Youngstown School's Superintendent said during Tuesday's school board meeting that the school year will not have to be extended after the YEA teacher's strike kept students out of the classroom for close to a month.

The school board met for the first time since an agreement was reached with YEA on September 16.

Superintendent Jeremy Batchelor explained the district is not below the state's required days of school because the online learning did in fact count as school days.

"We are still over the number of instructional hours that are required from the state," Batchelor said.

There is a possibility the school year may have extended based on the number of snow days the district could see this winter.

The school board approved changing the district's grading period and revised academic calendar and is reviewing certain pacing guides teachers should follow to get all of the required lessons in.

"As long as teachers stay within the pacing guides and we adjust just a bit, we should be okay," Batchelor said. 

"We've been around to the buildings and working with principals and teachers," Batchelor explained to 21 News on Tuesday. "Things seem to be going really well to start the in-person learning. We don't really anticipate anything we don't already know. We have a lot of work to do and we'll stay the course and make sure we hit the ground running."

At Tuesday's school board meeting, certain testing benchmarks were reviewed, showing growth within several programs in the district. The report card released by the Ohio Department of Education shows YCSD ranked the lowest out of the surrounding districts. 

"Compared to other schools in the Mahoning Valley, we weren't where we wanted to be," Batchelor said. "But I've said many times, we aren't where we want to be but we sure aren't where we used to be. We've made a lot of improvements in the district. If you look at the progress in the gap closings, we've made tremendous grades. We were on par with every other urban school district in the state."

This comes as the official 'first day' of school was changed to September 18 on the district's academic calendar. 

Batchelor said it feels "great" to have students back in the classroom.

"I got into this to help students," he said. "It's great to be able to walk through buildings and hear kids laughing. That's what we're here for and it's been great going building to building to see that."

According to the district's website, the last day of school will be on May 22, 2024.