education involves concepts of time and development, and students in the U-Med Academy get a heavy dose of the sciences, including human growth and development, anatomy and physiology.

“If you told them they’re going to learn about geometry, they may roll their eyes, but when they know they have to insert that stick in at a perfect angle to get the desired result from their welding application, it becomes real, and now they’re interested in understanding it,” Saville said. “Because if they don’t have that angle, they’re not going to get the weld they need.”

But that does not absolve students of their regular education responsibilities. Without passing their general education requirements at their home school, they cannot enroll or remain in Choffin’s programs.

The school does provide online credit recovery for students struggling with their basic academic requirements and offers remedial teaching and support to help them pass those tests.

Choffin also offers a robust adult education program on the third floor, and has begun to align it with the undergraduate programs. For example, U-Med graduates can go on to the adult education 10-month program and earn certification in nursing or surgical technology, among others.

“It’s a way to keep students in our building for another 10 months after graduation and then they’re off making a decent living,” Saville said.

Like many of its students, by and large, traditional teachers are not where Choffin invests either.

“Our teachers are from industry; they’re not traditional educators from an academic standpoint.

These are iron workers and firefighters,” he said. “We have to transform them to understand pedagogy and how kids learn, and it’s probably a three-year process.”

Obtaining teaching credentials through Kent State University, Saville said, Choffin’s instructors learn how to assess what kids know when they come in, what they need to learn, and how well they’ve learned it by the time they leave.

“So I know we’re showing growth. I know each program measures that,” he said.

Yet, Choffin’s high state test scores were not always that way, because both the students and teachers had to learn what the state wanted.

“This number [97.7% passage rate] wasn’t even close to that. We grew into this score. We were usually sitting at about 50-60 percent,” Saville said. “What we did was restructure our curriculum to make sure everything we teach is aligned to the standard, because those tests are very structured and pointed at those standards.”

But Saville said the teachers were not failing to teach students what they needed for practical application.

“We were teaching everything and just not focusing on the test standards,” he said. “Some of the tests are not the best. We don’t believe they’re current enough to reflect what we really do within our industries. They revamp them every five years and they’re getting better but some of them are kind of antiquated.”

The tests are designed by Ohio State University’s Center for Education and Training for Employment.

Now, Saville said, the teachers have found a good balance to show students practical application skills and still teach what the tests demand.

He said the state also recently started allowing seniors to retake their exams after 30 days, which helps the school’s test scores.

Saville said he knows Choffin still has room for improvement.

For example, under the career and post-secondary readiness category, the school’s work-based learning score is a lowly 2.6 percent.

“It is a struggle for us. It’s not measured on the report card this year but will be next year, so we’re rallying to get our numbers up for that,” Saville said.

He also would like to see, at some point, Choffin take on more of an academy model where career and technical education is combined with more traditional classes. The school does not have the space for it, but Saville hopes they can find a way.

He has seen success at his former employer, MCCTC.

“I see the value of the fusion of academics, but we just don’t have that here. Our building is not big enough,” he said. “So I think we’re at a disadvantage with the fusion part of an academy model. Is that something we could grow to? It’s possible, but we need more space.”