Jul 9 2025
Board Meeting

▼Full Transcript Below

1. Public Comment
   ⏯ 0:30:25 - 0:40:10

   • • Morgan Dukes (McKean staff member & alumni): Urged the board to vote against the committee’s Innovation Center proposal; risk of losing staff and disrupting student services.

     • Val Gould (McKean Alumni & AZ Committee member): Urged the board to vote against the committee’s Innovation Center proposal; District sidelined AZ Committee's focus on attendance zones to pursue the Innovation Center.

     • Jenny Howard (parent): Asks how this plan dismantles inequities; Calls for equal access to rigorous courses, arts, CTE, and extracurriculars at all high schools.

2. Presentation to the Board and Discussion
   ⏯ 1:36:28 - 2:44:59

   • • Mark Pruitt, Director of Secondary Education and committee members presented the work of the Secondary Attendance Zone Enrollment and Programming Committee to the Board, covering the committee’s findings, analysis, stakeholder engagement, and final recommendations for the high school and middle school attendance zones and programming.

3. Board Action Items - Attendance Zone Committee Recommendation

     ⏯ 2:53:25 - 2:56:37

• • • Superintendent Dorrell Green recommended that the Red Clay School Board approve the recommendation of the Secondary Attendance Zone Enrollment and Programming Committee as submitted.

⏯ 0:30:25 - 0:40:10 Click to hear all comments or Click a name below to hear individuals.

⏯ Morgan Dukes: Hi my name is Morgan Dukes and I am speaking about the proposal put forth by the secondary attendance zone and programming committee. I'm not only a McKean staff member but also a McKean High School alumni. VoTech high schools used to be shared time facilities. Students were bussed from their high school to a VoTech facility for vocational education. When enrollment decreased, state and local officials, including the superintendent, were interviewed and several issues were noted, including a communication and integration between schools, funding, transportation, and extracurricular activities. All things that were also brought up by community members as potential problems at the committee's public meeting in June. In the end, VoTech schools became full-time. The McKean student body is the largest student body of all Red Clay high schools. And that's not even including the Meadowwood students that are also serviced within the walls of McKean. Redistributing these students and our staff will cause large disruptions to not only McKean students and families, but the larger Red Clay community and could lead to a loss of skilled teachers at a time when they're difficult to find. If Red Clay were to move forward with the proposed innovation center, we would only have 139 available seats left at the high school level. If we gain any additional students as a result of redistricting, we would be severely limited in space. And based on McKean's capacity, only 57% of Red Clay's current non-charter high school students would be able to attend the innovation center. This does not seem equitable. McKean currently serves large populations of marginalized groups, including special education students, MLL students, and low-income students. With some of these groups overlapping, I don't see them represented within this proposal. Redistributing these students to other high schools would disrupt the specialized support services and programming that these students receive and could lead to detrimental outcomes. Additionally, these students are being asked to step into an entirely new environment with new adults, students, and expectations, which presents a new set of challenges for them to overcome and could be seen as obstacles for them to even join a CTE pathway at the innovation center. Not only that, but the special ed services, supports, and policies that are in place and normalized within one high school may not be recognized or supported by an innovation center, thus risking legal repercussions. Instead, career pathway options should be spread across the high schools with each school offering some common pathways while other pathways are only offered at certain high schools. Currently, there are several career pathways that students are not being offered in Red Clay that they would be interested in. By creating new pathway options across the high school, students could then choice to the school with the pathway that they want. Yes, this is costly, but creating an innovation center with new pathways and paying for transportation would be costly, too. Based on the operations impact shared by Mr. Ammann at one of the committee meetings, this proposal would have one of the greatest impacts to our operations across multiple levels. Therefore, I implore the board to vote against the committee's proposal and make it a great day to be a Highlander. Thank you.  

⏯ Val Gould: Good evening everyone. I am Val Gould. As many of you already know, I am a member of the Attendance Zone committee. I am also a former Red Clay teacher and will be about to rejoin the district as music teacher at Baltz. I want to share a few thoughts on the proposals that you'll be voting on tonight, courtesy of the Attendance Zone committee. Our charge as committee members was to work toward equitable outcomes for all of our students. All of our students, not just some. However, it became evident very early on that some of the district administration had other ideas in mind and that idea was an innovation center. As a result, we spent very little time on addressing attendance zone concerns such as the attendance zone issues at Warner and some of the other schools in our district that are affected by poorly designed attendance zone feeder patterns. This district through its former board and administration, not likely anyone in this room, have created this situation of underenrollment at AI and increasingly neglected traditional high schools here in the district through its support of charters and magnet schools which have created or I should say recreated a form of school segregation where traditional high schools like McKean, Dickinson, and AI have become all but afterthoughts. I urge this board to reject the innovation center proposal. Instead of creating yet another wheel in a district already full of wheels that have run over the idea of equity, our time and resources should be spent creating a level playing field on which all of our students and staff will find pride, success, and joy in their education. The disrespect of those who need our support the most has gone on way too long. It is time for this board to start making things right again. Please vote no on the innovation center. Thank you.

⏯ Jenny Howard: My name is Jenny Howard. I'm a mother of four and a former Red Clay teacher. I'm here tonight to talk about the proposal to restructure Red Clay's high schools. The plan responds to declining enrollment without addressing why enrollment declined in the first place. It's because our system has not served all students equitably, especially those from our most marginalized communities. Red Clay's own data shows that access to college level courses, extracurriculars, and enrichment is not equally distributed. Schools like Conrad and CAB offer twice as many AP and dual enrollment courses at traditional high schools like McKean, Dickinson, and AI. These gaps are not due to student interest or ability. They're the result of policies that privilege some students and exclude others. These aren't just program differences. They are life-altering disparities. A student who earns a year's worth of college credit

in high school can save their family 10 to $25,000. That's not just savings. It's generational opportunity. And when those options are concentrated in selective schools, we are protecting pathways for privilege. Meanwhile, students in underresourced schools get less fewer reg they get fewer rigorous courses, fewer clubs, fewer sports, fewer staff, and fewer chances to shine. That's not accidental. It's the predictable outcome of a system that siphons students and resources into exclusive programs. This proposal doesn't reverse that. It codifies it. By consolidating schools without fixing the inequities that caused the decline, we risk cementing a two-tiered system. One for students with access and advocacy and another for students told to make do. And let's be honest, those students are overwhelmingly from communities already underserved. So, I asked the board, how will this plan dismantle rather than reinforce inequities that harm our most vulnerable students? Will every high school, not just magnets, be guaranteed full and equal access to AP, dual enrollment, the arts, CTE, and extracurriculars? And will the district commit to an annual equity audit to make sure we're not tracking students by race, income, or neighborhood? Because equity isn't just about who gets in the door. It's about what they find when they get there. If we don't confront the structures that created these disparities, we're not solving anything. We're just institutionalizing inequity. 

⏯ 1:36:28 - 2:44:59

Mark Pruitt: Six of us, including myself, from the committee will be presenting the work we've done over the past seven months on the Secondary Attendance Zone Enrollment and Programming Committee. The work actually initiated at the November 2024 School Board meeting when there was a recommendation for vote through a presentation that the Board approved the Secondary Attended Zone Enrollment and Programming Committee. It was amended and the amendment was that we provide a recommendation and an update at this July meeting. 

So the committee started work immediately. As many of you remember we put out requests for anyone who would be interested in serving on the committee to our community. 118 folks put their names in. We selected names out of a folder, one from each nominating district in your area. So we have seven public members that served on the committee including three board members, three RCEA members, three district administrators and three school administrators. I can tell you this, they came with different points of view, opinions and expertise but as someone who facilitated the committee I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of them for their willingness to meet our norms. We were respectful at all times. They were collaborative at all times. And had that not been the case, it would have been very difficult to herd 19 people and shepherd them along. So I really appreciate their willingness to serve on the committee. 

You're going to see some slides tonight. We're going to go through a lot of slides. It is just a small fraction of the work of this committee. The committee has a website. You can go to the website. It has everything that we've done, every piece of research that we put up. I would particularly note rolling slides which outline all seven meetings that we had, as well as every video recording in its entirety from every meeting.

The charge from the School Board in November was to evaluate the enrollment, programming, and attendance zones of Red Clay Secondary Schools and make recommendations to the Board at the July 2025 meeting. In doing so, our committee was to consider strong and balanced enrollments across schools, the impact of attendance zone changes and alignment of those boundaries to existing K-8 attendance zones when possible. There had been changes to kindergarten through 8th grade attendance zones in 2015. 

Part of our charge was to align the high schools with that, equitable access to quality education for all students and come back with the advantages and challenges of each of our recommended options and ideas through data analysis, community feedback and research. The committee met seven times. There were six initially scheduled. The committee felt that in order to meet our timeline, we added a May 1st meeting. You see some general topics of the work we did.

We spent the first two months on the committee looking at data, both historical data in the district and current data in the district, as well as lots of infographics that shared that information and after looking at that the committee came up with some key findings to sort of guide our work. 

The first was that high school attendance zones were last updated in 2002, resulting in no straight line feeders and a fragmented city of Wilmington. So, as I said, the colors of these schools, HB, the the four middle schools, Stanton, Skyline, HB, uh, and AI Middle School, they're in color. The green boundaries are the current boundaries last updated in 2002. I would point out two particular points here that I think show some of the problems with this:

One is McKean High School is sort of central and has all four middle schools feed into it. So there is no sense of community K-12 once you get to high school. There's no sense of a counselor working at one high school working at one middle school to bring those students in. The second is that the boundaries of the high schools in the city of Wilmington still exist from a desegregation order in 1981. Very fragmented when compared to K-8 attendance zones. 

The second finding was that high school enrollment has remained constant for the most part. It's fluctuated by a few hundred over the years, but during the last 20 years when enrollments remain constant, we've actually added two schools. And we went from five schools to seven schools. This has resulted in 1,000 extra seats, more than 1,000 extra seats in our seven high schools. Which also currently has AI high school with less than 600 students in it. But we've also seen that at John Dickinson High School in 2019 and McKean High School down into the mid 700s a few years prior to that. 

Another key finding was that AI High has less students in its attendance zone when compared to John Dickinson and McKean High School. We did a lot of work. Pulled this comes from 2022-2023 data. But we pulled out everyone where they live, including our own schools, our own charter schools, Newcastle County, Votech, other charters, and private schools. And you see that potentially a lot less students are available to go to AI than the other two schools. 

Very similar to the high school situation,  middle school enrollment actually declined a bit over the past 20 years, but again, we've added two more schools during that time period. And so again, you see a larger number of seats, than you have students to fill those seats and you see vacuums and low enrollment, for example, at a school like Skyline with a projected 420 students for next year with a capacity of 750. 

The next one is that the Warner community has no distinct feeder pattern. There are two elementary schools. Every one of our elementary schools feeds into one middle school - except Brandywine Springs and Warner. And that's fine. I'm sure that had to be done in 2015 and there had to be some decisions made. However, that group of fifth graders, 150 kids,  that moves on to sixth grade, they go to two middle schools and then three different high schools. That really resonated with the committee. 

After the key findings we showed the impact of underenrolled schools at the high school level. What you have is college access courses, dual enrollment courses, advanced placement courses, and IB courses at each of our five high schools. Another simple example is when you don't have enough enrollment, it's going to be hard to fill out. You see this a lot in the news, right? Like when we fold up a football team, everybody knows that there's not enough students in the school to fill 26 interscholastic sports, plus junior varsity sports for those programs.

Next, an additional piece of data which actually was released from the University of Delaware's Applied Demography and Survey Research Center is that they released a 30-year projection of New Castle, actually the entire state, but New Castle County enrollment in public schools over the next 30 years. All five districts will decline according to their projections with Red Clay projected to decline by 3,000 students over that time period. Assuming of which about 1,000 would be high school students. 

Tawanda Bond: For those of you that may not know who I am, my name is Dr. Tawanda Bond. I am the Senior Director of Teaching and Learning and I'm part of the committee that's been working on this for the last six, seven months. So, one thing that we looked at when we talked about ideas coming out of this committee is really making sure that we had a platform for equitable voice on our committee. So, if you take a look here going back to Mr. Pruitt's goals that he expressed at the beginning of the presentation, we stuck to these four goals throughout our conversation over our six months of meetings. And then we talked about our rules. So, we really had a space where people could bring ideas. There was no criticizing. We encouraged. We built on each other's ideas and weren't afraid. So, no idea was too big, no idea was too small. 

These were some of the committee's ideas that we initially came up with and I'm going to walk you through these and then I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Jay Bastianelli who is the principal of HB DuPont middle school to talk a little bit about some of these things and also Mr. Shawn Snyder to talk a little bit about some of the next steps. 

So we looked at repurposing one high school as a technical high school innovation center that would result in two attendance zone high schools. Our second was to make this innovation center available to middle school students. So these were just brainstorming ideas. Move John Dickinson Middle School program to Skyline to allow for increased high school enrollment in the two attendance zone schools. Create virtual program opportunities for secondary schools. And this didn't mean like an online school. We kind of kept it open. We had a lot of conversations around what virtual programming may look like. Move Charter School of Wilmington to an existing high school and reduce down to two attendance zone high schools. Expand Dickinson as a 6-12 IB magnet program and reduce down to two attendance zone high schools, which would be McKean and AI. The last pieces of our committee brainstorm. We're reducing down from eight to seven middle school programs because many of these things needed to go together. Move AI middle to AI high to create one 6-12 A to Z program. We had some conversation around capping Conrad and CAB as smaller enrollments. And then of course like Mr. Pruitt shared before we looked at the information about Warner and how the students kind of go to different places. We talked about the possibility of creating a K-8 attendance zone school at Warner and creating a K-12 attendance zone school at Warner. So, we talked about both. And then the last thing that we tossed around was the idea of allowing choice busing for all students to all schools. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to one of my other committee members to take us through our next steps.

Shawn Snyder: Good evening. I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm the director of technology here in the school district. We invited Dr. Ammann and Dr. Heacock in to do some analysis and to offer us both some research and some statistical evaluations and analysis of our current facilities. So, let's take a look at a slide here where Dr. Ammann did a brief analysis of each one of the ideas to discuss five different domains. HR impact, transportation, tech, nutrition, facilities, and cost. He created a rating scale that was fairly broad but high, low or medium. Now, this is not a scientific study necessarily. It was an overview of what the analysis would yield. A high negative impact doesn't mean it's a bad idea or that we shouldn't consider it - just that we would need to be more thorough in our analysis and be prepared to mitigate any negative high impact. So, as you can see, there's the analysis right there. 

For example, the innovation center, a high HR impact because it would require significant staff moves, a high transportation impact because it would require busing during the day. It has a low tech and nutrition aspect cost to us because it would be moving materials around but generally providing the same services from a facility standpoint. It would be sort of a medium lift for us. We would have some retrofitting to do it all three of our high schools to accommodate these changes but it wouldn't be massive and the cost would probably be you know medium mid-range in that. Whereas compared to the MYP program over to Skyline if that were to be part of this a fairly low impact from all three of those. Obviously, if you're a teacher being moved, you feel the HR impact would be higher because it's affecting you personally, but overall, the analysis was that those were all moves that could be done with minimal impact to the overall school district.

Operations impact from various ideas. Once again, same idea. These are three other ideas that were discussed that range from a medium high or low impact. Let me go back to the last slide right there. Choice bussing was one that we talked about a lot. To kind of clarify what the challenges there are is the cost is very high. It's the only very high you're going to see on the entire spreadsheet. 

The research was provided by Dr. Corey Heacock who did some analysis to answer questions that came up through the process. One of the questions was are proficiency levels impacted by the size of a school? Dr. Heacock did some analysis of schools within Delaware. She did some research to try and determine if there was any definitive research about a magic number for the size of a school. That study doesn't really exist. 

But we did notice throughout the state that proficiency levels seemed to improve as school size increased to a maximum of 1500 students within our own state. Absences were lower in schools of up to 1400 students. Larger schools had higher rates of absenteeism and dropout. Increased school size over 1500 students seemed to correlate with lower reported feelings of engagement, connectedness and participation by students. 

She also did some research on economic outcome. Research on grade level configuration was inconclusive. If anybody wants to get a doctorate, please do a study on that because it doesn't seem to exist at this point. And then grade level configuration is typically based on student enrollment, building space, cost, and community influence. These tend to be the factors that lead to a decision about moving schools around, closing a school, opening a school. Generally, money tends to drive that decision. We have more options, thankfully. From an analysis of ideas, each idea was considered.  

Antonio Gomes: My name again is Antonio Gomes. I'm one of the members of the community that had the privilege and pleasure honestly to serve at this committee to really do an analysis. Honestly, I know there's been a lot of talk from everyone. I can say the fact that we were able to even come up this far in such a short period of time is astronomical to me. I know there's a lot to ask for. We talked a little bit about the data, right? We looked at the data, what the problem is. We had folks bringing in additional information for us to understand. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities that are out there and we brainstormed there. Honestly, we were a lot of people in that room with a lot of different ideas but we needed to narrow this down. Ultimately that's what we came up with. What are the things that we need to consider with all these great ideas that people have? Very different ideas. How do we consolidate that into something that's a little bit more manageable for us to ultimately come up with a resolution or a proposal for you guys. So we decided to look at all the ideas and kind of categorize them. Look at the relevance of the problem, the feasibility and the impact. Does this idea make sense to the core issues? We had a specific goal and objective for this committee. Did it meet it? What is the feasibility of implementing the solution? So we talked about just the analysis that we did. What's the cost? What does it take to make it happen? And then of course what is the impact to the community? Ultimately the ultimate goal. 

So we took all this information and the task was for us to all come together and decide hey let's narrow this down to four. What are the four things or four ideas that we came out there that we thought would be suitable for us to proceed and look into it a little bit further. And that's what we're looking at here. 

Here are the results of basically all of us coming up and deciding which ideas meant the most. As you can see, the innovation center was the one piece that stood out. But there's a couple things that we also decided during the conversation that could intermingle as well. So we didn't want to leave anything behind and we provided opportunity for folks to make their cases to really disclose why should we consider this idea or remove it altogether and we had the opportunity to discuss that which I think towards the end we all came to a consensus and took a vote of whether or not to exclude it which is where we kind of went to the next step. 

Maddie Reitemeyer  : My name is Mattie Reitemeyer. I am a school counselor at AI High School. I previously worked at Dickinson High School and for a couple years at AI Middle as a school counselor. So what I'm going to talk about is the audit that was presented to the committee. This is it. You can see it up here. And what was done is district looked at the CTE classes and asked sort of what stage are they in as far as what our goal is with the standard in teaching. So I'm just going to give an example. If you look at plant science and animal science, it met the standard. When you look at strategic goals and state standards for CTE, they're doing really well. If it's in red, they're still at the beginning stages. Some of the ones that are up there are brand new. So, it's not that they're poor programs, it's that they're only a year or two old and they're still getting off the ground. And then yellow would be in the middle. So, that's just to look at it. You can see a quick glance, McKean is further along than the other two high schools in a lot of their programs. 

This - I'm not going to take a lot of time on it. They put together some examples of schools that already have innovation centers within their district, but I think anyone that's interested should definitely check those out as standards and whatever the board decides to do, I'd really encourage you to look at other models as well. 

So kind of combining the two ideas, one question would be what is actually being offered at this innovation center if it were to go forward? And this would be some of the suggestions that came up based on programs that are already well underway. And then some areas where we don't have CTE. I think there was a mention of that in a public comment that there's areas that could be expanded too and they would look at that at the innovation center. 

So a big question that a lot of people have, I had it for sure, is what does it look like if we do this? So, this sounds like a big idea. It's great, but what are we actually doing day to day? And this is one idea that could potentially happen by the grade level.

So, your ninth graders at Dickinson and AI. What they would do is take a CTE exploration course. They do a couple weeks looking at each potential program that they could do. One thing that I would say definitely needs to happen if you're going to do that is get them to take a field trip over the innovation center and actually see these classes in session and what it would look like, what they get to do during the day. So that would be in ninth grade. They wouldn't commit to a program. Most ninth graders do pick a class and then they follow it through the next three years right now, and this would give them a time to explore it. 

In 10th grade, they would do their first year, but it would be one and a half credits. In 11th grade they would do their second year which would also be one and a half credits. So you're going to see a three-year program condensed down into two. But because they're spending more time in the class, they're still covering the same content. 

And then an idea with 12th graders would be some of them might move on to dual enrollment. I'm just going to give an example. If it was an allied health student, they might then go into something like anatomy and physiology at DelTech. So they're getting a credit, but they're still staying in the program that they want. Or you might have a student that would go out and actually do some work in the community in the program that they're studying. That's just an example. 

What would a student's day look like? I'm going to try and do a good job explaining this. I apologize in advance if I do not. One way that I think about it, because for me it makes a lot of sense, is if you moved kids by grade level. We said the 9th grade students, they're doing a CTE exploratory course. They'd have seven classes on their schedule. One of them would be that CTE in their home building. 

The next year you have your 10th grade students. In the morning they'll come to school, then they'll get on a shuttle bus. This would be at Dickinson and AI to go over to McKean and they would spend from 7:55 to 10:05 in that CTE course. So that's why it's one and a half credits because it's more minutes than would otherwise happen. They come back and they go to lunch. Then your afternoon students, they're at lunch while the other students are traveling back. 

So let's say it's 11th graders now. They're going to spend their afternoon at the innovation center. So they come in the morning, they're doing English and Math. They go to lunch and then they're going to get on the shuttle bus and they'll go over to the innovation center to do their CTE which would be their level two. So you have a large group of students traveling together. I'm just giving an example of how it could be. It could be half 10th and half 11th in the morning. It helps me think about it from a grade level standard. The morning students are doing their English and math. So, it's just a way to think about the schedule on a detailed level. There are others, but I think this is a clean way to think about it.  

Mark Pruitt: After brainstorming a relevance and impact analysis, asking for some more information, what might an innovation center look like? A counselor like Maddie did some work to give an idea. We then started to make some decisions. First of all, we looked at some virtual 6-12 programming. By unanimous consent, the committee agreed to go ahead and move forward with that as a recommendation that the district would further consider. We would not require anyone to take online courses but that would meet the needs of a family who was interested in that. That idea had no bearing on the other ideas. It had no impact on our current problem that we face. 

The next discussion involved the idea of reducing enrollment at CSS and CAB Calloway. 19 members, not one of them chose a tally mark for that. So by unanimous consent, we removed that from further consideration.

AI Middle school to AI High school having a 6-12 attendance zone school did receive two tallies. Some discussion about that. I actually brought this up. This actually sort of memorializes the problem, right? When you take 500 middle school kids and 600 high school kids, you put them in a building. Now you've filled the building up and you've ensured that AI's high school population will never grow because there won't be any space to do that. So by unanimous consent we removed it from further consideration.

Dorrell Green: Mr. Pruitt, I think the thing to note is that’s the current issue right now at the John Dickinson school. We can't grow the high school portion because we've co-located middle schools. But then to look at the other issue around capping Conrad and CAB, inherently through the choice process, they're limited in their ability because you’ve got to be able to have specific cohorts to show that you have adequate programming in both of those schools. 

Mark Pruitt: It's a really good example, Dr. Green, of when Dickinson was at less than 600 students in its school. Hey, let's put a middle school there to try to get some of the high those middle schoolers to stay for the high school. Well, it worked. Now the building is at capacity, but we still have a top priority to let attendance zone students go to Dickinson. We have to let those students even by limiting IB choice students in the program. So it's a good example of what would happen if you did something similar to AI at AI high and AI middle. 

A lot of discussion and a lot of public comment about relocating the charter school of Wilmington. It received 4 tallies out of 19. After discussion, I made a motion to remove the idea due to not enough support by the committee. Further discussion ensued. The  motion was seconded because this was not unanimous. We did use a Robert's rules process for many of these and that was seconded. The motion passed 11-2, 11 yes and 2 abstain and the idea was removed from further consideration. 

Choice busing for all students received five tallies out of a possible 19. After a lot of discussion I did make a motion to remove the idea due to not enough support by the committee and discussion ensued. This is an interesting one. I don't think anyone doesn't want to take every student from their front door to where they want to go to school. So you're not really voting no because you don't think that's a good idea for kids.  But practically is it possible in a school budget? Is it possible with the number of buses you need, with the number of drivers you need, with the current driver shortage, which is corrected to a certain extent, but you know, it's just not a practical idea. 

Dorrell Green: And the local expense because a lot of those routes get approved by the state.

Mark Pruitt: Financially, obviously. Yep. Yep. Dr. Amman talked about that. That was an 11-2 to remove it from further consideration.

Now, we we’re down to just a few of our brainstorming ideas that had been discussed, talked about you could not have an innovation center at McKean and reduce down to two high schools and turn John Dickinson into a magnet program and reduce down. You had to make a choice there. A lot of discussion amongst these two. Ultimately, Miss Todd-Dixon made a motion to move forward with the idea in the recommendation to move forward with the innovation center. Dr. Muffley seconded the motion and the motion passed 11 yes. Two people abstain from voting. 

The first part of it was removing Dickinson from further consideration.

Then the second part of that was to move forward with the innovation center. 

The next one was these two were sort of coupled. One of the ideas was big- we have too many middle schools. It's causing a vacuum at some of our current middle schools for programming and opportunity and access. One of it was a consolidation of middle school programs from 8 to 7. Another one existed moving the John Dickinson middle school program to Skyline. Both of those sort of fit together. After a lot of discussion, I made a motion to move forward with both ideas in the recommendation. This would allow for the increased high school enrollment needed at Dickinson High School. If you're going to move forward with one, the middle school has to move. The IB program has to move to another space. The motion was seconded by Mr. Leonard and all 12 members on the committee in attendance voted unanimously to move forward.

A lot of discussion about a K-8 program at Warner. Originally we were talking about K-12, and we removed that very early. Quite simply, it's not a facility for a high school. It doesn't have the athletic space, the outdoor space, the lab space, those kinds of things. But you know a lot of discussion about K-8 at Warner. We did feel like the idea contradicted with the goal of the committee which was to bolster enrollment at all of our schools. However because of concern around the city of Wilmington middle school attendance zones by unanimous consent. The committee agreed to include a future re-evaluation of middle school attendance zones, particularly as they relate to the Warner Elementary School community would be included in our final recommendation.

That brought us to what we sent out to the community at the beginning of June or right after the Memorial Day weekend.

We came up with three core principles that we put forward.Creating straight line feeder patterns that align high school attendance zones with existing middle school attendance zones. That we have balanced enrollment. Distribute students equitably across attendance zone high schools. That we have program equity. Ensure that all students regardless of high school have access to high quality academic and extracurricular programs. So that part of the recommendation was you know that we were put forward what we called our core principles as we move forward.

Two specific program changes. One, establish the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus. The committee recommended on May 21st that the Thomas McKean High School be reimagined as the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus through expanded partnerships with local colleges, universities, and the business community. This flagship hub will produce courses in CTE, industry standard credentialing courses and early college credit opportunities. 

As part of the change, a number of comprehensive high school attendance zones would be reduced from three to two. AI and Dickinson. These two comprehensive high schools would split the Red Clay high school attendance zones equally, allowing for increased enrollment and a more robust academic and extracurricular offerings. These two attendance zones better align with middle school attendance zones. We would then be able to use middle school attendance zones, where a middle school goes to a specific high school instead of being split to three high schools allowing for straight line feeder patterns and it would include a short shuttle bus transportation that would be provided from AI and Dickinson to the innovation campus. They would be there for one quarter of their program. We run on an AB schedule. So students would register for courses or do course selection for one quarter of their program at the innovation center.

Program change number two was to relocate the John Dickinson Middle Year's program to allow for increased high school enrollment at the John Dickinson School. The committee recommend recommended relocating the MYP middle school program from Dickinson to Skyline Middle School, allowing for a more balanced enrollment across middle schools. 

And finally, additional recommendations for future consideration of the district. Middle school attendance zones. Re-evaluate the middle school attendance zones especially as they pertain to the Warner elementary school community to improve feeder pattern continuity and equity particularly in that community and virtual high school programming. Explore the development of virtual high school coursework to expand flexibility and learning opportunities for red clay students. So that was where we were on May 21st. That was the recommendation that we put out to the community to collect their feedback in a survey. 

Tawanda Bond: So once we got to the point where we had all of our recommendations that we were preparing for the board, the committee came up with the idea to make sure that we had stakeholder engagement. So we embarked on two major pieces of stakeholder engagement. After our seven public meetings with public comment at all of our meetings, we had a June 10th community meeting that had Q&A. So, we were there for several hours, just open forum. We also conducted student focus groups and I'm going to talk a little bit through the student focus groups that we conducted to get student engagement and student feedback. Then after that you're going to hear a little bit from Mr. Jay Bastinelli about our community survey that was conducted by Hanover Research. 

So when we did our student focus groups, I'm going to give a kudos to my team on teaching and learning. We had Mr. Brian Mattix, the supervisor of science, as well as Mrs. Karen Ammann, our supervisor of instructional technology who conducted student focus groups on a really tight turnaround time working with our middle school and our high school principals. And really the big gist of it was looking at getting student input and student feedback around these three bullets. 

What CTE pathways do students wish were offered at their current school? 

What career affairs interest them the most? 

And what were their perspectives on the district's proposed CTE innovation hub? 

Now, at the bottom of some of these slides, you'll see some anecdotal notes. And these are truly from the mouth of the babes. And if you're there to hear Mrs. Ammann speak to the committee about the enlightened work that she did with the students, there was a lot of really good community conversation with the students. They went kind of off task a little bit when they were talking about their needs, their wants, their dreams with the CTE pathway idea with the innovation center. 

So this is our focus group demographic data. So you all have this information in front of you so you know who the participants were and our focus groups and this was the methodology. So we conducted it through Zoom. Each of them were one hour of course our moderators Mrs. Karen Ammann Mr. Brian Mattix and their focus areas were around CTE awareness, student interest, feedback on the proposed innovation center, equity, partnerships, and learning supports. And again, another anecdotal piece there for you to read from one of our AI high school students.

These are some of our key findings and over the next couple of slides, you’ll see some of the information that fell under these big buckets. We focused on innovation center course and pathway interest, professional college partner professional and college partnerships as well as learning environments and you'll see some of the themes that came out of the conversations with the students and again a student quote. 

When we talked about course and pathway interests these were some of the themes that came out from our middle schoolers and our high schoolers. The middle schoolers talked about how many of them only have four current pathways that match their student interests. Our high school students felt more access across schools would be valuable particularly for specific pathways like autotech, physical therapy, nursing, plant science, and animal science which Ms. Reitemeyer shared in one of the previous slides about where we offer those at which of our schools. The kids talked about their willingness to travel. They opened up about shuttle transportation, some of their concerns about missing school-based opportunities, and they also talked about exploration matters. The middle schoolers really thought it would be pretty great to have a CTE exploratory experience where they could also have some access to that innovation center and preview pathways before they decide on one. 

The second big bucket was professional and college partnerships from our middle schoolers. They shared work experience and valued skill building things like time management. Our high school students were more vocal, they emphasized mentorship, networking, job readiness. They talked about entrepreneurship courses and mentor supported student businesses. They saw those as valuable. They wanted help with job searches and internships identified as a gap and an opportunity for our innovation center. And all of our students supported classroom visits from professionals, multiple speakers per field. That’s what they recommended and what they wanted. 

And then the last big bucket was learning environment. Of course, our students wanted and preferred a hands-on active learning over traditional instruction. High school students reported positive experiences in current CTE courses and work-based learning experiences. And then they had a lot of conversation highlighting the need for CTE programs to be more accessible with a focus on truly practical real world experiences that align to their learning styles. And they talked a lot about multilingual learners. And really again from the mouth of babes their concern and their value for bilingual support and they also recommended expanding it more into CTE classes. 

These are some of the recommendations that came from our student focus groups. They talked about outreach. They wanted to see a CTE fair for middle school students. Exploration offering CTE trial periods or exploratory courses for middle school students. Instructional design. They like shorter, engaging, hands-on project formats. Mentorship was a highlight. Expanding that access to career mentors, of course, MLL supports. This came up a lot. They wanted uh to ensure that we would have bilingual push-in teachers and CTE classrooms. They wanted high*interest pathways. There was a pathway conversation that we’re not currently offered at all of our high schools. The pathways. They wanted high-interest programs that are currently only offered at individual schools like automotive, nursing, and career prep. They want help with job searches, applications, as well as interviews. And now I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Jay Bastinelli to talk more about the community survey that was conducted.

Mark Pruitt: Pause at this point and say we are about 80% of the way through. It's a lot of information. It was a lot of work. Would anyone like to ask questions now or would we like to finish up and then ask questions? Finish. I know it's a lot of information but it's important information.  

Jay Bastianelli: My name is Jay Bastianelli. The first slide that I would like to share is we had 1,128 participants complete the survey. From the outside, you would think there's approximately 16,000 students in Red Clay. That's not a real high number. But if you look deeper, the last survey we sent similar to this was in regards to our strategic plan that Dr. Bond and her team worked very hard on. Only 500 people took that survey. So, more than twice as many took this. So, I think that says a lot about the passion people have for this committee and this potential plan. If you look closely at the survey participant background information, you will see who exactly filled this the majority were staff members followed by parent guardians. If you break it down even deeper in terms of the school, you're going to see the majority were instructional staff or teachers. Also looking a little deeper in terms of the survey participant background information. Just like we have at most our back to school nights in late September, elementary school always has the highest participation and that goes the same with this survey. The majority were elementary school parents or family members. In terms of feeder school attendance, it was most attended feeder schools and then a strong percentage not attending their feeder school. Some are unsure and you can also see the background information. The most was special education parents. In terms of participation background information the majority were white and the majority were female.

Then also looking deeper in terms of what did they feel most strongly about? What do they think was most important? 46% said ensuring all red clay students have access to quality college and career ready education. Even breaking it down deeper, you could look exactly how the community members felt, how the parents felt, and how the staff members felt. The highest percentage was having access to quality college and career programming. All right, so I'll turn it back over to Mr. Pruitt.

Mark Pruitt: After some general questions in the survey, it did ask a specific question about the two specific changes - the innovation center and the moving of the John Dickinson MYP program. You see that there were 51% somewhat supported or strongly supported the idea and 34% strongly opposed or somewhat opposed the idea. We then looked at that broken down disaggregated. 

We looked at the staff first. The district office 60% supported.  23% opposed. Elementary 60% supported, 20% opposed. Secondary schools a little closer 45% to 43%. But it is important to note and to be expected that the two schools, the staff at the two schools that were most directly impacted, their jobs will change. McKean High School and Dickinson, at least some of Dickinson's teachers, they are actually flipped and drove that number down. And I think that's to be expected. Those types of changes can be very difficult for our employees. So that makes sense. Move to parent totals. Very similar. 50% supported, 31% opposed. However, again, the most participants, and a flipped result between the McKean parents and the current McKean and current Dickinson parents. The AI Middle School was in there, but only four parents took that survey and three did oppose it. That was the community member results. 

We then looked at please say how much you oppose or support adjusting middle school feeder patterns to allow students at Warner to attend a feeder pattern closer to their home. 70% somewhat support or strongly support and only 7% opposed. So that was overwhelming support. Look at that disaggregated. It was similar. 

Dorrell Green: So, and just again for those in the earlier point that was made, when we talk about middle school for Warner specifically, they're split. Their cohort of fifth graders

either attend HB DuPont, which is the furthest part distance away, or they

attend Skyline Middle, which is the second furthest. 

Mark Pruitt: Then we asked them about virtual programming. 47% supported, 37% opposed. Look at that disaggregated. It is important to note that the educators supported that far more than parents, but also important to note that we're not requiring anyone to be involved in a virtual program. That would be by choice and didn't really impact the overall purpose of this committee. 

Dorrell Green: The other danger in that is if you say virtual program that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people too. So some assume virtual school. So again I think to unpack that a little. Why the committee left that on and didn't take that recommendation off. That's something that we can continue to look at especially post-covid in terms of learning options for students

Mark Pruitt: That would be the work moving forward you know if it were to be approved by the board.

Shawn Snyder: Part of the survey we collected comments from each one of the survey participants generated I think over 400 comments and questions digging through that data we leveraged some technology. We created an executive summary using some AI tools, chatGPT, and a few other ones to kind of take that massive amount of text and turn it into some more understandable data that we could put on some slides. This represents some of the main themes of those comments. Number one, there was general support for proximity-based schooling that came up over and over and over again. People would like the school to be near their house. The concerns about equity and diversity. That seemed to be a driving force. Actually was the charge of the committee. So, I'm glad that people were asking questions about that. Specific concerns related to McKean High School. That really I think crystallized some of the need to explain whatever decision we make thoroughly to the communities that it impacts, regardless of what decision is ever made. There will be work to do to explain whether it's this out of the box idea or whatever idea the board decides to move forward with. Impact on feeder patterns and program continuity. That was something that came up specifically from staff. Calls for stakeholder engagement. Several staff members emphasized the importance of ongoing communication with stakeholders, finding as many ways as possible to make sure that we have created opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard. Then finally, the last category was just kind of miscellaneous concerns and suggestions centered around transportation, staff assignments, building usage, many of the topics that we've covered throughout this presentation. Overall, the staff respondents demonstrated a thoughtful and engaged perspective on attendance zone revisions. They recognize benefits and challenges and surfaced those through the comments.  I also did an analysis of these comments using an AI formula that I developed along with a couple other people that looked at keywords and phrases in each one of the comments in the survey and described a negative, neutral, or positive attribution to those statements. Because when you're looking at this, it's easy to start to think, well, these are all negative comments or these are all positive comments. Really, the vast majority of the comments were questions that didn't have a negative or positive connotation. They just really didn't have all the information they wish they had. That made a lot of sense since we're in the process and not at the end of the process. So, that seemed right that we were proposing some things. An innovation center is not a thing that Delaware has done before. So, I would expect the majority of the people to have questions about what that looks like and how that works. Basically a tag was put on each one of them and then we counted them up and it explained based upon the response where that fell. So the most common themes of these were student needs and program availability, student attendance and community impact, quality of education at the innovation center, feeder patterns and school choice, middle years program and IB alignment. These are the most common words that appeared in comments associated with those topics.  

Mark Pruitt: We looked at data. We spent the entire June meeting looking at data. The student focus group data and the survey data that went out to the community. We analyzed that information. We left time at the end to get into small groups. And the bottom line, the overriding question was did the data compel us to edit the recommendation? We got into small groups and looked at those three questions.  Each of the three groups gave an update. I think there was overall sentiment from each of the groups was that the overall survey participation was lower than the committee had hoped. While for red clay, it was a good survey result, it was more than double our strategic plan survey, but still only 1100 surveys for a rather large community and and also that some survey respondents did not understand the recommendation like a lot of the questions in the comments had to do with like where is my kid going, are they going to be there - are they going to be here? Further explanation of that.

Then we allowed for two motions to amend. The first motion was to provide the current recommendation to the board, but also recommend that the board not take action until October 2025 to allow for better community understanding of the recommendation and more engagement from the community and stakeholders. There were 14people. We did operate on a quorum. So we needed 10 votes to move anything forward to the recommendation. There were 8 yes votes and 6 no votes. The motion did not pass.

Then there was a second motion to amend which was to engage in a campaign with stakeholders to educate and gather feedback on the current recommendation and then re-engage the committee and make a recommendation to the board in the fall. There were 4 yes votes, 10 no votes. That motion did not pass.

Questions? 

Aje English: I have a question. I didn't want to forget it. I have a comment about the last slide about the two motions that did not pass, but I don't want to forget my first comment that I had that was regarding the feedback and the survey results that 1100 number that you stated that you provided from Hanover. In that number, does that include any of our city schools or families or we do have that information?

Mark Pruitt: Disaggregated by each school for family. I can't pull that now. I can certainly get that for you. 

Aje English: Okay, yeah. I would like to be able to see that just because I know that Warner obviously is one of the city schools, and there are a number of schools in this plan that are going to be affected by this. So I would just like to, as the person with the city seat, I would like to see what their feedback is on that. As a city mom of a student  that is in the Red Clay School District. 

Mark Pruitt: And I agree that if we move forward, the recommendation says to look again at the middle schools, particularly as it relates to Warner. I think you have to get feedback from that specific community because certainly it won't be enough. It's 1100 surveys divided by - if it's evenly distributed - it's 28 programs, right? 

Aje English: So, my next comment would just be to say that I would be interested in with my fellow board members here to kind of further discuss motion number one regarding the opportunity to distribute the survey and additional time, just to see if we could get feedback. I don't know if there's an opportunity to do that, if I would have make a motion for that. Um, I'm open to discussing that further after everyone else asks their questions. 

Jose Matthews: I can weigh in on that. I'm of the opinion that moving forward with this doesn't mean that we're now going to stop engaging with the community. We're always going to engage with the community. It's an ongoing process. So the work here certainly isn't finished whatsoever. Really, tonight's recommendation allows us to get started in that work. Then it really is incumbent on the board to make sure that, as the governing body, that we make sure that we're receiving our monthly updates but then in addition to that - setting the direction to the district to what we want to see. That's certainly a discussion that we can have at our upcoming workshop. There's definitely going to be a lot of communication that's going to need to be happening and a lot of engagement that's going to be happening. It's our job to make sure that it does happen moving forward. But tonight's recommendation allows us to be able to initiate the process. But unless we provide the go-ahead to the district to be able to initiate that work, then we're really just putting ourselves at a standstill, right? 

Aje English: So as a rebuttal, Mr. Pruitt, if we do in fact approve this and move this forward, what is the next step? 

Mark Pruitt: I think the next step would to be come up with a planning document of what needs to be done between tomorrow or whenever it was passed, and backmap from a timeline which really needs to be done. The board had talked about having this new program operational in August-September of 27. To do that, the work really needs to be done by October of 26.  Because we needed to get the information out to allow families to participate in school choice at these new programs. That's really our deadline. What would that look like -  Whether it's engaging with RCEA regarding teacher movement if you're moving English teachers and CTE teachers…

Dorrell Green: and that would all be part of a part of that process. I think from November and the board setting forth and I just want to acknowledge the committee and the committee members because the board gave us a charge to establish a committee and really look at again those three broad areas in terms of enrollment balance, look at programming, and being mindful of equity. And as we've heard through many public commenters and different things, we here for a reason because too often in our district, we looked at situations in isolation and never looked at the district comprehensively just in terms of how we look at the Red Clay consolidated school district. And we've created options. We've created opportunities and forced ourselves into a corner where if we don't control the destiny and the vision of the district, something or someone else likely will. And so I'll just want and this isn't the buy all end all in terms of the recommendation that the committee put forward, but I just want to acknowledge the work of the committee because when we look at balance or just taking the John Dickson school situation as an example, we co-located a middle school program where now we currently actually have an underenrolled middle school and rather than look at it comprehensively across the district as a report we can look at it in isolation from one individual school perspective understanding that there is a domino effect that ultimately impacts a lot of our schools whether that's through magnet whether that's through choice so again I just think we're eventually going to have to address it through feeder pattern processes and in and alignment because again our middle schools and secondary schools are splintered and that really doesn't provide an opportunity to have community across the district. 

Aje English: Well, I don't want to and not to cut you off, I just have one last comment. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I appreciate all the work that the committee has done because I do appreciate it. And I know that the previous board, we voted to set this plan in motion. And I'm not saying that we don't continue on with the plan. What I am saying is that in my role as an individual board member, my first priority is my role as a parent. Not just of my son in the district, but all of the children in the district. So I just want to make sure that in the timeline that we are still working to attempt to accomplish that we make the decisions properly and if we need to make adjustments that we can keep that in mind that we should make the adjustments and not make hasty decisions just because of the previous timeline that we put in place. When families select homes, they select their homes based on the schools and everything else that is provided in these communities. And so I just want to be sure that we are making a proper decision. So that's my final comment. 

Vic Leondard: I just want to say part of the charge is also to form another committee if we go ahead with this advisory committee. That was part of the charge. Correct? 

Mark Pruitt: That was amended out of it. So the initial one had two committees running. One ran through November and then the other one…Well we would certainly need to align feeder patterns but with this recommendation new attendance zones would be relative. The idea would be to have an entire middle school and you'd have to just make sure that there was equal enrollment as much as we could according to our attendance zone middle schools. So that work you're not parsing out neighborhoods or arguing, you're not doing the kinds of things that often you do when you look at it. You're just simply slotting in four middle schools into two high schools if this were adopted. 

Dorrell Green: So it's straight line feeders from our middle to our high schools which we currently don't have as he indicated. If you're going from Warner, you're going to two different and then those students are being splintered across three different high schools. So the eighth grade class at AI Middle actually still have three attendance zone high schools.  

Devon Hynson: I guess Jose's response to her question basically superimposes a requirement that we pass it to be allowed to get more information from the community. Because her question was germaine, but was specific that she wanted to get more information from the community and get more information feedback from the community and you're saying well this allows us to do that. 

Unknown Speaker: Not necessarily. 

Devon Hynson: So let's just say that if we say we want to postpone it and give ourselves 45 to 60 days to be able to get to the community, and find out what they they're saying because the only person I've heard that are objective voices that weren't on the committee, that were parents of kids that are in the schools do not agree with this.

Jose Matthews: So, I'll -

Devon Hynson: Hold up, hold on. So my point is I don't know why that's being taken off the table, an opportunity to get to the community and get more information from them and what they feel about this plan. 

Jose Matthews: So, let me reiterate what I stated. What I'm stating is that passing this doesn't inhibit our ability to continue to work with the community. In fact, I think that this would help us continue to work with the community in forming what we want to see out of these plans. But passing this vote tonight does not inhibit us from continuing, which I know that we will continue to do as we have always done, making sure that we're

engaging with all of our stakeholders. And it's incumbent to us as representatives of the community -

Devon Hynson: Absolutely.

Jose Matthews: to be able to do that work as well and bring that information from the conversations that we're having with parents and stakeholders, and people that we represent at this table. So, a lot of that responsibility falls not just on the district and their outreach, but to us and our respective office. But it doesn’t inhibit that.

Devon Hynson: Well, I want to be clear. What does passing it tonight do?

Jose Matthews: It allows us to give the district a charge that we have appropriate amount of planning because there's a lot of work that's going to be happening over the next year. And in order for this to be successful, we have to make sure that we're giving our operations side of it. So, right now it's caught up in governance. That's our barrier right now. Operations can't do their work and planning unless we give them the directive to do so. So the charge of the board that directive in the mission

Devon Hynson: Let's just say we pass it and then the community says no, we don't like it. 

Jose Matthews: Then we can amend it. I mean there's nothing here that isn't amendable. There isn't. And I can tell you, Devon, from other initiatives that this board has done, we're constantly evolving plans, but we can't get to that operational piece, and that planning piece, until we've released it from governance and have given the charge. But we can continue to make amendments and as the community vocalizes, you know, the things that they want to see within the programming or the things that they want, you know, and I can tell you I even have additional ideas on my own. For one, I can give an example. I would love for the innovation center to expand their program. I think a lot of the list of programs that we have for now is great - but I think there are different, bigger, broader ideas. But it starts with planting the seed and we can't expand services - like I would love to see plumbing, I would love to see electrical programming. I would like to see HVAC, but unfortunately we're not at that point yet. And I think we definitely could expand and grow something really unique and really powerful. But until we release it from our governance perspective, operations will not be able to do their job and making sure that they can continue their work to plan for what is going to be an incredibly busy year. 

Aje English: And to his point, Mr. Hynson, it has to come before the board. It does have to come before the Board. So there will be, like Mr. Matthews stated, opportunities for us to flush this out at the workshop and us to continue to communicate with Dr. Green or Mr. Pruitt and his staff. And so we are voting to set this in motion - or not - but there's also an opportunity for us to continue to flush the details out. And that was the point of me posing my questions, not to disrupt, but just to ensure that all voices are being heard. 

Jose Matthews: And I want to make sure - the plans aren't binding yet. I mean, we have not approved a plan yet, but we haven't also allowed and given authority to Dr. Green and the district to be able to move forward with the planning process. So, nothing here to that level of detail is going to bind us. 

Devon Hynson: So, what does it say? Can I read what it says because I don't have a computer.

Jose Matthews: No, no, no, you're fine. 

Vic Leonard: Well, while we're waiting, Dr. Nesmith has a question online.

Kecia Nesmith: Thank you. Thank you, President Leonard. Uh, sorry. I'm sorry I can't be there. Um, so a couple things I just want to say to kind of piggyback on what Ms. English has said. I've been on the committee. I attended six of the seven meetings and I really appreciated all of the hard work. I have said that we need to include on the -if not the committee - the guests in the meeting of constituents. And we did not do that and it has been repeated over and over and over again. So to the point that oh we can get more input later, we could have gotten the input during. And so to that point, I do not believe that we did our due diligence to fully engage the community that would be the most affected. And secondly, when Ms. English said about when people buy their homes, that's a big, big deal. And so yes, we want equity. Yes, we want access, but to what extent will we compromise the trust of the community to get there? I believe that we should we should not make haste because we might waste an opportunity to make it really good. That is the end of my comment.

Vic Leonard: Any other comments? 

Kecia Nesmith: There's no motion on the floor. This was a presentation. We're not even under action items. This was a presentation.

Jose Matthews: Dr. Nesmith, I acknowledge the error. Thank you for pointing that out.  

 ⏯ 2:53:25 - 2:56:37

Dorrell Green: It is the recommendation that the Red Clay School Board approve the recommendation of the Secondary Attendance Zone Enrollment and Programming Committee as submitted.

Jose Matthews: So moved Jose Matthews 

Susan Sander: second Susan Sander.

Vic Leondard: It has been properly moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? 

Kecia Nesmith: I have a question. So the recommendation - it was two recommendations that weren't passed by the committee. So what is the recommendation?

Dorrell Green: So I think based on the committee there was the unanimous vote back in May that the committee decided - In the June meeting, it was my understanding from the committee was they voted not to make any amendments to those motions. So it's the original recommendation that came before the committee and the last meeting. Again my understanding based on the committee was that they voted to not make any amendments to those original unanimously-voted recommendations.

Kecia Nesmith: Was that on May 1st because I don't know that we had enough people there to be able to make that recommendation properly. I don't know if that's correct or not.

Dorrell Green: I believe that was the May 21st meeting if I'm not mistaken, Dr. Nesmith. 

Mark Pruitt: We had voted item by item to come up with a recommendation on May 21st. That is the recommendation that went out to the community. It was also the recommendation that was used with the focus group of students. We then took that information, looked at that information at the June meeting. We then had an opportunity to amend the recommendation. We did not get 10 votes to amend the recommendation. And so that's where we stood at the end of the process.

Vic Leonard: Any other comments?

Kecia Nesmith: I'm good. Thank you. 

Vic Leonard: Shall we go for a vote? Okay. Um, Ms. Stevens, please call a vote.

Maria Stevens: Ms. English?

Aje English: Yes. 

Maria Stevens: Mr. Hynson?

Devon Hynson: No. 

Maria Stevens: Mr. Matthews? Yes. 

Maria Stevens: Dr. Nesmith?

Kecia Nesmith: No. 

Maria Stevens: Ms. Sander?

Susan Sander: Yes. 

Maria Stevens: Ms. Twardus?

Beth Twardus: Yes.

Maria Stevens: Mr. Leonard?

Vic Leonard: Yes. 

Maria Stevens: Five Yes. Two No. Motion passes.

🎙️Presentation to the Board: Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming July 9, 2025 

• 📄Red Clay Attendance Zone and Programming Committee Recommendation to the School Board For convenience, the full text of the document is typed below. 

Red Clay Attendance-Zone & Programming Committee Current Recommendation to the School Board 

Core Principles 

• Alignment of Attendance-Zones: Create straight line feeder patterns that align high school attendance zones with existing middle school attendance-zones. 

• Balanced Enrollment: Distribute students equitably across attendance-zone high schools. 

• Program Equity: Ensure that all students, regardless of high school, have access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programs. 

Program Change #1: Establish the “Thomas McKean Innovation Campus” 

The committee recommends that Thomas McKean High School be reimagined as the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus through expanded partnerships with local colleges, universities, and the business community. This flagship hub will provide coursework in the following areas: 

• Career and Technical Education (CTE) 

• Industry-standard credentialing programs 

• Early college credit opportunities 

As part of this change: 

• The number of comprehensive high school attendance-zone schools would be reduced from three to two: Alexis I. duPont High School and The John Dickinson School. 

• These two comprehensive high schools would split the Red Clay high school attendance-zones equally, allowing for increased enrollment and more robust academic and extracurricular offerings. 

• These two attendance-zones better align with middle school attendance-zones, allowing for straight line feeder patterns from middle school to high school. 

• Short shuttle bus transportation would be provided from AI High and Dickinson to the McKean Innovation Campus for career, technical, and early college coursework. 

Program Change #2: Relocate the John Dickinson Middle Years Program (MYP) 

To allow for increased high school enrollment at The John Dickinson School, the committee recommends relocating the MYP middle school program from Dickinson to Skyline Middle School, allowing for a more balanced enrollment across the middle schools. 

Additional Recommendations for Future Consideration 

• Middle School Attendance-Zones: Reevaluate middle school attendance-zones, especially as they pertain to the Warner Elementary School community, to improve feeder pattern continuity and equity. 

• Virtual High School Programming: Explore the development of virtual high school coursework to expand flexibility and learning opportunities for Red Clay students.

🌐Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee webpage

📁Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee Meeting Rolling Slides

📊Results from Hanover Survey District Summary

📊Results from Hanover Survey Raw Data