Jun 10 2025
AZ Town Hall Meeting

▼Full Transcript Below

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Audience Questions & Comments

⏯ 1:06:34-2:24:03 

• • • How did the committee evaluate the impact of bus suspensions on students with disabilities; why was integrating magnet programs into comprehensive high schools not considered.

    • Lack of confidence in handling transportation effectively

    • Will the MYP remain a small program within Skyline, or is there an intention to transition all of Skyline into a Middle Years Program?

    • Disparities in offerings are not due to Delaware Choice law, or student ability, but due to district structures

    • How will the proposed plan address resource imbalances between Red Clay’s traditional and magnet high schools, ensure under-resourced neighborhoods are equitably

    • If AI High School's declining enrollment was originally the reason the committee was formed was the underlying cause of decline ever investigated?

    • Are all traditional high school students required to complete CTE credits?

    • Concerned about students' potential loss of instructional time due to busing to another building.

    • Concern about segregation of students according to academic vs career targeted pathways  

    • Who originally suggested the Innovation Center, and was the idea initiated by a district employee?

    • Worry about student transportation, and afternoon sports.

    • How will the Innovation Center help equalize AP course offerings at Dickinson and AI duPont?

    • Will Skyline still offer Spanish immersion?

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⏯️Mark Pruitt: Good evening, and welcome to the Secondary Attendance Zone and Programming Committee community update for the Red Clay School Board. My name is Mark Pruitt. I was on the committee for the past six months, and I'm going to introduce you to some other members shortly. I wanted to just give an outlook that a lot of work, a lot of effort, has gone into the past six months and a brief summary of what you'll see here tonight.

We plan to give you a brief summary of our data considerations, analysis, research, and how we made our decisions to come up with the current recommendation. After we get through those slides, we intend to stay and answer all of your questions as best we can, so it'll be a question and answer at the end. This is not a Board meeting in the public; this is for the public. Public comment won't be necessary because you'll be able to speak at the end, and we will respond to you at the end.

You could advance two slides please, Beth. Important to note that this is going to be a summary of our work over the past six months. We have a committee web page at the Red Clay Consolidated School District's website, which includes details of the committee and its work, including a meeting schedule, committee members, meeting agendas, and meeting minutes. I highlighted and linked the rolling slides; all six meetings to date are on one slide deck, so you could look through just a ton of information. As well, you could look at the video recordings of every meeting, the data considerations, and other supporting documents that we went through since January.

I will say at this point I'd like to introduce some members of the committee. First, Beth Jefferson is the administrative assistant; she's done a lot of work in the evenings with the committee over the past six months. A few of the members offered to assist in this presentation, and so I would like to introduce Dr. Jodi Muffley, who will come up to the microphone for a slide or two a little later in the evening. She is a nursing/health allied health teacher at AI duPont High School. Mr. Jay Bastianelli, principal at HB duPont Middle School—I’m at Brandywine Springs. Shawn Snyder is the Director of Technology for the Red Clay Consolidated School District, and Dr. Tawanda Bond is the Senior Director of Teaching and Learning for the Red Clay Consolidated School District.

We do have a couple of other members in attendance that I'd like to introduce. Miss Emily Carroll just joined us in the back; she is a science teacher at McKean High School. Mr. Antonio Gomes is a member of the public, a parent in our school district who's been with us for the past six months. And you can see the 19 people that served on the committee. That committee is outlined through Board policy and the number of different stakeholder groups that are to join the committee.

Additionally, we have two of our three Board members who served on the committee. Mr. Vic Leonard is here this evening; Dr. Kecia Nesmith is here this evening. And we also have two Board member-elects: Miss Beth Twardus will join the School Board in July, and just joining us is Mr. Devon Hynson, sitting in the back, School Board member-elect. Finally, this evening, our superintendent will join us to talk about a slide or two; Dr. Dorrell Green is here as well. We've got a group here in person; we're much larger online—60—so we're much larger online, so people are engaging with the work. At this time, I'd like to invite Dr. Nesmith to just welcome everyone to the meeting.

⏯️8:02 Kecia Nesmith: Good evening. I am very happy to see many of you here. Our committee has been working hard to take all of the input that we can to make sure that our students have access to multiple opportunities, and we really, really value the input of the community. And so if you're online, share out the link to other members of the Red Clay community, and thank you all who were able to come here today. Hopefully today you'll get insight into the thinking of the committee and then be able to ask very good questions and offer any ideas that you have. Welcome.

Mark Pruitt: Before we move forward with the committee's work, I wanted to note that you will be able not only to ask questions at the end of this meeting, but we launched a survey last Thursday. That survey is still open. I'm assuming some of you who joined the meeting, whether in person or at home, have waited to complete the survey; we really appreciate that coming out to get more informed. There will be a QR code at the end of the slide so you have access to the survey. The survey closes at midnight on Thursday, or it's through Thursday.

Okay, so at the November 2024 School Board meeting, the Red Clay Consolidated School District School Board voted to create a committee to evaluate the enrollment, programming, and attendance zones of Red Clay secondary schools and make recommendations to them at the July 2025 Board meeting. In doing so, the committee asked that we consider a strong and balanced enrollment across schools, that we consider the impact of attendance zone changes and alignment of those boundaries to existing K-8 attendance zones when possible. In fact, create straight-line feeders when possible to provide equitable access to a quality education for all of our students, all of our secondary school students in this instance. And when we reported back to them, report back on the advantages and challenges of our recommendation options through data analysis, community feedback, and research.

They gave us a scope for the work, which was data analysis, legal and policy review, stakeholder engagement—which is a little bit backloaded; we felt as though we needed to have a draft recommendation before we fully engaged. Certainly, we held the meetings in public and had public comment, but we really have dug into stakeholder feedback over the past couple of weeks—and a recommendation report. Resources available to the committee were data specialists; certainly utilized them. Legal counsel if needed. We had a guest speaker, our Chief Operating Officer Dr. Ted Ammann, spoke on the impact on transportation, facilities, and finance. And we also had at our disposal the University of Delaware's Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research.A quick overview of our meetings, when our meetings were held: again, both the agendas and the minutes are posted on the website. You see the work we did, and you're going to hear that a little more throughout the evening.

 ⏯️ 11:27 Mark Pruitt: First thing we did at our January meeting was look at data. And when I think we're up over 150 slides in a rolling slide deck for six minutes, how to reduce that down to a summary was very challenging over the past couple of weeks in creating this presentation. But I really tried to look at what were the key points and key takeaways the committee found.

The first were that K through 8 schools, elementary schools, and middle schools—those attendance zones were redone in 2015. They are very concise in nature, meaning that they are bounded by geography and they have straight-line feeders, meaning three or four elementary schools feed into an attendance zone middle school. And you see our middle school boundaries: Stanton on the southern tip of the map; AI Middle School to the west all the way up to the Pennsylvania boundary; HB duPont Middle School, including Hockessin; and then Skyline on the western side there. Additionally, there are two carveouts in our attendance zones, one being for Skyline Middle School, which takes a large section of the city of Wilmington in light blue there, and then two dark blue areas for—one being on the west side of Wilmington for HB and another one being on Lancaster Avenue for HB Middle School.

What you see in green are our high school attendance zones, which were last modified in 2002. And there is absolutely no rhyme or reason because there was no consideration given when the K through 8 boundaries were attendance zones were revised in 2015. So you see the McKean feeder in somewhat the middle of the district cutting through all four middle school attendance zones. There is no straight-line feeder, no semblance of a straight-line feeder there. You see AI High School, obviously of the largest area of AI Middle School, but not all of AI Middle School—not a lot of housing, not a lot of parcels out there, large properties, golf courses, farming areas. That loops around and captures part of HB Middle School. And then you see again the city of Wilmington, which is all three high schools have some of the city of Wilmington: AI High a portion of the west side, McKean High School a portion of the west side of Wilmington and a portion of the north side of Wilmington near Market Street, and then Dickinson High School a portion of the north side of Wilmington north of that McKean portion. So that's how we currently exist.

Next slide. What that creates is a lack of continuity in vertical articulation between middle schools and high schools. So you see that each of our schools pulls from at least three of our middle schools, and that's AI and Dickinson, and McKean has a new community being created by all four of our middle schools. I want you to digest that for a minute. It's a lot, I know. This can be dense information if you're seeing it for the first time. This slide deck will be posted tomorrow morning.

Next slide. All right, the next piece that we looked at is the issue of the number of seats we have to offer our students and the number of students that we have to sit in those seats. Because we are a choice state where students can choose to fill out a state choice application for any school, and if that school is not at capacity or not at least 80% capacity, we must allow that student to attend that school. What you see goes back—and that is really small, but you have two dates there: 2003 and 2025. All right, the key takeaways I'll go to first. High school enrollment between 2003 and 2025 has grown by 12%, but high school seats have grown by 26% over that same period as we have added two new schools since that time period. The school district charters the Delaware Military Academy starting in 2004 and Conrad Schools of Science in 2007. What that has created is our high school capacity numbers sit currently at 83%. Set another way, we have 1,000 more seats in our school district in our high schools than we have students to fill those seats. So at any given time over the past 20 years, one of our three attendance zone schools has been in a difficult situation of being significantly underenrolled: McKean High School on coming up on 20 years ago; Dickinson High School about nine, 10 years ago; AI High's precipitous decline, which has gotten some articles in news media over the past year, has dropped down to, I think they sit currently at about 575. So that is—that's that—that is—we spent a lot of time on this information. Again, if you go to the website, you'll see a lot more slides, a lot more infographics to go along with it.

Next slide. What we know is that for the most part, while we did get a bump in enrollment when we opened Conrad Schools of Science—or when the district opened Conrad, DMA, and Conrad Schools of Science—over 20 or 20 years ago, is that we did move about 400 students. We earn 400 more students over that period of time. However, for the past 15 years, we have remained static at the high school level. We educate about 5,000 students, a bit more than 5,000 students, of which 4,000 are Red Clay residents, are in-district students. I think that's important to note because I think that's important information to show that that's where we are and that's who we are. And the University of Delaware—you're going to see a slide by the University of Delaware shortly that will assist with that. If you look at our middle schools, very similar. We actually over the same time period—this goes back, the bar graph and line graph—the bar graph shows the current enrollment at all eight of our middle school programs, and the line graph shows all eight as they were in 2000. Brandywine Springs and the John Dickinson Middle Year program did not exist in 2000, so we've gone from six middle school programs to eight middle school programs, and we actually have less students in our middle schools now than we did 25 years ago. So we have a reduction of about a hundred students. A lot of discussion about the charter schools at the middle school level that have come up in New Castle County over that time period. I would say for the most part we've remained constant, but certainly have seen no increase, but we have increased seats significantly over that time. Give you a moment to consider that slide.

Next slide. As you see, we actually over the past 15 years have decreased in middle school enrollment while we've added new schools to our middle school programming. We next talked a lot about the impact of low enrollment on programming okay and and I I will be the as someone who has worked in high schools for for many many years okay it's difficult to tell whether programming you know there there's a clear connection between enrollment and programming and if you are underenrolled it is very very difficult to offer a comprehensive program to your schools to to your to your families at your school okay couple of examples are advanced coursework opportunities elective and CTE programming opportunities extracurricular opportunities and the one that gets probably the most press is high school athletics right you'll always hear that AI duPont had to cancel their football season or school B had to they didn't have a softball team the last couple of years all right so while it may not be the most important of the four people can easily identify with that because they hear that in the community. Next slide.

College Course Offerings so some actual data associated with that, you see Cab Calloway and Conrad the number of college courses that they offer when compared to AI High, McKean and Dickinson okay and I think it's important to note that you know if we have a comprehensive high school and we want students to attend our comprehensive high school we have to be comprehensive in nature and I think that that is something that the committee continued to grapple with over this time period and then the interscholastic athletic offerings you know show a lower number of offerings at AI, McKean and Dickinson when compared to Conrad, Charter School of Wilmington and DMA. Most significantly I think is the lack of subvarsity programming at those schools and so a ninth grader coming into the high school and wanting to try a sport may be somewhat less eager to participate if they have to jump in at a varsity level of competition. Next slide.

So after looking at significant data for a couple of meetings we sort of came up with key findings and we've already spoken through some of those. High school feeders were last updated in 2002 resulting in no straight line feeders between the middle schools and the high schools. There had been a precipitous enrollment decline at Skyline the year that the John Dickinson MYP opened in 2015 so precipitous decline of nearly 400 students over a 10-year period. AI High had a precipitous enrollment decline between 2010 and 2025 from 1400 students to 550 students, 575 where it currently stands. AI High, we looked at some data—I did not share this data again, it's on the website—but there are significant more. There are significantly more students who could possibly attend McKean or Dickinson than there are AI High School. Okay. I did not—that data was complex in nature and very difficult to understand but let me tell you that Dickinson and McKean currently have about 80% more students to potentially attend their attendance zone school than does AI duPont High School okay so that was a key finding we came up with.

We discussed the fact that Warner has no distinct feeder pattern, Warner Elementary School. It is one of two schools that splits up its fifth grade class and sends them to two different middle schools and then from there those two different middle schools the Warner community goes to all three of our high schools. High school enrollment has remained constant but we have gone from five to seven high schools over the past 20 years. Middle school enrollment has declined slightly but we have gone from six to eight middle schools in the past 20 years. A prioritization of Red Clay residents in magnet and charter schools, that's Charter School of Wilmington, Delaware Military Academy, Conrad and Cab Calloway. In the choice process the School Board insisted that those students that Red Clay residents be given preference has impacted the attendance zone high school enrollment negatively over this time or there's been a reduction that can be attributed to it. And there are fragmented middle school and high school attendance zones in the city of Wilmington that have existed since 1982.

University of Delaware's Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research provided -just probably three months ago- an analysis of public school enrollment over the next 30 years from 2021 through 2050. They just produced the survey; you see Red Clay in purple at about 14,500 students in the year 2050 they anticipate and predict 12,000 students. They expect the growth and movement to lower New Castle County and Sussex County over that time period. Again we have that study on our site. At this time I'd like to introduce Dr. Green to join us and talk a little bit about the Redding Consortium.

⏯️ 26:27 Dorrell Green: Good evening everyone. Thank you for those who are here in the auditorium at Brandywine Springs and those who are joining us online. As Mr. Pruitt indicated these are longstanding enrollment trends that impact Red Clay because at the end of the day Red Clay is truly a microcosm not only of northern New Castle County but the state and so when we look at our charter charter options when we look at choice—I happened to be at Linden Hill’s fifth grade move up ceremony today and it was interesting number that the fifth grade class that's moving up to sixth grade are likely to attend 14 different middle schools and so that's a lot of pull on community, that's a lot of pull on neighborhoods. That's again - families have options and choice but when you look at a comprehensive school district that pulls on our ability to have that enrollment.

And so what you actually see on the slide today is the Redding Consortium for education equity is also under a process as a result of which was initially Senate Bill 148 but was House Bill 22, 222 and 229 which was to promote educational equity within the City of Wilmington and Northern New Castle County. The goal was to streamline from four to two comprehensive or traditional districts that serve the city of Wilmington. So currently the Brandywine School District, Christina School District, Colonial, Red Clay along with New Castle County Vo-tech but the four main school districts are the ones that the city of Wilmington as a part of the city has been carved out to serve the City of Wilmington. And so the Redding Consortium's task is to look at redistricting with the primary goal to which was approved in an interim plan on May 9th of 2024 which was to remove the Christina School District from serving the city of Wilmington. That plan or that goal is to then redistribute that part of the city to yet to be defined comprehensive school districts to serve again two or fewer which would mean two out of the four would no longer be serving the city of Wilmington in addition to Christina no longer serving the city of Wilmington and the final plan expected by March 2026.

They have three—we have, as I serve on the Redding Consortium, fiscal, operational and engagement subcommittees. There is a meeting this weekend, June 14th at East Side Charter School that is hosted by Redding Consortium. They had two town halls, one on May 19th which was an in-person hosted at Warner Elementary and then it was a virtual town hall on May 22nd and they're exploring different things around teacher pay, wraparound services, early learning is a big conversation in that space just in terms of what does early education early learning look like and then various options for whatever the remaining schools would be. American Institute of Research is conducting a landscape analysis and this analysis is really looking at the social drivers of health, really looking at the lived experience of the children's families and communities within the city of Wilmington that really impact our schools.

One of the interesting findings: there are approximately let's just say 3,000 or so current Wilmington residents that live in Wilmington proper high school age children attending grades 9 to 12. They go to 37 different high schools across the state. 37 different high schools. Proportionately AI High School serves as the largest number of students out of that number but yet it's the lowest enrolled Red Clay school. So I'll say that again, AI duPont High School proportionately serves the largest number of current 9th through 12th grade students that live within the city of Wilmington but it's the lowest or one of the lowest overall enrolled schools in the state. And so clearly through our analysis looking at the 20-year history of enrollment it's just not a Red Clay issue it's a broader northern New Castle County issue but it impacts us locally just in terms of how we're able to provide programming and sustainability of programming within our district.

And so they're considering looking at various options which will be discussed this weekend per some modeling conducted by American Institute of Research to look at what would be the impact if there were a single school district. I know many within the community have championed we need a Wilmington School District back but what would that look like? What would that impact look like? What would be the disproportionate impact on students' families and residents within the city of Wilmington but then more importantly the districts that currently serve the city of Wilmington? I can tell you preliminarily that students probably would fare far worse than they do now because that would further concentrate high levels of need within a small geographic area which would then require a lot more support. What does a northern New Castle County consolidated school district look like? Again a modeling that will take place and then pairing multiple districts a Colonial-Red Clay, Colonial-Brandywine, Brandywine-Red Clay all of the options excluding Christina from the city of Wilmington.

Upcoming timelines again analysis and engagement will continue through the summer through the fall. The controller general's office would review the fiscal impact of things in January 2026. They would have to submit a final plan to the State Board of Education for review and then legislative approval a year from now. So that work does potentially impact but I think the thing that we've already taken a step to really look at what the analysis looks like for us within Red Clay as a district. I think we've done our due diligence to see what that impact looks like to us locally irregardless of what happens with the Redding Consortium, we'd be clear-eyed in terms of what that impact would look like for us from facilities enrollment and then more importantly from a programmatic standpoint.

So happy to answer any questions once we get to the Q&A section of it but I will say this: the other point that Mr. Pruitt brought up no rhyme or reason around the 2000 early 2000 high school feeder pattern change that likely had to do with the Neighborhood Schools Act as well. That was the same time period where districts more importantly K-8 were forced to have students come. That was the end of Deseg busing; students then attended schools those who lived in the city of Wilmington close to home which obviously had a disproportionate impact because there were no high schools within the city of Wilmington. So when you look at high school feeder patterns again as a district our feeder patterns - no rhyme or reason - are carved up into various parts of communities within the city of Wilmington. So thank you.  

Mark Pruitt: So the committee Dr. Bond will come up to talk about the committee's brainstorming and again we'll be here to answer any questions once we get to the conclusion of the presentation.

⏯️ 33:52 Tawanda Bond: Thank you Dr. Green. So I'm here just to share some information about how we brainstormed in our committee. One of my roles is making sure that we have equitable, rich, representative voices heard in all of our committee meetings. So in our meeting when we got to our brainstorming session we really talked about no idea was too big or too small because we wanted to make sure everyone was recognized in the space but we made sure that we always had our goals—our goals to keep us on track and on pace with the goals that were charged to us by our Board. Strong and balanced enrollment across schools; aligning our balance to K-8 attendance zones when possible; considering geographic and neighborhood schools when possible; and equitable access to quality education for all students. And these were kind of our norms at the bottom.

All right so during that conversation we had a lot of rich conversations in our groups. Our groups were diverse and where we landed was on about 12 recommendations. So this was kind of our big ideas. So we were very innovative in our thought processes. We had a lot of conversations in our groups but we really always brought it back to the relevance of our ideas: so do those ideas really address the core issues of enrollment and programming? So what you'll see here is kind of where we started and when I'm done I'm going to turn it over to one of my colleagues Mr. Sean Snyder to talk us through some of the research that went into where we're ending at currently.

The first one was to repurpose one high school as a technical high school innovation center so that really would reduce us down to two attendance zone schools making an innovation center that would be available to our Red Clay to our middle school students; moving MYP to Skyline; creating a virtual program opportunity for secondary students.

And then moving CSW to one of our existing high schools and reducing down to two attendance zone high schools; also expanding Dickinson to a 6-12 IB magnet program, which would also reduce us down to two attendance zone schools; reducing down from eight to seven middle school programs because we started looking at how some of these things could be in tandem; move AI Middle to AI High; we talked about creating a 6 through 12 school A through Z program; capping Cab and Conrad so that they would have smaller enrollments; creating a K-8 attendance zone school at Warner; we had conversations around this; creating a K-12 attendance zone school at Warner; and then choice busing for all students to all schools. So as you can see, this was a large amount of differing opinions on ways that we can address the goal that was charged to us by the Board, but in order for us to progress beyond this point, we needed more information. We needed research, we needed more data, we needed more expert opinions and expert advice. So I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Shawn Snyder to walk us through what our next steps were.

⏯️ 37:12 Shawn Snyder: Good evening everyone. So to get this expert advice, we tapped on a couple of people that work here in the Red Clay School District. We have Dr. Ted Ammann and Dr. Cory Heacock, our Chief Operating Officer and our Manager of Teaching and Learning and Assessment. They did an analysis of our facilities and looked at several categories, one being the HR impact—that's human resources, that's our human capital, the people that work in a building; our transportation, how we get students there; our technology and nutrition, the ability to have things like this and make sure our students eat each day; our facilities, just the state that they're in and what type of improvements would be necessary if we were to move buildings; and then finally the overall cost to the district, not just initial costs but long-term costs.

Dr. Ammann did an analysis and decided to rate these between high, low, and medium, and this is not necessarily a scientific study but it's a brief overview of what some of the high-level resources we would need to make these moves. We looked at every single idea and right here high and low and medium don't necessarily mean good or bad; they just mean the amount of effort, the amount of time, or the amount of treasure that would have to be dedicated to making that move. And I'll give you a moment just to digest these ones right here. For example, the innovation center, the HR impact would be high because you would move the teachers from one building and distribute them into two other buildings. The transportation would be higher because we would now have an additional run to get those students to an innovation center, but you would also be losing a bus run because there would be two high schools instead of three. The tech nutrition: it's pretty much the same; we would redistribute those efforts, but it wouldn't be a big lift for the technology department and it wouldn't be a huge lift for our nutrition department. Facilities: there would be a level of upgrading that the buildings would need to be able to have these programs in them, so there would be an impact. And then finally the cost; generally right down the middle too—there would be some investment that would be required, but it's not like building a new building, which would be a high cost.

Let's go to the next slide. Once again, these are all the choices the committee came up with, evaluating each one. I'll give you a moment to look through these while you do. I'll go through consolidated 6 to 8 programs: once again, HR impact was medium; transportation was a medium impact; tech nutrition low; facilities would be a high impact there because we would be moving a lot of buildings around and that takes a considerable amount of money and effort; and then the cost would be medium for all of those types of moves.

Let's go to the next slide as well. Same thing right here; we have our other choices, whether it be Warner Shortage K to 8, Warner K-12, capping Cab and Conrad—we mean limiting the amount of students that can enter there—or choice busing. Now I do want to point out one of the ones right there for cost for choice busing because this was one that we talked about quite a bit in the committee and it seems on its surface an easy solution. Transportation to do this way—to make sure a bus basically shows up at everybody's house and brings them to school no matter where you go—is almost prohibitively expensive given the rules of how Delaware funds transportation. The difference would be completely on the local and it would be a staggering amount of money to make that happen.

So we also had Dr. Heacock conduct a lot of research to answer some of the questions the committee came with. After each one of the meetings we might look at some feeder patterns and I think it was Miss Nesmith or Dr. Nesmith—I'm sorry—asked, "Well what's the preferable grade pattern for a school? Should it be K-8? Should it be middle school? Should it be K-12?" So Dr. Heacock evaluated research, actually did some evaluations of districts neighboring us, and we determined in that one there is really no definitive research about a magical grade pattern that really addresses some of the needs. Most of the time what we discovered is grade patterns aren't even considered when making these decisions; things like cost, transportation, population density—those make those decisions before anybody even gets to that part. So we couldn't find anything compelling; there doesn't seem to impact outcomes, at least in the research that is available.

What we did find is the size of a school does impact performance, and we found this in Delaware and then actually throughout the country in both research and then an analysis of neighboring school districts. There's a little bit of magic in a school that maxes out at around 1,500 students; there seems to be a sweet spot according to the literature. The other thing too is the larger a school, the less expensive that school is to run to a certain point, which makes sense with economies of scale. When you do things in bulk—go to Costco, buy toilet paper; go to the gas station, buy toilet paper—figure out which one's cheaper. That makes a lot of sense. Research on grade level configurations is inconclusive. I said before, grade level configuration is typically based on student enrollment, building space, cost, and community influence.

Let's go to the next slide. All of our homework, and Dr. Heacock really did this work—I don't want to take credit for it, she did a phenomenal job gathering this information—and all these links are live links that you can go check out our sources if you need to after the presentation. At this time, I believe I'm handing this over to—is this Jodi? I think this is your slide.

⏯️ 42:43 Jodi Muffley: An analysis of ideas: each idea considered against the relevance to the problem. Does this idea address the core issues of enrollment and programming? Feasibility: what is the practicality of implementing the idea considering resources and possible constraints? And the impact: is this a high leverage initiative?

⏯️ 43:22 Unknown Speaker: So after a lot of great conversation and some robust discussions, the committee agreed to move forward with the following parts of its recommendation. So number one is alignment of attendance zones to create straight line feeder patterns that align high school attendance zones with the existing middle school attendance zones, very similar to what Red Clay did in 2015 from elementary and middle school. Balanced enrollment, which distributes students equitably across attendance zone high schools. And then program equity: ensure all students, regardless of high school, have access to high quality academic and extracurricular programs, which definitely goes back to one of Mr. Pruitt's earlier slides, giving kids opportunities: AP classes, dual enrollment, athletically. Okay, so the committee unanimously agreed to remove the following ideas from further consideration without further discussion. One was creating a K through 12 attendance zone school at Warner Elementary; the indoor and outdoor facility is not equipped for high school. Obviously Warner is absolutely gorgeous from the outside, but there's not room for a football field. And then next one was to make this innovation center available to middle school students. We had a really nice discussion on that and the topic was really, while middle school students could take a field trip to the innovation center, it is not necessarily developmentally appropriate to transport middle school students to another site for programming on a regular basis because middle school students and the bus are not always the best combination.

And then this was our committee; we each had to do four different tallies that we felt were the best going forward, and this is how the committee voted.

Mark Pruitt: Go back one slide. Once we went through the analysis of ideas, we pulled a couple out because practically they didn't make sense. We then took a straw poll of the committee members where they could choose four of the ideas and it sort of gave us some ideas as to where we should consider to have discussions when developing a recommendation. All right, the ones are the four. So if you look at Jason Bastinelli at the top: Relocate CSW, K-8 at Warner, 8 to 7 middle school programs, and John Dickinson MYP to Skyline were the four he supported the most at that moment with the information he knew. You could not choose five; you could choose three.

⏯️ 46:08 Mark Pruitt: Okay, the committee then began to ask questions about the Innovation Center. Obviously, it was the most outside-the-box idea, and so in 2022 our district conducted an audit of our CTE programming in the school district. We looked at several things: the curriculum, the industry partner committees that we needed to have, but we also looked at the facilities themselves. And when doing so, we came up with—I have three areas on a rubric: one, they meet the standard of our new strategic plan; yellow, they're approaching the standards of our new strategic plan; and red, they do not. The facility itself and the classroom and the contents inside the classroom does not meet currently; it allowed us to do something to work over the next five years. What you see is that McKean, not only the district but McKean itself, has really leaned into career and technical education programming over the past 15 years. I think they are the flagship of career and technical education not only in Red Clay but in the state of Delaware. So what does it give us? It gives us teachers over there that have a great program not only, but facilities that give us a great program.

Next slide. The committee wanted to look at, "Well, who else does this?" and so we spent some time at a meeting looking at Cherry Creek Innovation Campus in Centennial, Colorado, and more locally, the Cecil County School of Technology in Cecil County, Maryland. Actually had an opportunity to speak with their superintendent of schools as well as an assistant principal at the program and bring some information about how that program works back to the committee. Then there were some questions about, "Well, what would it look like in Red Clay? What might it look like?" And this was really a stretch. And so a school counselor at AI High who's on the committee, Maddie Wright-Meier, she and I met and really just sort of sketched out some ideas. Right, certainly two people don't make the decision of what an innovation center and its relationship to its two home high schools—you don't make that decision with a school counselor and an administrator—but we did have significant experience in our roles at the high school level and took a look at what that might look like.

We also spoke to Rodel—we've done some work with Rodel and with Hanover Research on where jobs are going to be over the next 10 years. And so we took everything, and if we put it at McKean, that would be facilities that already meet the standard of our new strategic plan. We would have to upgrade the Academy of Finance, move that over from AI to McKean—pretty easy lift. The more of a little heavier of a lift, the Entrepreneurship program from Dickinson to McKean, but McKean had really invested in everything and there was a lot of—there were a lot of things that the two schools do that McKean already does.

Where we had gaps are in two areas. One is health science: while we do have a patient care program at McKean, we would need to expand that patient care. We know there are wages for 18-year-olds to go whether that be a radiology tech, a phlebotomy tech, a CNA, to be job-ready with a livable wage at 18 with also the opportunity to take college credits and build on that career. Additionally, the area where we have a real gap where there are jobs out there now is in information technology. The area of computer tech—we've all had our—been in a workspace or at home where our computer does not work and we have to call the tech that works for that company and they come out and they fix the problem. A very valuable part of our school district; Sean works with those folks all the time. There is a Cisco three-year program that could provide a certification, so that would be an area we would need to add to give all of our high school students access to that program, as well as some a cybersecurity pathway to get students involved in. So we do know there's some gaps there.

Next slide. You know, what might it look like for a 9th through 12th grader? A 9th grader might take a CTE exploratory course at the home school with field trips to the innovation center during their 9th grade year. In 10th grade, it's a three-year—a three-credit sequence of courses that is a graduation requirement in the state of Delaware. They would take a 1.5 credit class in 10th grade, a 1.5 credit class in 11th grade to complete that three-credit sequential pathway, and then the senior year be able to take dual enrollment college coursework associated with that pathway or industry standard credentialing coursework associated with that pathway. Just an idea to sort of let people get their hands around it.

⏯️51:34 Mark Pruitt: Next slide. What might it look like at our schools? All three of our schools operate on an AB block; that is an 8-period day with four periods on a Monday, 5, 6, 7 and 8 on a Tuesday, and then it starts again—1, 2, 3, 4 on a Wednesday, 5, 6, 7, 8 on a Thursday. What might it look like at the innovation center? Students arrive on campus. Obviously, as students got older, if they had transportation to get to the Innovation campus to start their day, they could drive directly; you'd have to have a setup like that. But if they rode a school bus, they would arrive at their home school, get on a shuttle bus—either 9 or 13 minutes—head over to the innovation center for an Innovation Center block from 7:55 to 10:05, board a shuttle bus that departs for the home campus at 10:15, and be ready to attend block 3 and/or lunch at the home campus at 10:30. Very similar to what is done at the Cecil program and the Cherry Creek program. And you can see what a PM block might look like as well. So a quarter of your day—an AM or a PM on an A or a B day—would be spent in this program. Certainly you could potentially take an elective that would have you over there all day and what that might look like—there's a lot of work to be done but they asked for you know sort of a sample of what might it look like for Red Clay. Next slide.

Then we got into decision-making okay and the first one we pulled out was virtual 6-12 programming. There were 9 out of 19 tallies for it; there certainly was interest for it. We decided that it was worth further investigation and that we would include it in our recommendation, but we would include it in a way that allowed the district to further investigate the possibility of virtual programming going forward. We did initially—the committee had it as a 6 through 12 virtual programming opportunities. The committee by and large thought it was developmentally inappropriate to have middle school on online courses and so our recommendation will be for further consideration of 9 through 12 courseware.

Reduced enrollment at Conrad School of Science and Cab Calloway: no one gave a tally and so went with unanimous consent we removed it from further consideration. AI Middle School and AI High School: combining the two for a 6-12 attendance zone campus did receive two tallies out of 19. The idea would limit future enrollment at AI High and had unanimous consent to remove from further consideration. Relocate the Charter School of Wilmington from the Wilmington campus to one of the three existing high schools and reduce down to two attendance zone high schools: got four tallies out of 19. At this point there had been enough discussion that there could potentially be a nay vote so we did take a vote. I made a motion to remove the idea due to not enough support by the committee. Discussion ensued, there was a second, and the motion passed to remove it from further consideration 11-0, and two abstained. There were no "no" votes. Choice busing for all students received five tallies of 19. After significant discussion—and I think I got this worded pretty well—while all members agreed with the idea conceptually, the idea was not practical and the district did not have the funding for such an initiative. There was a motion, a second, and the motion passed to remove it from further consideration 11 yes to 2 no.

Now we were down to a core group that were somewhat connected to one another. So you could not make a decision to move forward with an Innovation center at McKean and reduce down to two high schools and leaning into the John Dickinson school as an all-magnet school and reducing down to two high schools—if we're going to move forward you can only move forward with one. Significant discussion about that okay. Miss Todd Dixon, who was on the committee, made a motion to move forward with the idea in the recommendation to move forward with the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus and remove the John Dickinson IB Magnet from further consideration. The motion was seconded by Dr. Muffley, here with us tonight. The motion passed 11 yes, two abstentions. With the innovation center decision, the idea of the John Dickinson school was removed from further consideration. I apologize for the missing "i" and an "n." Go down one.

Okay, consolidation of middle school: these two were connected right? Reducing down middle schools from 8 to 7 was a broad idea and then there were a couple that were more specific in nature. After significant discussion I made a motion just to move us towards a vote to move forward with both ideas in the recommendation: one, the consolidation of middle school programs from 8 to 7, and moving the John Dickinson Middle Years Programme to Skyline. The first one had 13 tallies, the second one nine tallies. The idea of the committee was that this would allow for increased high school enrollment at the John Dickinson school, and the motion was seconded by Mr. Leonard. 12 members in attendance voted unanimously.

The discussion about where to move the Dickinson—what to do with the middle schools—there were two issues: one is moving the Dickinson MYP middle school program and the K-8 at Warner. There was significant discussion and concern about the Warner community and the fact that those students have significant travel to the two schools the furthest away in our school district, HB duPont Middle School and Skyline Middle School. However, the committee did think the idea of adding an additional middle school program contradicted the committee's charge. So we're working to boost enrollment, to improve and expand programming, and now we found ourselves talking about adding a middle school attendance zone at Warner Elementary. What we did was, because of the 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. We decided to include that in the final recommendation.

The recommendation, as I'm sure most or all of you have seen at this point—there was a one-pager that went out—we came up with three core principles: 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; and program equity, ensure that all students, regardless of high school, have access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programming.

Specifically, program change number one is the establishment of Thomas McKean Innovation Campus. The committee recommends that Thomas McKean High School be reimagined as a Thomas McKean Innovation Campus through expanded partnerships with local colleges, universities, and the business community. The flagship hub will provide coursework in the following areas: CTE programming, industry standard credentialing programming, and early college credit opportunities. As part of the change, the number of comprehensive high school attendance zone schools would be reduced from 3 to 2: AI High 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 at those two schools. These two attendance zones better align with the middle school attendance zones allowing for straight line feeder patterns from middle school to high school, and that the program would provide a short shuttle bus transportation to AI High and Dickinson to the McKean Innovation Campus for career technical and early college coursework.

Program change number two was the relocation of the John Dickinson Middle Years Programme to allow for increased high school enrollment at the John Dickinson School. The committee recommends relocating MYP middle school program from Dickinson to Skyline Middle School, allowing for more balanced enrollment across middle school programming.

Finally, two additional recommendations for future consideration by the district: one deals with middle school attendance zones—re-evaluate middle school attendance zones especially as they pertain to the Warner Elementary School community to improve feeder pattern continuity and equity; and two, virtual high school programming—explore the development of virtual high school coursework to expand flexibility and learning opportunities for Red Clay students.

Next slide. Stakeholder engagement: once we came up with a draft—it really was a lot of work to get to that—we came up with a draft and we're out now trying to engage with stakeholders. We did some of that; we had 7 public meetings scheduled. We already had 6 of them; we actually had 6 originally and we added one because we knew we had too much work to get done. And there was public comment I believe all except for one of those meetings. June 10th here tonight we're having a community meeting with a question and answer session. We just completed two student focus groups, one for middle school students and one for high school students. An executive summary of those two focus groups will be provided to the committee next Tuesday at our meeting. And we have a community survey that's currently open. There's a QR code to get to the survey if you have not already taken it. However, we wanted to not only be able to dialogue with the folks who came out to the meeting here tonight and answer questions, but again allow you to hold off on completing the survey before answering the questions. Okay, question answer. Go back to the queue; we'll leave a QR code up.

Dorrell Green: I want to personally thank Mr. Pruitt and the committee members who spent the past 6 months. Again, these aren't easy conversations for us to have, and the reality of it is to kind of do status quo and do nothing will further exacerbate a lot of the inequities that we see within our district. And so one of the agreements was again no idea would get critiqued or receive criticism, but when we know we're talking about students, when we're talking about families, when we're talking about feeder patterns, it ultimately impacts people. It's going on 7 years that I've been in this school district and programs come, programs go. We have certain programs and schools that are desirable within our district at the expense of others. We are the Red Clay Consolidated School District, and what consolidation means is that every child, every family, every educator should at least have some foundational semblance of the same experience regardless of what school you're in under the Red Clay umbrella.

So this was a committee's attempt to take historical dynamics that fall outside of our community—choice, charter, 20-year feeder pattern enrollments, declining enrollments—to compile all of that information to put forth recommendations per the Board's charge to investigate what it would look like to provide an equitable outcome or experience for every student within our district. So there are no definitive answers, but I do want to thank the committee members for bringing their ideas, for bringing their concepts, for digging into the data, for doing the research, and for giving of their time with students in mind to look at what we can do as a school district community to not only be innovative in a sense, creative in a sense, but more importantly to be equitable about what that learning experience is for every child, every student across the district. We just had 5 commencement ceremonies; many of them look different than the others, but in the end over $10 million worth of scholarship awards granted to our graduates across the district. They're going to top schools, but it is our responsibility and due diligence to make sure that every student has that opportunity, and the way that status quo is, we're not granting every student, every family, every child that opportunity across the district. So whether it's this recommendation or another one, we do have to evolve and have to change to make sure that we look at again—because numbers aren't growing but we've increased the number of seats and capacity, so there has to be something.

So we want your collective input, we want your feedback, and now will transition to the question and answer session because I know there are questions both online and in the audience. So I'll bring Mr. Pruitt back up so that we can really figure out how we're going to answer those questions. So we can start with in-person first. One moment.

⏯️ 1:06:34 Audience Member Orr: Hi, so hi how are you? First off, thank you everyone on the committee for all your hard work. I guess 2 areas of concern are the bus transportation for students with disabilities and then the bus transportation for students with behaviors when you're talking about an innovation center. So for example if a kid gets a bus suspension and then let's say that kid also has a student with a disability, where's the fine line between denying that kid access to FAPE? So it's just something to consider. Number 2: magnet schools. I mean I kind of feel like we're ignoring the elephant in the room. The whole purpose of a magnet is to attract, yet we're talking about a comprehensive school district with a comprehensive school but the idea of relooking or looking at these magnet schools wasn't considered. And I just am shocked but at the same time not surprised that that was missing because those tend to be the holy grails of the Red Clay School District. And I mean Mr. Pruitt, no offense, but you were the principal of one of those schools. So I mean it's tough for me to think that the committee really exhausted all consideration when no tallies were given to even reconsider looking at the magnet schools. What would that look like if the magnet schools were absorbed into the 3 comprehensive schools where students still have access to all the great programs that all the other comprehensive schools offer and they're still getting great instruction by talented individuals? That's I mean I guess that's my question is why wasn't that considered?

Dorrell Green: So I'll let Mr. Pruitt bring the profile up, but there was discussion around capping the enrollment of the 2 magnet schools. And for the sake of the public and the community, the state of Delaware does not have a magnet school designation; that is actually just a Red Clay designation. Be it as it may, we're talking about Conrad and Cab Calloway, so let's be specific about what we're talking about. In essence, they do go through choice process and have a semblance of an enrollment cap per se. The question was do you further cap their enrollment, and per the committee's discussions from my understanding they decided that really looking at that wasn't an option but there was discussion around just that.

Audience Member (Orr): I guess my question is why have them at all when you have a comprehensive district with 3 comprehensive high schools that could service all kids in an equitable fashion?

Dorrell Green: So what 2 schools then do we then close?

Audience Member (Orr): Cab and Conrad.

Dorrell Green: We have 5 high schools. You say go to 3 comprehensive high schools.  

Audience Member (Orr): I am not trying to be a rabble rouser (lost mic) ...No. And I guess the question is that if we have 5 schools. We have 2 magnet schools and we have 3 comprehensive high schools. Why don't we look at adjusting or closing the 2 magnet schools so those kids could matriculate into the comprehensive schools? 

Mark Pruitt: I can speak to it only through the lens of the committee as best I can. One, that didn't come up as an idea after brainstorming in 3 small groups. Nothing was a bad idea, think outside the box. There was discussion or an idea to cap those programs, make them make those programs smaller. I think in the limited discussion that there was a thought that they were the most popular in terms of choice applications and that potentially that was a metric used in the decision-making process. That's just—but again I might be speaking for someone on the committee so I'm going to let Dr. Kecia Nesmith speak to that.

⏯️ 1:11:38 Kecia Nesmith: I think it's—Thank you for that question. Thank you for that question. There was some discussion around that. I particularly brought that up. I think part of the issue was that we didn't want to get too deep into philosophical differences around magnets and the purpose of magnets. Magnets, I'll put in air quotes, and the purpose of magnets. Because in the state of Delaware with school choice we often have a fractured approach to schooling because of the choice. And so the magnet schools were created, the programs were created, and these are things that I think that we need to continue to explore but without creating too much of a fractured school district in the time period that the School Board and the Board—is the collective, not the person—had charged this group with. I think that that would be too—I can't think of the word—but, it would impact a lot.

But I do think that we need to look at not just the school district but the state because a lot of the issues that we are talking about come from the different laws and the different mandates of the state. And so what would schools look like in Delaware in general if there wasn't school choice? I know many of us may be from other states. I'm from Pennsylvania originally; we didn't have school choice. We have smaller districts, they're funded differently, and so to have a comprehensive high school in those locations made a lot more sense. But with our district being one of the bigger districts and trying to mitigate too much change at once, I think that this is what we settled on. But I would say that there were many people who did have the perspective, myself included, around looking at the magnet program schools or whatever. So I do think that that was a good point to bring up, but in terms of what we actually are able to do with funding and change and all of that I think that this is—my personal opinion—that we don't have a perfect idea for how to move forward but I think it is addressing the charge of the committee which was to ensure that there's equitable programming and access.

One of the things I did bring up though, and I think we can continue to talk about this, is the early college offerings and the things that are happening at Conrad and Cab Calloway. How do they have access to the innovation center and if they have access to the innovation center? So I think there's some curricular things and some programmatic pieces at all levels of the school that could be addressed through a plan that would move forward so that it would be a little bit more equitable around around the around the whole thing and then eventually maybe looking at those magnet schools and looking at a different approach.

Mark Pruitt: All right, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take a second question here. Mr. Hynson.

⏯️ 1:15:18 Audience Member Devon Hynson: All right so number 1: I have some of the same concerns that the gentleman just expressed, but with some of the transportation issues that I've experienced over the last 20 years as a student advocate I just don't have any confidence. I think it's unreasonable to expect that we're going to handle transportation effectively because we came up with a new innovation program. So I just think that that's wrongheaded just to begin with; that's just my personal opinion. The other thing is that I didn't recognize any community members on the list that you had so I would like to go and look at how many people from the community were actually on that committee to begin with. And then the third one is because I was under the impression that much of this was generated because of the concerns with AI and the enrollment right? So I wanted to know what prompted the committee and why basically was the committee created? So that's 3 questions. Can somebody write them down?

Mark Pruitt: Yeah I'll answer. Well the first one was more of a comment I think, but I'll answer the second question which was the 7 nominating districts. There were 7 members on the committee, one from each of the 7 nominating districts. We allowed folks to put their name in if they were interested; it created about—I think there were about 120 people that were interested. The largest nominating district had 20 or 25; the small—but everyone had at least one. So all 7 nominating districts in the Red Clay School District were represented on the committee. We confirm their address within each of the nominating—a few of them are here.

And what was the third question I think is more of a Board level question and maybe Dr. Green. It was like what prompted the Board to ask to launch this committee?

Dorrell Green: So 2 things I think prompted. One, discussion around overall high school enrollment which AI—the Friends of AI, the task force, which we did have a task force to look at AI. But generally speaking, we went through a strategic plan process and we knew that certain schools were offering certain programs that other schools weren't. So when the Board gave us the charge to look at AI, we told them we're at this position because previous times when one school in Red Clay had an issue, decisions were made that impacted pretty much everybody. So if we're not looking at this from a comprehensive lens and we're only looking at it through the vacuum or lens—because when Dickinson's enrollment was similar to being the lowest enrolled high school when AI was at its peak in 2009 and and choice busing was providing transportation from suburban McKean and suburban Dickinson feeder patterns to prop up AI's enrollment, we didn't have a task force or committee at that point. That just became the flagship high school.

So rather than do something in isolation to address one school, we looked at something comprehensively with the charge of the Board to look at what this means for the totality of the district and how do we look at programming, resources, opportunity, and access across all of Red Clay. And so the com—(Question from audience) I didn't see a hand up just to answer—and I'll hand I'll hand it over quickly so realistically resources to have that same level—Who's next? I can walk to you—to have that same level of programming we wouldn't be able to have the the arts programs at each school at the same level. We wouldn't be able to have the sciences programs because of the resources. So you do limit by having more and you want to give everything.

⏯️ 1:19:47Audience Member Anne Budischak: Thank you. Hello district administrators, my name's Anne Budischak. I show up sometimes as a parent but I am showing up tonight to represent our small but beautiful slice of the district which is the MYP program at the John Dickinson School. So I do have a few questions; my colleagues who are joining us virtually have submitted questions as well but we're just looking for some clarification basically because there's been a lot of conversation about the impact on the high school communities and a lot of details around that but very little information about the MYP kind of shows up as a bullet point once in a while. So first, do you anticipate the MYP becoming a small program within Skyline or do you anticipate transitioning Skyline in its entirety to a middle year's program?

Dorrell Green: Yep so I would generally say my vision would be you would have to go schoolwide to provide access. Because even within the MYP framework, just like we know with all even if—for example in the diploma program even if you don't get the diploma—the IB diploma, opportunity and access to that IB curriculum is something that elevates all students. And we do know that and from my previous experience in working with international baccalaureate program—

Anne Budischak: The certification is specific to school and site location.

Dorrell Green: That was my second question. That would be something that we would have to consider. Obviously when you look at IB certification that the school itself would have to be designated as such.

Anne Budischak: Yeah absolutely so IB no longer allows small programs within a larger school so you would have to provide that extensive training to all of Skyline staff. That is a huge lift and it's also an expensive one that I'm wondering if it was taken into consideration when you were looking at the cost of making that change. One more question: what's going to happen to us? Because I don't foresee this being a simple cut and paste situation. I unfortunately would anticipate losing some families in the transition from our building, our tiny little tea up in the corner of Dickinson, into a different building. A lot of what attracts our families to our program is the small nature of the program, so I don't anticipate all of our families moving over and you know there will be redundancy obviously with the staff. So how do you anticipate reassigning the MYP staff when this change happens?

Dorrell Green: And again I think when you look at the one chart around high impact, low impact, medium impact—obviously the devil's in the details. We know that there will be an impact to staffing, who's currently certified, who would want to transition, to your point, how will we onboard and train new teachers or new staff. Again having in a past life gone through that, every teacher would have to be trained in that building but that's something that we will and are considering just in terms of what that transition would look like. Again the devil is in the details, but that hasn't been completely ironed out yet.

Anne Budischak: Okay so just to clarify we don't yet know how the staff would be reassigned?

Dorrell Green: Correct.

Mark Pruitt: Yep I would say that when we've done this in the past, which was not me, that we do have to engage with the teachers particularly RCEA, come up with some actions as to how we would, you know, as to how we would make those decisions. And RCEA would absolutely have a role in that as to, you know, would a student- would a teacher—would you would advocate that first right to move over to that building and continue with that program. I don't anticipate but that's a lot of the work that needs to be done which is why there's a two-year buffer, you know a two-year gap to do work like this. Right, we would have to engage with RCEA not only for the—again that's a small program—but McKean High School's core content teachers going one direction, CTE teachers at AI and John Dickinson going the other direction. There's some significant work to be done.

Anne Budischak: So the timeline here would not be for obviously not next school year but not the school year after that either so three years?

Mark Pruitt: The earliest we could do something like that, that we could start the new programming would be August of 2027.

Anne Budischak: Thank you. I appreciate all of your time.

Mark Pruitt: And I know there may have been one other question just in terms of the impact of Redding and that's why we also pushed that timeline out because again Redding which is June of 2026 which is next year their decision to really see what does that impact actually mean for us to be aligned.

Let's transition and get Zoom —I do feel like when you offer a Zoom option that they are equal participants so Beth can you ask a question from Zoom or is that possible? Are you able to start up at the top for questions? Are you able to start up at the top? You read us some questions and I'll reread them; I have no problem for the record. Okay. He's going to repeat it. I'll restate it okay.

So I don't believe I think we answered question number 3 but not 1 or 2. Stakeholder feedback is currently being collected both at a meeting like this, through student focus groups, but most importantly through the survey which is open through Thursday. The second part of that question was that I believe this is a long-term solution for Red Clay and not a band-aid. How about we'll go to an in-person question now.

⏯️1:26:47 Audience Member Jenny Howard: Okay, Hi. All right. So first I just wanted to clarify for everyone the Delaware Choice Law just says that anybody can apply to any school in the state including traditional schools, charter schools, etc. if there's capacity available. So we really can't keep blaming this fragmented district on the state choice law. They don't have magnet schools in Brandywine and they don't have this problem there. The data clearly shows that the course offerings, the extracurriculars, and the advanced academic opportunities vary dramatically across our district. So these disparities are not driven by student ability or interest but by the structures we've created. So my question is: how does this proposed plan address the deeply rooted resource imbalances between Red Clay's traditional high schools and its magnet schools and how is the district going to ensure that their under-resourced neighborhoods are equitably represented and supported across all specialized offerings? Basically I'm asking: we have a two-tiered system right now; we have winners and losers depending on what school you get into. Are we going to have that again? Is it going to be equal access to this Innovation campus or is it going to be application-based?

Dorrell Green: So it would be equal access to start from your last question working backwards and that's the whole purpose of it right? Because we know that there are inequities because they're tied to career technical ed pathways. So certifications and credentials—that would be the point of creating a hub with work-based learning opportunities so that if I am a student in a magnet or another high school I have access to that certification. Brandywine School District: 3 high schools, 3 middle schools, straight line feeders. So to compare Brandywine to Red Clay I think is an exercise in futility because we're going to try to really compare apples to oranges. Brandywine School District also has their DSG order in play. The Neighborhood Schools Act does not impact Brandywine the same way it impacts Red Clay. Brandywine School District has one elementary school that serves the city of Wilmington as a whole; Lombardi, Carcraft, Hanby all distribute their city population and then their middle schools, Springer and PS duPont, straight line feeder tally straight line feeder. And their middle schools to our point where we looked at rebalancing these directly into a traditional high school. So choice across their district with the exception of if you're choicing at Mount Pleasant High School for the IB program—there's more equitable programming because they can be consistent across 3 high schools rather than the 5 that we have and then the 2 charters that we authorize.

Mark Pruitt: We're going to pivot to a virtual question. There's a question about—we answered that one; I think that was probably a fellow teacher at Dickinson. Are there any other questions? Got it. All right, how about an in-person question right in the front.

Audience Member Unknown Speaker: Thanks. I just have a question so can you clarify is Redding the one that's looking at what to do with Wilmington?

Dorrell Green: Yes.

Audience Member Unknown Speaker: We've got this going on and then your group here going on. How do they coexist when they're the changes that in one could impact the other on how it exists?

Dorrell Green: So Redding is legislated, right, and it's a legislative body. I do sit on Redding Consortium as well as all the other superintendents and then various other appointed folks. Their timeline is actually ahead of ours, so the reality of it is whatever change that the legislature would make—let's just say Colonial and Brandywine are determined to be the 2 school districts—they're going to have to go through an internal process post-Redding decision. We've actually gone through an analysis pre-Redding decision so that whatever decision that potentially comes out of Redding at least we have a greater understanding of what that impact would be to our district, to one, advocate on behalf of Red Clay, to know what additional resources, what bandwidth, what grade configurations, feeder patterns, what all those adjustments look like. We're somewhat ahead of the game.

And again this is what we can currently control which is Red Clay. We can't determine, we can give input, but I will say the American Institute of Research (AIR's) modeling of what those potential options will look like will be telling because again it's just not a matter of redistributing the feeder pattern. It's just not saying Red Clay: Take a portion of the children in the city of Wilmington and the children are going to fare better—we know that's not the case. We're also looking at resources; you're looking at concentration. What does that look like for students with disabilities? Are you creating inherently disproportionality, which likely would be the case because you're creating high pockets of students with need, students with varying needs into one school? So at least by us looking at this internal analysis I think we're ahead of the game and we're a year staggered behind any Redding decision.

⏯️1:33:24 Audience Member Devon Hynson: So if AI—let me sit down because I got to think—if AI was initially the reason why the public came and said we want to address the decrease in enrollment in that school and we pivoted to a larger more comprehensive solution, did we ever like address the issue of why AI was losing enrollment to begin with?

Dorrell Green: Yes we did.

Devon Hynson: What was that? What was the answer to that?

Dorrell Green: Feeder pattern. Families in AI are not attending AI and AI has a smaller percentage of their feeder students attending. So to Mr. Pruitt's earlier point...

Mark Pruitt: There are more students in the McKean/Dickinson feeder pattern who are attending Dickinson versus AI. Even by geography, a lot of the Hockessin, Greenville, Centerville area really isn't a concentrated population.

Devon Hynson: Do we know the total number of students that are currently in that pattern, not enrolled in this school, but are in the pattern and was it sufficient to provide a good population in the school? So then the shifting of the attendance zones was to address that issue?

Dorrell Green: The conversation about the attendance zones was related to the public's concern about AI, the public's concern about AI in addition to what we know we need to do across Red Clay as a whole. So because if we take the approach that we're just going to shift more students to AI where are they coming from? No, it wasn't like a referee like hold on. AI is one part of a larger issue. AI as a result—because past decisions that were made to just simply look at enrollment, right, because that's what initially the the the decision around enrollment and what we shared was: you're just not going to deal with a school based on enrollment because you can't manufacture enrollment without looking at programming and without looking at balancing out attendance because our K-5 or K-8 attendance zones were addressed but high schools were never addressed. So if you think you're going to address the AI duPont issue in isolation without looking at the totality of it, it's not going to work.

Devon Hynson: So I am hearing that the adjoiner was put on from the district. The community said, "We want to know the problem with AI duPont," and you guys said what a solution is to address all of our schools.

Dorrell Green: Correct.

Devon Hynson: Okay. Was it ever explained—because I don't really understand why we don't think that creating programming in AI duPont would not attract a population that would go to AI duPont?

Dorrell Green: Because it's just not programming, and that's part of the challenge. We've tried to prop schools up based on programming, and let's say a staff member leaves with that program. Because that's actually happened, right? At one point Dickinson had a construction rental programming; Delcastle takes the staff member, guess what happens to the program? It's gone. And then families of choice to a place based on a program, that's not sustainable. So there has to be some semblance of enrollment and attendance zone and alignment and balance to sustain programming.

Devon Hynson: But did it increase enrollment at Dickinson? Because if I recall—

Dorrell Green: No, it was only 2 cohorts that went through.

Devon Hynson: But it's still increasing. But increased enrollment at Dickinson is actually the MYP program.

Dorrell Green: Okay.

Devon Hynson: But it's now preventing my point from increasing.

Dorrell Green: So then we're speaking the same language then. My point is why don't we do what we need to do to address the enrollment at AI duPont, and it's going to take enrollment from another Red Clay school.

Shawn Snyder: I can potentially give—so we have 6,000 seats in our high schools right now, 5,000 students to fill those seats. What has happened over the course of the last 20 years is there's a tipping point for students; first McKean, then Dickinson, now AI duPont, where it becomes a vacuum and the students are vacuumed out of that school very quickly.

Devon Hynson: But here's my only thing. Because from my perspective, I'm watching us do the same thing we've done before. We created Charter School of Wilmington, right? We got Cab Calloway, we got Conrad, and now you're going to create an innovation center that you suggest is only going to serve 600 students, right? It looks like 300, 300. So that still creates the same old winners and the same old losers. So all you're doing is—it sounds like it's creating another vacuum unless I'm misunderstanding.

Mark Pruitt: Yeah, no. They will not—the innovation center will not be a home school at all. It addresses the issue that we have 6,000 seats and 5,000 students. We are essentially taking out 1,000 seats. So what we're going to do is force families into 2 buildings and then carve out for 600 high-quality education programs. All of those students—no one will attend McKean High School. They will go over to McKean for coursework and return to their high school.

Devon Hynson: Okay, right. But that high school is going to be less one of the high schools that are there now, right?

Dorrell Green: So we're going to essentially forcing—so where are the kids going to go if you're—where are the kids going to be? Go ahead.

Jodi Muffley: Staff member and a 20-year Red Clay parent. The concept is to close McKean. You take those feeder kids, you load Dickinson, you load AI duPont, and every child at AI duPont and every child at Dickinson has access to that innovative center. They will take a bus and they will go. The equality of that is, as we said, the numbers drive programs. Discussing what happened, the demise of AI duPont and everything—as a parent, I've seen Red Clay play whack-a-mole and basically, "Oh, that school's failing, let's dump some money and programs in there and build it up," and then another school fails. This is kind of alleviating that and creating one center that all of our children will have access to.

Devon Hynson: What can you tell me what access looks like?

Jodi Muffley: That means, for instance, my program is allied health science. I'm only offered at AI duPont. I can only grow my building or my program based on my numbers. So next year—I started year one with 50. Next year I have 75. I have the highest CTE numbers in AI duPont for next year and I will have 75 students. Think about—I moved to the innovative center and now all of these kids have access that I could potentially have 200 kids in my program. So that's kind of the concept behind the innovative center.

Devon Hynson: But there's still kids there. See, I'm trying to be—kids there, you won't.

Tawanda Bond: No, what I'm saying is there's other kids in the building. Mr. Hynson, no, no, there's not.

Devon Hynson: In a traditional high school, you're saying that every single kid in that building is going to have access, is going to be able to go to the innovation—

Tawanda Bond: They will be in the AM program or the PM. That's the beauty of it for programming.

Dorrell Green: Okay, so what I would suggest, Board member-elect, so that you know you're well-versed: schedule an appointment so that we can do a deep dive so that you can better understand the concept of what you're likely hearing for the first time.

⏯️1:41:44 Anne Budischak: All right, I'm going to put my parent hat on quickly. I'm not well-versed in the high school CTE requirements, I'm a middle school teacher. So all high school students in a traditional high school are required to complete CTE credits, correct?

Mark Pruitt: They're required to complete a career pathway, okay.

Ann Budischak: A three-year sequential career pathway. So that means all students who attend Dickinson or AI duPont in the new format would have to take classes at the innovation center?

Mark Pruitt: I don't think - again that is still to be determined. And I—no, I'm going to answer.

Ann Budischak: That the CTE classes will no longer be offered at AI duPont or Dickinson. I was under the impression—

Mark Pruitt: Well, I think that is to be determined by a group of people who make these decisions. I'll give you an example: at the Cecil County program, they keep 2 or 3 CTE pathways on campus for those students who do not want to participate, but they are limited in nature. They're easily propped-up facilities.

Ann Budischak: So anecdotally for me as a future high school parent, my child busing for part of their school day to another building is not attractive to me as a parent. So I'm wondering if the committee has taken that into consideration. Might we lose families who don't want their children to lose instructional time on a school bus?

Dorrell Green: So, and again, that's the whole point of tonight, right? That's the whole point of the survey is to get that type of feedback.

Ann Budischak: And and then another question. So I'm pretty sure that students at Dickinson in our high school program who are like—can they do like—does art satisfy or band satisfy CTE or career pathway requirements?

Mark Pruitt: They—it depends on the sequential nature. It depends on the sequential nature, but it also satisfies graduation requirement. It satisfies graduation requirement. So there's a difference between a career pathway and a graduation requirement.

Ann Budischak: I'm just concerned that we might have some additional segregation of students if we have students who are maybe in more academically targeted pathways to fulfill those requirements versus students who are in more career training pathways to fulfill those requirements.

Dorrell Green: This isn't Vo-tech, right? And so I think that's the other thing. If you look at the chart where we talked about allied health, when you talk about PT, when you talk about digital marketing, media design, or you talk about the audio, radio, video, teacher pathways, right? Which is—I mean there's a whole host or list of things that students have to look at that 3-year sequential pathway currently - That aren't necessarily being fulfilled as a result of us not necessarily being able to staff, resource, and actually go deep. Culinary, for example: students who aren't completing level 4. So ultimately you want students upon graduation to have a credential, a certification, or an experience through a career pathway that's going to allow them to be marketable, as to Mr. Pruitt's initial point around the patient care pathway, right? We know that there are 18-year-olds—and we saw that during COVID—that got their CNA license and they went right to work, right? But then that student can ultimately decide: do they want to go to a two-year RN program, ultimately become a nurse? This allows us to partner with public-private partnerships, work-based learning opportunities, but also career high-skill, high-wage types of jobs through labor market analysis. So again, the purpose of tonight is to kind of share what the committee has gone through over the last 6 months, allow the community to give their feedback so that the committee can take this feedback and then ultimately we provide a recommendation to the Board. We can say, "Here are the things that we've also heard from the community." Thank you.

⏯️1:47:23 Kecia Nesmith: Yeah, I'm going to put my parent hat on too, and I'm also going to put my educator and knowledge hat on. There's a couple of things that were talked about and I think that we need to address them because it was kind of brought up but we didn't really talk about it. The segregation-desegregation law had a lot to do with where we are today and so the elephant in the room is that magnet programs, charter schools, etc. were created to segregate, right? To segregate. So why does MYP Dickinson program not want to go to Skyline? Potentially - because it is a predominantly black school now since they made some changes. And why were those changes made? I was—my daughter was in that school in Skyline when it changed. It was a tremendous—it was not under the leadership of Dr. Green, but it was a tremendous change in the culture, in the preparation for teachers. So if we want to talk about being upset about magnet schools or wanting comprehensive schools, it's because somebody didn't get what they wanted, right? My children are benefiting from the segregated schools, CSW and Conrad, but if they hadn't then I would have made a choice that was best for my kid. But I'm not going to try to change the system because of it.

But the bottom line is people are not satisfied with comprehensive schools because of the differences among the students that are in it. But if we—and I'm not saying that I totally support all of the ideas that have been presented by the committee, but we do have to come to consensus. The other elephant in the room—and I brought this up at every single committee meeting—is that we do not have families here that are from the inner city, and sometimes we need to do a little bit more to engage families who are not typically engaged. So through this meeting I have requested that this recording be sent to all families and that we connect with the different community centers and other partners to ensure that this information is distributed and that we can continue to get feedback. Because once we do have a plan, like Dr. Green said and Mr. Pruitt said, there are many decisions and plans that have to be put into place to address some of the questions.

But at the end of the day, money is only spreading but so far. And so if we want to have quality programming around the arts, music like Cab Calloway has, we're not going to be able to have that quality at all 3, if that was it, 3 comprehensive high schools. There's not enough money and it's not enough teachers to do that. So there is some area for improvement around providing access to all of these things, but at the same time if you want to have a pathway that is very specific to your talent, your gift, or your desire like a Cab Calloway, then we have to consider how we might do that. This—and I think for where we are right now, I think this plan is at the beginning of addressing that. Is it perfect? No. But comprehensive high schools—I'm a high school principal—comprehensive high schools are not for everybody. They're just not. Sometimes they're too big and kids can't manage being in schools that are too big, and sometimes they are not interested because their art mind needs that or their science mind needs this. So I think with the innovation center, which is not a Vo-tech, the innovation center can have multiple college courses or some of those courses could be at every comprehensive high school including Conrad, because I'd like to see Conrad have some more college access, and it can have—Cab Calloway can do the same. So we're not going to fix the desegregation and the people with the white flight from AI duPont. A lot of the kids who live in that feeder pattern go to Tatnall, they go to Tower Hill, they go to St. Mark's because that's where those families can either afford or want to send their kids. If we're going to—we're not going to address the racial divide here, but that is a real thing, and I can say that because I'm not at the school district. But it's a real thing and so we can't ignore that. Why do we want to go to Conrad? Why do we want to go to Cab Calloway? Why do we want to go to CSW? Did you look at the populations at these schools?

⏯️1:52:36 Dorrell Green: One moment too, and I would just say I think it's also disingenuous to say that Conrad and Cab Calloway don't have semblances of diversity, because they do now. There's—IB MYP does as well, right? So what I would say is this: I think there's a difference between diversity and choice. Choice is a lottery process and when we don't get that, the one of 3 choices that we select becomes part of that problem, right? Because everyone can't get every choice. And then what we end up doing by default is trying to make everything equitable at the expense of all of our programs. So if you have a school of performing arts, you're there to participate in performing arts and then the expectation is for us to prop up a performing arts program at another one of our districts and exhaust resources where we're not doing anything quality across our district. The reality is we have to do something.

There are some questions online because this isn't necessarily—there's nothing finalized. This was a committee that met for 6 months that was given a charge from the Board. This was their thinking, their brainstorming around how we can create equitable processes, programming opportunities, and access, and not do what has happened in the past where we look to address a singular issue at the expense of all of our communities. Furthermore, there's need throughout Red Clay. I'm probably the sole person who gets the advantage to actually see to the point that our community eligibility feeding provision numbers in this district will likely result in every child being able to eat for free in our district. So sometimes you get this with blinders on and see things just from a singular lens of my singular school experience and I want to go to the next experience with the cohort of children that my child has gone to elementary and we want to matriculate through. The reality is we want that experience for every child. Mr. Smallwood, just as—okay, 

⏯️1:54:48 Phillip Smallwood: one of the questions that came up a few times was about the Meadowwood program that's currently at McKean. Were there any thoughts or plans about that? 

Mark Pruitt: Yeah, well, I think it's—yes, we've had discussions about Meadowwood, but we have not even put forward a recommendation at this point. So have we engaged with student services at the district office with Miss Kathy Maddox, the longtime principal at the Meadowwood program? Absolutely we have. I think that those students deserve everything that we're trying to provide for all of the students who currently go to these three schools, and so our commitment would be to have that program be at either Dickinson or McKean, to engage parents in that program. But I think that's still to be determined.

These are 19 people, these are seven public members, three members of RCEA, three building principals who gave of their time, three district administrators coming up with a helicopter view idea that we're getting feedback on now. Make adjustments to that recommendation based on this feedback, provide the recommendation to the School Board. The Board would then at least have one month to consider that; they then take feedback from the community before they would vote and potentially allow us to engage in the hard work that would need to be done to have something like this completed. I mean, yeah, we we did not have the people at the table at one point. With the committee there was a question about, "Well, who's going to watch the kids if the bus doesn't show up? The shuttle bus doesn't shuffle." It's a great question but it's not—we're not there yet, right? We're not there with seven community members, three teachers... those are things that you start at a helicopter level and you drill down into the details as you go. Our goal is to make the Board's charge—is that we make a recommendation at the July Board meeting. The Board charged us in November with having a committee and that committee making a recommendation to them at the July Board meeting.

⏯️1:57:29 Dorrell Green: We have enough information to make a recommendation and to move forward from the recommendation. 

Devon Hynson: I don't - I don't understand.

Mark Pruitt: Do we want to take one more? Is there one more question online?

Mr. Smallwood: You kind of led into the next question, which is what is the timeline? What happens after this meeting for the committee and the reccomendations.

Dorrell Green: Survey input. You get additional surveys, there's a recommendation that would go before the Board in July. The Board could vote that up or down, we get another charge, the Board says need more time—that's the Board's prerogative. We were given a charge, the committee was formed, the committee took data research information. The reality is status quo, to do nothing, impacts the entire district.

Devon Hynson: [inaudible]

Dorrell Green: Well the committee doesn't feel they need more time. The Board goes back based on what they get. 

Devon Hynson: [inaudible]

Dorrell Green: He didn't express that.

Devon Hynson: [inaudible]

Dorrell Green: He is standing right here so he can - 

Mark Pruitt: —no, I did not mean to say that. I'm saying we're not to that level of detail. If the Board were to vote to move forward with the recommendation, then the district would then engage with the work necessary to pull off a plan like that, to put leaves on that tree, and enter into the committee work that would need to be done—the engagement with parents and the larger community, the business community, the post-secondary educational community, the transportation office.

Dorrell Green: Because the reality is if we would have come before and we had a plan, what would the response be? We created a plan without input. So the charge was to give the Board a recommendation of something to address attendance zone, secondary enrollment, and programming, which includes—if we can go back to a couple slides that talked about being balanced—straight line feeder patterns for middle schools. Because we know currently if I'm an eighth-grade class at AI Middle, I'm going to three different high schools. And because I'm not going to a singular school or have the opportunity with my class, guess what? I'm going to choose Delcastle. And so...

Audience member: [inaudible] 

Dorrell Green: And it's not me, we. It was a committee that had research, that used data to come forward with a recommendation. This is not a singular idea or thought of one person. And now the community has an opportunity based on what they've heard, to give feedback. There's no definitive final decision that's being made in this room. This is the opportunity really to share with the community what the committee has done the last six months. Everything's online for you to see, to wrestle with, to question. You don't like it, you like it, you think this should happen— provide the feedback.

⏯️2:01:22 Audience Member Amy Reynoso: Okay here we go. I have three questions and two opinions. The first question is—well actually I want to tell you—(lost mic)

Dorrell Green: You might have to get up and come closer. 

Amy Reynoso: How about now? I think the committee did a good job so I wanted to say thank you to everyone for volunteering their time. The first question is: who on the committee suggested the innovation center and what is their role?

Dorrell Green: Who in the committee suggested the innovation center and what is their role? I think when you look at where the innovation center came from, it really is a vision of what makes most sense for the district. I'll take credit for it as the superintendent to say that this is a thought in terms of how we support all of Red Clay, if we want to put it on somebody.

Amy Reynoso: Okay, but it's coming from the committee so I'm just asking if the person who suggested it on the committee works for the district. That's all I was wondering. The second question is: why is Brandywine Springs Middle School a magnet and not a feeder school? And I know that doesn't have anything to do with the innovation center but we're talking about feeders and magnets—that was my just another question. And then the last question is: are we able to change the high school feeder patterns without a drastic programming change? Like the elementary feeder lines in 2015, or is there a fear of, I don't know, losing a building? I feel like there's something else that we need to look at as—

Dr. Dorrell Green: What is that something else that you're recommending that we look at?

Amy Reynoso: I'm not recommending anything; I'm just wondering if there's something I'm missing, that's all. And then the the two opinions I wanted to say is: I don't think that you can pack up MYP and drive down the road to Skyline. I think it would be devastating to the staff and the families at Dickinson who loved and built this program, and it's like moving Spanish immersion from Marbrook to Richie. I just want to state publicly that I oppose moving the MYP program out of Dickinson to Skyline. And the last opinion is some of the feedback I've heard from other moms is that this idea might backfire because we'll lose more students due to the transportation to and from the buildings; it's a huge concern. So that was—that's all I have to say.

Dr. Dorrell Green: Thank you, appreciate it.

⏯️2:04:39 Jenny Howard:  Could you go back to the slide that says "examples of impact"? My question is about the courses. So for like a student that is not maybe on the career pathway but possibly the college pathway and—

Dorrell Green: Career pathway. So I want folks to understand: career doesn't mean you're going straight to the workforce after high school. Career pathways are in some instances college pathways.

Jenny Howard: Okay.

Dorrell Green: So I think sometimes we got to be—make sure we're we're saying the same—

Jenny Howard: Yeah, I'm confused.

Dorrell Green: So a a physical therapy pathway could be career and/or college pathway because I could become a PT assistant and go to DelTech to get certification and go in career, or I could go to college for six years and get my—I mean my doctorate in occupational therapy. So CTE career technical pathways are learning experience that every student in the state has to go through, so this isn't just simply a Red Clay thing. The problem and what we're trying to solve—and I'll give you the example of: there were two culinary programs in our district two years ago. One at AI duPont High School that was underenrolled, that was floundering. One at McKean High School with a commercial grade kitchen. Why would we try to use resources to prop up a commercial grade kitchen when students are actually making the choice to go to McKean's fuller culinary program?

Jenny Howard: I know, so actually it's this—the slide that says the example. So I guess maybe I should ask my question this way: so like my child is likely to take advanced level courses. So when you look at the slide that says "examples of impact," how would this innovation center more evenly equalize the Advanced Placement course offerings at either Dickinson or AI duPont? Because I'm going to be honest with you, if my—if the opportunity to take these advanced level courses isn't there, then my kid doesn't want to choose either of them. And right now the examples of impact, they're not—

Dorrell Green: And that's part of the problem right now, because we don't have equitable access to advanced course placement courses across our five schools. So even if you're looking at our strategic plan, we talked about looking at making sure that there's a six-pack—for a lack of a better analogy—of the AP courses. AP Seminar being a anchor course that every student in the district would be able to take and have access to. So I'm not—

Jenny Howard: The difference is like there's 25 and 22 at Conrad and Cab Calloway, but only 9, 9, 4 and—and that

Dorrell Green: and that's now.

Jenny Howard: But how will - how will this change that - is my question. The innovation center idea—I'm sorry, maybe I'm just not getting it.

Dorrell Green: Because it's allowing us to have a core course of AP course offerings for all students at their school feeder schools, and then innovation center were where you would go to actually get the support for your CTE pathway. So—

Jenny Howard: So you would be able to offer 25 Advanced Placement classes at the traditional high schools?

Audience Member: Questions or statements that are being made [inaudible]

Dorrell Green: Yes we are, sir. She's asking—I'm hearing her and she's asking and we're responding to her. This is a conversation and a dialogue.

Jenny Howard: So would you be able to with this new idea? I'm just confused.

Mark Pruitt: Yeah, so the the idea—I use AI duPont High School as as the most extreme example. They have 550 students in that school at this point. They have five English teachers on staff. They're very limited in their ability to offer courses beyond the core English courses: English 9, English 10, five, six sections per grade. The bigger you are as a school—900, 1,000, 1,100—in a comprehensive school, the more staff you earn and the more flexibility it gives you to deal with programming.

So I'm going to go—I'm going to go a little bit further and say that there was a time in this district—and I go back to Sean Snyder's point when he said I was a Conrad principal—but I taught and coached at McKean for 12 years and and and I'm a graduate of the high school and care deeply about the school. I can say there was a time in this district, in 2004, where there were 3,400 in-district students at those three schools. The the fact of the matter is—and it's not that we couldn't choose a different route that this committee chose—but there are 2,000 in-district students attending those three schools and your question was fantastic because it's very challenging to offer the elective coursework, the AP coursework. They only have 550 students. That's only about 160 kids a grade. 160 students want to—in any grade want to take AP US History, it's only 4 that have interest. Therefore you cannot allot a teaching section of a unit of a teaching position for 4 students. If you double that number, you provide the the capacity and the flexibility to do that. Those are great questions.

Jenny Howard: That makes sense okay. So possibly?

Mark Pruitt: Yeah we can go.

Jenny Chorman: Hi, good evening. I wanted to ask if Skyline will still be offering the Spanish immersion program at the middle school level if MYP transfers?

Mark Pruitt: Yes.

Dorrell Green: We've already invested in—we've already invested in the program. Both programs would would be at the school.

Jenny Chorman: And the same for AI duPont for the high school?

Mark Pruitt: That's correct. One one major change would be the Early College Academy, which currently has 100 seats and one 100 seats at McKean and 100 seats at AI duPont High School, would now have 200 seats at AI duPont High School.

⏯️2:10:28 Audience Member Jenny Chorman: Okay. And the second is kind of a comment more than a question. In some of the committee meetings I heard that CSW want to expand to a middle school program. I will strongly suggest do not accept that because that will fracture more of the system where it already is.

Mark Pruitt: I agree.

Dorrell Green: Thank you for that, Miss Chorman. Just so that you know and again for the public, certification: they applied for an expansion grant that didn't go anywhere. So just so that folks know, that was something that they looked at several years ago through an expansion grant but that didn't go beyond them getting that grant and analyzing what that would look like.

⏯️2:21:03 Audience Member (Becky): Hey, thank you. Kind of going on just making sure you hear our voices. I agree with a lot of people, the transportation scares me, especially if you have them mornings and afternoons and then if you have sports afterwards. How are they busing? Do they get bused all the way back to their school or they get bused from the innovation center to home? Just there's a lot to think about and to decide if this proceeds. And then McKean is dear to my heart, so it's sad-ish to hear it might be like going. It's a community that I love and I have a rising 10th grader now. So if this is going to happen in 2 years, that would be a senior year—like how does that impact the students that are there now? And then are you going to keep accepting into McKean if this passes? And then like they're just going to have to integrate like mid-year mid-classes—it's just a consideration.

Mark Pruitt: Let me deal—answer the transportation question first. It is the single biggest obstacle that we need to hurdle, right? Both the logistics of it, the day-to-day of it, the the big picture of it, the fiscal responsibility. What does it look like? Well we're not taking 28 buses to McKean every day, but we are running shuttles as needed across the district. What's behavior look like on that bus? I believe that you want to give the kids the best programming possible, and I think if you start to say—and I understand special needs, that that's a separate issue that we also are responsible for ringing the bell and meeting the need of. However, I think when you start talking about behavior, I believe this—I've always believed this—if if we're not going to do something that we believe—that I believe is potentially great for kids—because of their behavior, it's time for me—that's not how I would operate. So I understand behavioral needs of of students that you know, for a variety reason, but I don't—I think you need to accommodate that and and and and provide support so that those students can be successful if they choose to to get on that trans—if they choose to get on the shuttle bus and it meets you know meets their educational needs. But by and large, you know I believe that students will respond if the adults are providing a great experience for them. The logistics are challenging. I said that was the first thing I said to you is that is something. But yes, absolutely a sketch—a pencil sketch has a student back to Dickinson or AI duPont at 2:00. School day ends at 2:10 so they can go to a student government meeting, they can go to a JV football practice, they can go wherever they need to go. They still—they would still have the opportunity to participate in a comprehensive high school experience and a more robust comprehensive high school experience.

⏯️2:15:18 Tawanda Bond: I just wanted to share one thing before we before we wrap up and I know you have a question also. We had a couple of questions about where the ideas came from and the recommendations—where did they come from? I just wanted to just remind everyone that all of our information was very transparent, public, it is on our website. But the recommendations really came from the committee discussion. So although we're having discussion about you know whose idea it was or where it may have come from, we had some really rich discussion with our nominating members, our parents, our Board members were there, our district administrators. It was no single person who came up with any of these recommendations that you saw before you out of those 12 big ideas, and no idea was too small. So I just wanted to reiterate that we were very very clear and very deliberate and intentional about making sure everyone's voice was heard on the committee. So I just wanted to reiterate that piece.

Audience Member (Orr): Hi, so just following up with Becky's question about are you going to continue to accept people and what's going to happen to students already in that feeder? But I also want to take a moment and like—McKean is very near and dear to our hearts. I mean I started my—a significant part of my career at McKean as an ED. I saw it grow with the first preschool center into what it is now. We poured a lot of veter energy into McKean and it seems like it's a system that works, and I'm all about equity in terms of accessing it as an innovative center. I think we could explore a little bit more on how we expand equity across all the districts including the magnet schools. But my question now is more on a positive spin: let's say the innovative center really takes off and the public really says, "Hey Red Clay's got a great thing going here, they've got this innovation center which is really top of the line, we've got these 2 high - and then enrollment starts to increase, but now you have this innovation center part of the Red Clay culture. It's not like there's a lot of real estate to build another building. What has the district thought about that, or are we just getting too far ahead of ourselves?

Mark Pruitt: I think you have to consider that and I'll let Dr. Green speak to it, but I will say this: we educate 5,000 students in our school district, 1,000 of which are out-of-district students. So we can turn the hose off on out-of—we will always turn off the nozzle on out-of-district students to meet the needs of in-district students. So there's quite a bit of flexibility there because of the out-of-district students at all of our buildings including McKean, Dickinson, and AI duPont. But it is—it is something that you need to be mindful of going forward. I am going to let Antonio, who was a public member of the committee, speak. He he requested it and he's been just a tremendous resource, including handing off microphones tonight.

Antonio Gomes: I just want to make sure—this is a very small population of folks from our community. I think we can all agree with that. There's thousands of families that here; think about how many other opinions we haven't heard yet, right? And I want to reassure you that when we were in this committee and we having these discussions, they were as lively as we're having it today because there are different opinions. There's things that are strong that I feel strongly about that others don't, and I think we—what I want to commend the committee for is we tried our best to come up with an approach based on the timeline we have but with also—we used information. So if he had questions, we did the research, and that's some of the things that we point out. And I honestly encourage you guys to look at the information out there and say, "Hey does this information make sense? What other questions might there be that we're not thinking of?" That's the point of this meeting, right? That's also the point of what we're asking for you guys to complete the survey because that's how we're going to know: does this make sense before we go to the Board to even suggest this to look into the details that I think some of you are asking for? We might find out that this is not the path to go forward. I know we had a lot of comments during our committee meetings. We had a lot of representation I think from CSW for example in every single one of those meetings. But I just want to let you guys know I appreciate hearing this - for me - because it allows me to also be able to contribute a little bit better when I hear different opinions on everybody here. Everybody has families in different schools; I have my kids in this district too, so I know the feeling. But again thank you. I don't I want to make sure everybody's okay. The fact that we might not have [inaudible] Yes. I just want to make sure everybody's understanding that we're we're hearing you, right? And we're hoping to represent the interest of the community as best as possible. I'm not going to say I'm perfect, but I'm certainly going to listen to it and try to find out a way to get us there. And I think I can speak with a lot of the folks that were in those committee meetings: they they were fighting for a lot of the same things you guys were talking about. We just had to come up with a consensus because I think the message is: doing nothing is not an option. Let's do something.

Dorrell Green: So we want to thank everyone in the audience. One, for your thoughtful considerable questions, for your advocacy, for your feedback, for your input. We're encouraging everyone to take the survey again—that's meaningful feedback that we need, that we want, that we desire to make sure that we're addressing the broader community need in Red Clay. The last thing that we want to do is to make a singular or isolated decision to address a singular—what we perceive to be a singular—issue and 15, 10, 15, 20 years from now folks are wrestling with the tension that we're now being forced to wrestle with because decisions - no judgment - that were made to solve a problem or to be innovative or to be creative in essence has created a level of need across our community that we're now being forced to address. So thank you to those who are joining us online. Mr. Leonard has his hand up.  

Board Member Vic Leonard: [inaudible]

Dorrell Green: So so the timeline is just like deferred maintenance, right? If we don't address an issue now, we're going to continue to perpetuate and create an issue that will go on for a year, then that decision is lingering for two years, and we keep having situations where students aren't benefiting from all that—so again this isn't to rush a timeline. So please what we're asking you to do in this moment is to give us the feedback so that the committee and the group can present a well-informed, considerate recommendation to the Board for them to wrestle with, make a decision. If it comes back to us obviously we'll do our due diligence. But again, as Mr. Antonio indicated, the committee met the charge; they discussed the issue to address something that ultimately will be a benefit to the entire district. So thank you everyone for coming out this evening. We look forward to getting your feedback. Thank you for those who are in the audience who are dealing with the the mic situation. Those that are online—again, thank you for joining us this evening. Fill out the survey, feel free to go online. We have a dedicated website on the on our district web page that gives you all of the information that has been taking place over the past six months. Have a good night, thank you.

🌐Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee webpage 

June 10, 2025 Meeting Materials 

📁Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee Town Hall Rolling Slides June 10, 2025 

📹Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee June 10, 2025 Meeting Recording

📄Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee June 10, 2025 Meeting FAQs For convenience, the full text of FAQs are typed below.

June 10, 2025 FAQ’s from the Secondary A-Z & Programming Committee’s Community Update  

What is the earliest start date to implement the recommendations being discussed? August of 2027. 

How will the district handle bus transportation for students with special needs? Red Clay will meet the transportation needs of all students interested in Innovation Center programming. 

How many people from the community are on the committee? There is 1 community member from each of Red Clay’s 7 nominating Red Clay zones. 

Why wasn’t it discussed to absorb the magnet schools(Cab and Conrad) back into Red Clay? One of the ideas included capping the enrollment at each of these schools. This idea did not generate any interest from the committee. 

What prompted the board to create the committee? After years of under enrollment at one or more of Red Clay;s comprehensive schools, the board created the committee to provide recommendations for bolstering enrollment and providing more equitable programming across all schools. 

For the recommendation of moving the Dickinson MYP program to Skyline - Would this program be offered to the whole middle school? Yes, any student enrolled at Skyline or Skyline MYP and interested in the MYP would receive the programming. 

What would happen to the current MYP staff at Dickinson? Any plans involving staffing for all recommendations would involve input from key stakeholder groups including RCEA. Teachers would need to be trained through IB. 

Was stakeholder feedback considered in these recommendations? A survey has gone out to the Red Clay community at-large. The deadline for completion was 6/12/25. 

Will there be an application process for students at the comprehensive high schools(JDS and AIH) to participate in programming at the McKean Innovation Center? 

No, the plan is for any student interested to have access to this programming. 

How would this recommendation of the McKean Innovation Center impact the Meadowood program currently located at McKean? Relocation of the Meadowood program to another comprehensive high school would involve further discussion with key stakeholders groups. Red Clay is committed to continuing the high level of programming provided by Meadowood. 

Will the committee’s recommendation result in high school attendance zones (feeder pattern) changes? Yes, recommendation would result in more “straight line feeder” attendance zones and a more equitable distribution of students. 

Would the comprehensive high schools in this model be able to offer more advanced coursework? Yes, additional enrollment would result in additional staffing to offer more comprehensive college and career courses. 

Where would the high school IB program be located? The high school IB program would remain at Dickinson. 

Would Skyline offer Spanish Immersion if MYP moved to Skyline? Yes, the Skyline immersion program would remain at Skyline. 

If McKean closes how would that impact current students? Students at McKean would attend the school in their new attendance zone. 

What if this is implemented and becomes popular? What if enrollment increases at our comprehensive high schools? The University of Delaware’s state public school enrollment projections indicate a reduction in Red Clay students over the next 30 years. Additionally, at this time, Red Clay has approximately 1000 out of district high school students. The district would cap out of district choice applications if necessary. 

Has stakeholder feedback been gathered about moving MYP from Dickinson to Skyline? Red Clay has created a survey for feedback on the recommendations. 

What will the academic and extracurricular implications be for MYP students if the program moves to Skyline? Students will continue to have their same middle school programming and any additional programs offered at Skyline. 

Why was McKean chosen as the Innovation Center? McKean facilities include diverse high quality career and technical spaces. Additionally, the school is centrally located between Dickinson and AI High.

At times 12 of 19 voted(those in attendance) - that’s only 63% of the committee. The missing votes could potentially change those votes and recommendations. Why were the remaining members unable to vote? They were not in attendance at those meetings. 

With the sports at a home school, no buses would leave for away games before 2:10? Transportation is one of many considerations that will need to be realized if the plan moves forward. 

If a student is choices to Dickinson MYP, but does not wish to attend Skyline for MYP will they be notified of the program change while the choice window is open? Yes 

What would happen to the students that currently feed to Skyline? Would Skyline still exist as a feeder or would MYP take over the building? Skyline would still exist as an attendance zone school.

 What are the next steps? The committee is currently scheduled to present to the school board at the July 9, 2025 school board meeting. The school board would have to vote to move forward with the recommendation.