Jun 17 2025
AZ Committee Meeting

▼Full Transcript Below

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1. Public Comment

⏯ 4:52-31:55

• • • Dr. Kecia Nesmith (Red Clay Board Member and AZ Committee Member)  clarified that her town hall comments targeted family perceptions of the MYP relocation—not educators—while urging thoughtful planning.

    • Katie Mulrooney (Dickinson MYP teacher) explained moving the MYP breaks the essential 5-year continuum that prepares students for IB Diploma Program rigor

    • Anthony Swierzbinski (Dickinson MYP teacher) affirmed his commitment to teaching diverse student populations while warning that relocating MYP could affect the reauthorization process and or lead the district to eliminate the program entirely.

    • Anne Budischak (Dickinson MYP teacher) explained moving MYP eliminates middle schoolers' access to high school clubs and sports, and cohesive IB teaching staff which requires years of training. 

    • Valerie Budischak (MYP parent) urged the committee to approach AIHS's declining enrollment specifically instead of disrupting thriving programs. 

    • Tom Glennon (Dickinson MYP teacher and Red Clay parent) questioned what happened to student and parent focus groups that were promised and pointed out survey results were extremely limited. Urged delay and community engagement. 

    • Jenny Howard (Red Clay parent) used data from the district's "Examples of Impact" slide to highlight disparities in AP/advanced courses, dual enrollment, and athletic programs across traditional and magnet high schools.

    • Laura Boyle (Red Clay parent) Expressed worry that shuttling students between schools would be unappealing and drive families out of the district, while questioning how reallocating students would generate extra funding.

2. Recap of Committee's current recommendation to the Board.
    ⏯ 32:33-36:07

3. Presentation on student focus groups and Committee Discussion
    ⏯ 37:34-55:57

• Karen Ammann, Department of Teaching and Learning, presented results of small focus groups of middle and high school students regarding Career and Technical Education (CTE).

4. Survey Data Presentation and Committee Discussion
    ⏯ 55:59-1:30:27

• Mark Pruitt and Shawn Snyder presented a question-by-question breakdown of the 1,128 community survey responses followed by committee discussion.  

    ⏯ 1:30:33-1:36:55

• Shawn Snyder presented an AI-generated summary analysis of comments submitted with survey, highlighting recurring themes and sentiment.

5. Review of Recommendation
    ⏯ 1:52:31-2:10:58

• Following small-group breakout sessions, the committee reconvened to summarize their discussions about survey results, stakeholder feedback, timeline, community buy-in, and potential edits to the current recommendation. 

6. Committee discussion regarding the lack of consensus on the draft recommendation. Two separate motions were introduced to adjust the timeline and approach.  
    ⏯ 2:11:03-2:31:53 

• Mr. Pruitt made a motion to provide the current recommendation as discussed but also recommended that the board not take action until October to allow for a better understanding of the recommendation and more engagement with the community and stakeholder groups. 

• Caitlin Merto made a follow-up motion to engage in a campaign with stakeholders to educate and gather feedback on the current recommendation and then re-engage the committee and make a recommendation to the board in the fall.

7. Mark Pruitt detailed what he will present to the Board in July; Committee Discussion
    ⏯ 2:31:55 

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⏯️3:15 Mark Pruitt: All right, I have six o'clock, so I will take a motion to bring the meeting to order.

⏯️3:22 Vic Leonard: So moved.

⏯️3:23 Mark Pruitt: Vic Leonard makes a motion. Do I have a second? Val makes a second, assuming we're unanimous because we're here. Doing that with consent, and so we are now into our seventh meeting of the committee. 

Our agenda for this evening—you know, a lot of things that we always review at the beginning—but bottom line is we're going to look at some analysis, we’re going to look at some stakeholder feedback tonight, student focus groups and survey data. Then, do we need to make any adjustments to the current recommendation based on that feedback? Talk about our timeline for a final recommendation plan for a board presentation. Listen to public comment on both ends. Any member of the public can provide public comment. This committee's decided to allow for it twice—two times, but not twice. So if you go at the beginning, you cannot go at the end. If you join us late because you get here from work, you certainly can go at the end. And then adjourn the meeting. 

And we will start off with public comment. We will start off with in-person public comment. There is no pre-signup list. You would like to give public comment, Dr. Nesmith? All right. So what—we'll have a committee member—

⏯️4:40 Kecia Nesmith: Do I need to stand?

⏯️4:42 Mark Pruitt: No, absolutely no, I don't think it's necessary. Dr. Nesmith is a member of the committee and a school board member, but is going to use three minutes for public comment.

⏯️4:52 Kecia Nesmith: All right, thank you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Dr. Kecia Nesmith and I am a parent in Red Clay School District, I am a school board member, and an administrator in a different district. I would like to take the opportunity to clarify a mischaracterization of a comment that I made during discussions at our recent town hall last week about the proposed relocation of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme to Skyline Middle School.

I said that the MYP program does not want to move to Skyline because of the Black and Brown students, etc., and that was interpreted by some as suggesting that educators are unwilling to serve at Skyline because of their race makeup. That is not what I said, and not what I meant. My comment was directed at what I believe to be an underlying concern among some families, not educators. 

Several stakeholders directly and indirectly have expressed that they may withdraw from the MYP program if it is relocated to Skyline. That feedback, regardless of how it is framed, must be examined honestly. When families express that sentiment in response to a program being moved to a building that serves primarily Black and Brown city-based students, we have a responsibility to ask what's informing that reaction.

This is not about assigning blame. This is not about naming the pattern rooted in race, class, and geography that continue to influence how schools and programs are perceived—not just in Delaware, Red Clay, but across the country. So in Delaware, we are still navigating the long-term effects of desegregation. While well-intentioned, the systems that followed, including school choice and magnet program design—all of which my children have benefited from—have led to resegregation in practice, often leaving students of color and those from under-resourced communities on the margins of opportunity. And when families reject a program based on where it is housed, not the quality of instruction or student outcomes, we must recognize that as a symptom of a deeper systemic issue.

Now, I want to be clear about the nature of the MYP program itself. The MYP is a 100% choice-based program. Students are not automatically enrolled based on their home school. That will remain true even if the program is housed at Skyline. The relocation may increase awareness and visibility for students at Skyline, but enrollment—

⏯️7:36 Mark Pruitt: 30 seconds.

⏯️7:36 Kecia Nesmith: I thought you said last time we didn't do time on public—that's what you said last time. That's what was said in this meeting last time.

⏯️7:45 Mark Pruitt: No, we’ve been doing three minutes. 

⏯️7:46 Kecia Nesmith: No, it has not. No, it has not.

⏯️7:50 Mark Pruitt: I hear it has not. You can continue. You can continue because we certainly don't do it for committee members, but you mentioned that you are public tonight.

⏯️7:58 Kecia Nesmith: The building will host the program hopefully and provide access to anyone running it. There have been some concerns raised about housing MYP within comprehensive schools that include staff who are not IB-trained. That concern is valid and it is not new. We have acknowledged that here and continue to acknowledge the challenges and opportunities that such a model might present. 

On the one hand, it can create tensions, differences in expectations, training, and instructional culture between IB and non-IB staff. But on the other hand, it opens up the potential for deep, intentional collaboration around inquiry-based instruction, student agency, and interdisciplinary learning. If structured well, Skyline could evolve into a site of professional learning and instructional excellence for all students.

And then to end—I know I'm long-winded, but I need to clarify—however, this requires investment, which I believe this school district is dedicated to, into the training, leadership, and any other sustainable, high-quality implementation. Concerns about certification, course offerings, and conflicts with other programs, such as Spanish Immersion, are real, but they're not reasons to abandon the move. They are reasons to plan thoughtfully, ensure program fidelity, and align relocation with a timeline and structure that supports success. We must begin to stop treating schools that may or may not show our desires as spaces for experimentation without resourcing, and instead treat every space for excellence equally worthy of flagship programs.

Then finally, to address the concern that the MYP identity and culture will be lost: I believe that culture is important, but I also believe it can evolve and grow. Academic rigor, community, and values do not belong to buildings; they belong to people and practices. If we lead this transition well—whatever is decided—with care and coherence, the MYP identity can flourish in a new setting while expanding access to other students.

Then I'll just wrap up. I have more but maybe I’ll share it tomorrow. I'll end with this: my comment, just to be clear, my comment was never about educators. It was about confronting the underlying dynamics that continue to shape access, enrollment, and engagement across racial and economic lines. And I don't regret naming that reality; I believe it's necessary to do so, especially in this moment. I'm often the one to say the things that other people are unwilling to say. We are going to work together as a district. I am very grateful for all the parents that have worked on this, and for the parents who have opposition and other ideas. All ideas are welcome, and so I just thank you for the extended time, but I just wanted to say that comment.

⏯️10:44 Mark Pruitt: You could have finished as a member of the committee, so why not do it? I agree with you, let's just do it now. All right, we'll move to in-person public comment first. Okay, what I would ask is, you certainly can go first, if you would just provide us your name for the record. You do have three minutes, and I will give you a 30-second reminder. I'll just, as politely as I can, say "30 seconds."

⏯️11:07 Katie Mulrooney: Perfect, thank you so much. Hi, my name is Katie Mulrooney for the record, and I work at Dickinson MYP. Whatever you guys—we're good, cool. Thank you all for being here. I appreciate everybody who has taken the time to make these difficult decisions. Tonight, I'm not here to speak about logistics or scheduling, but about clear visions for our students, especially those who have historically been excluded from advanced, affirming academic pathways.

The IB framework is a complex continuum designed to develop a whole student over time. When decisions are made without a full understanding of how the interconnected parts fit together, we risk causing real harm to the very students and structures we aim to uplift and impact. It's important to remember that while the MYP is a choice program at the middle school level, it actually extends through 9th and 10th grade, creating a critical 5-year continuum that feeds directly into the rigorous 2-year Diploma Programme. The MYP isn't 6th to 8th grade classrooms that can be moved with low operations impact; it is an essential academic bridge designed to prepare students for the research, inquiry, and writing rigor of the DP. Removing the MYP from Dickinson breaks that bridge and disproportionately harms students who do not have external supports. In a district where access to advanced coursework is uneven, Dickinson's integrated IB program promotes equity by guaranteeing that all students, regardless of background, have access to a seamless, world-class pathway—not just those with the means to navigate a fragmented system starting in 11th grade. Keeping the MYP and DP together also maximizes district investment in IB-trained staff, curriculum development, and accreditation by sustaining an efficient, cohesive pipeline for student success. Our continuity matters. When students experience the full IB continuum in one building with overlapping staff, shared values, and consistent pedagogy, they are far more likely to see themselves as capable of succeeding in these demanding programs.

Our DP students serve as mentors for our 8th graders with their community projects. They enjoy extracurriculars like D&D and robotics together, and they engage in community service projects year-round. This is essential and crucial for our students historically underrepresented in advanced academic tracks. Finally, our IB learner profile and philosophy are grounded in anti-racist, inclusive, and globally conscious values. Dismantling pathways in majority-minority schools like Dickinson sends harmful messages about who advanced learning is truly for.

This committee was one vote away from strengthening Dickinson as an IB magnet school. Instead, we are now considering a decision that would move the MYP from the very same building that houses the DP, restructuring our pathway. This isn't just a logistical shift; it seems to be a message—one that risks telling current and future students and families that continuity, excellence, and equitable access aren't priorities. Programs can come and go, but values like equity, access, and excellence must remain constant. IB is more than a program; it reflects who we believe our students can become. Let's not make those beliefs feel temporary. Thank you.

⏯️14:08 Mark Pruitt: Thank you very much. Anyone else in person public comment?

⏯️14:28 Anthony Swierzbinski: Good evening, everyone. My name is Anthony Swierzbinski. I'm a social studies teacher in the middle school program at Dickinson. I'm just asking tonight that you maybe pause any potential changes to the middle school to preserve the integrity of our program.

I've been at Dickinson for 16 years, and for 10 years I've been part of building this program from the ground up. My big concern is if we move to Skyline, this could potentially lead to the end of our program, because I think the committee thinks we can pick up MYP, put it in Skyline, and pick up as usual. It's not going to be that easy, because with IB, we still need to be recertified—a really hard process—and potentially not be reauthorized. If that doesn't happen, then we're in a bad situation. I'm also concerned that if the district sees the costs and the time involved in the transition process, a decision will be made just to eliminate MYP completely and our program would disappear.

Dr. Nesmith, I appreciate your clarification of your comments. I've been at Dickinson for a long time, and I want to teach people who look different than me—if I didn't want to teach people who look different than me, I would have left a long time ago. Dickinson is really inclusive and we value everyone. I'm not anti-Skyline. I really like Mr. Metrinko. If I was moved there, I feel like I could thrive under him. I know a lot of teachers who work at Skyline, I'm friends with them, and I think they're heading in a really good direction. If this committee decides that's what we're going to do, I'll move to Skyline and I'm going to do my best every single day.

But MYP has been a labor of love that I've been a part of since the start. I'm not a Skyline Jaguar; I'm a Dickinson Ram. This has been my home. This has been my home for 16 years, and we've had a lot of amazing things that we've done. I'm not going to bore you with a lot of stuff, but whether it's our—we have Spanish kids, almost 50% of our 8th graders are going into Spanish 3 or French 3, they've gotten two credits already. We have art students—our art kids put on a display in the lobby of the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science. They built a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex model because we do some really cool projects, outside-the-box thinking. Our 8th graders do community projects that get them to think about stuff outside the classroom. I'd be remiss not to say I feel like I'm really proud of the cross country and track teams that I built there that have become some of the best teams in the state.

It doesn't mean that if we go to Skyline all this disappears, but my home is Dickinson and I don't want to leave it. I'll trust what this committee does, but I would like to stay where I'm at.

⏯️17:25 Anne Budischak: So, my name is Anne Budischak. I am the 8th grade Language and Literature teacher at the John Dickinson School. We don’t have ELA teachers, it's Language and Literature. That's an IB thing. So I'm here today to make clear that in advocating for our school, the MYP staff is not rooting against Skyline; we are just rooting for our school. And we're also looking for honesty. We're looking for the committee to be honest about your recommendation, to admit that you're not moving Dickinson's MYP to Skyline—you are closing Dickinson's MYP. You are ending our students' participation in the variety of clubs hosted by high school teachers. You are blocking our students' access to the robotics program. They love that. You are eliminating our students' ability to join the jazz and marching band and our students' ability to participate in varsity sports. You are dispersing our very cohesive staff—maybe the most collaborative and cohesive you have in the district. You are shuttering our culture and our home.

And then, maybe after closing us, you are remarketing Skyline. I say "maybe" because those of us intimately involved in implementing a Middle Years Programme understand that it's not that easy. It's taken four years in the program for me to finally feel like I kind of know what I'm doing when I'm writing IB units and designing IB projects and IB rubrics that go above and beyond district curriculum. When I'm creating lessons to implicitly instruct students on IB approaches to learning and learner profiles. You see, IB doesn't provide us with curriculum or lesson plans, just a set of ideals that we, the teachers, have used to guide us as we labor over our own creations. We are IB—our staff and our students. Scatter us to the wind, and you start from the bottom.

So please, your words matter. You are not cutting a staff, a student body, and a program out of Dickinson and pasting it into Skyline; you are sacrificing one for a small chance that you'll maybe one day be able to recreate something slightly similar somewhere else. Thank you.

⏯️19:53 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Other in-person public comment? Go ahead.

⏯️20:03 Valerie Budischak: My name is Valerie Budischak—very confusing—and my comments are a little bit different. I'm a parent of MYP students.

So the goal of this committee is to evaluate the enrollment, programming, and attendance zones of Red Clay secondary schools. Why do we feel the need to evaluate this at this time after attendance has been declining for 20 years? Let's all be honest about this: this is because this committee was created to save A.I. duPont High School. When asked this question directly last meeting, Dr. Green said that the decline in A.I. is a symptom of the whole problem.

So let me give you an analogy that came to me when I was thinking about this, as I work for the Epilepsy Foundation of Delaware. When someone has epilepsy or recurrent seizures, the seizure is the symptom, not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the electrical activity in the brain—there's too much electrical activity. We don't have a cure for epilepsy, we can't cure that electrical activity, but we can help the symptom. We do have medicines and treatments. We can think about this one symptom—A.I.'s losing enrollment—and we can try to help that issue. 

Why are we penalizing schools like McKean and Dickinson, who adapted to draw in more students to their schools and are thriving, when A.I. did not do this? Let's address that symptom of this problem and not create more future symptoms by disrupting these other schools.

So I'm asking the committee to do a couple things. First, ask the school board for an extended timeline to do this work. There needs to be more time for community feedback. There was no town hall in April as was on the agenda—that was taken off. So the first time us as parents were aware of this was a couple weeks ago. So it would be nice to have more feedback. It would be proper protocol to include your stakeholders more than one survey, which was basically like "We're going to do this, what do you think? Is that okay?" and had no opportunity for us to give any feedback.

I'm just curious why none of the 10 options on that rubric that this committee discussed had to do with anything with the enrollment at A.I. Why was closing A.I. not an option? Why is making it a magnet school—why is it all about all the other schools and moving a thousand other students around when that was laid on the table? So that is my comment.

⏯️22:28 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Any other in-person public comment? Tom.

⏯️22:32 Tom Glennon: My name is Tom Glennon. I'm a Red Clay parent, I teach at Dickinson MYP, and I'm a former Red Clay administrator. I'd like to thank you all on the committee for your hard work that you put in, but I'd also like to echo what Ms. Budischak just said and ask you to please delay your final recommendation.

At your first meeting in January, Dr. Green said, "We really want to be able to use your knowledge, your expertise, as you sit at this table, as you hear and get the pulse of those within the community and bring it back to this committee so that we can make some informed decisions." A slide of the scope of your work was shared, which included: "Collect feedback from stakeholders, including parents, students, teachers, and community members, to inform recommendations." Have you been successful at using the pulse of the community and stakeholder feedback to inform your recommendation?

We already know—and based on some of your own comments from previous meetings, I believe a number of you would agree. Was the survey shared with stakeholders on June 4th? Sure. But it was originally supposed to go out in April so you had time to analyze results and use them to inform your recommendations. Did the district recently host two student focus groups on a 60-minute Zoom call? Sure. Did the focus groups include a Dickinson MYP student? Nope. Based on the results that will be shared later in the meeting, did the students in the focus group support the Innovation Center? Of course they did. What middle and high school students wouldn't be excited about participating in cool, hands-on learning? As someone on the outside looking in, both the late survey and limited student focus groups seem to have been afterthoughts, and their results obviously did not inform your current recommendations.

Where is the data on the rest of the focus groups that Mr. Pruitt said would be happening—the ones supported and funded through the Rodel Foundation that would include a student focus group, a parent/community focus group, a teacher group, and a business partner? I'm assuming these never took place. Can you make adjustments to your recommendation tonight? Sure. But that is an extremely quick turnaround for something that you were originally supposed to have over two months to analyze and digest before making a final recommendation.

Here are a number of your comments from earlier meetings, which are posted online:

• "I think we're rushing it, personally."

• "Make a big decision, come up with a solution after, what, six months of one meeting?"

• "I certainly don't want to rush a decision if we're not there yet, and there are a lot of factors of public comment that we need to think about that might influence the difficulty of making a sound recommendation."

• "I have a concern about a broad recommendation if we don't flush out a lot. I'm going to be nervous to do a straw poll."

• "I don't feel like I have a good sense of how these ideas would look in practice, so to vote for one without knowing exactly what it'd look like makes me nervous."

• "I think we are rushing it because it seems like even on the problem statement there's some confusion, so I think we will need more time."

When you hear these comments, it's like people are not exactly clear about what the problem is.

I'll jump down to my conclusion, Mr. Pruitt. Thank you for writing the conclusion for me. You said, and I quote: "I am open to a motion to move it back a month, to move back three months. There is no way to change any student's programming before August of 2027, and that really doesn't change whether this work is done by July or this work is done by next July." Once again, I ask you, please delay your final decision so that we can work as a community to figure this out. Thank you.

⏯️25:40 Mark Pruitt: Thank you very much. Any other in-person public comment? Move to online. 

⏯️25:53 Unknown Speaker: We have one so far. Jenny Howard. Ms. Howard, can you unmute your mic?

⏯️25:57 Jenny Howard: Good evening, and thank you to the committee for the time and care you've dedicated to this process. It's clear there is a sincere commitment to improving outcomes for all students in Red Clay. That said, I believe we haven't yet explored all the structural solutions that true equity requires.

I urge the district to adopt a more unified version for secondary education: phase out exclusive magnet high schools and invest in three fully comprehensive feeder high schools, each offering the same academic, extracurricular, and college/career readiness opportunities regardless of where the student lives. Capping magnet enrollment isn't enough. I heard that come up once; it may slow growth, but it doesn't fix the deeper issue that some schools remain resource-rich islands while others operate with far fewer opportunities.

The disparities are clear in the "Examples of Impact" slide. Dual enrollment, which is essentially free college, is offered in eight courses at Conrad, but only four at A.I. and McKean, and none at Dickinson. These courses can save families thousands of dollars and give students a major head start, yet access is tied to which school a student attends. The pattern continues with college access coursework: Cab and Conrad offer 29 to 30 advanced courses, while McKean and A.I. offer 12, and Dickinson 15. In athletics, Conrad, CSW, and DMA field more teams than any of the three traditional high schools. That matters not just for scholarships, but for engagement, health, and a sense of belonging.

These are not minor gaps; they shape futures, and they are often tied to housing, income, or a family's ability to navigate a complicated choice system. If we're serious about equity, we need a model like Appoquinimink, where all three traditional high schools offer identical programs and access. Students shouldn't have to choose a school or win a lottery just to get basic opportunities. We won't achieve equity until we stop asking students to gamble with their futures. Let's build a district where address doesn't determine destiny, and every child has a fair shot. Thank you again to the committee for your hard work and for the opportunity to speak tonight.

⏯️28:02 Mark Pruitt: Thank you, Ms. Howard. Anyone else online public comment? All right. If anyone joins us or would like to give public comment at the end, we certainly—

⏯️28:16 Unknown Speaker: Somebody just raised their hand. Laura B.

⏯️28:23 Mark Pruitt: Laura B., if you'd please give us your full name.

⏯️28:25 Laura Boyle: Sure. Hi, good evening. My name is Laura Boyle, and I did not expect to speak tonight, but since the opportunity is here, I'm just going to give a little bit of my interpretation.

I really have appreciated that there has been a committee that's looking into the attendance zones and wanting to do something that builds back AI. My concern, of course, is that McKean will suffer tremendously if we go through with the CTE program. I just have a terrible feeling about the way that it's been designed, where I don't feel, as a parent, if my child had the choice of two comprehensive high schools only, and would have to be ferried back and forth during the school day, that that would be a draw for me to take my child to Red Clay or have them go to one of those schools. I would be looking elsewhere, probably.

This is a little long-winded, but my experience—I come from Long Island, moved here 25 years ago. I went to a huge high school; my graduating class was over 1,300. We had two high school buildings on one campus: one for 9th and 10th graders, one for 11th and 12th graders. 

The year before me and my year, we had classes in trailers all over the campus because we had too many kids. And what happened was the board decided we needed  another building, and they built another building. But that building wasn't built or finished until after my sister completed school—was in high school—and she's seven years behind me. But by the time her feeders came through, they were down to about 900 students per year. And five years after they built that new building, they had to sell it because they did not have enough kids.

And the one thing about feeder patterns is they come and they go. It depends on generation, it depends on the new developments that are coming in. And I—I don't know, I feel like this program hasn't been looked at long enough. And the new—the new idea for the design for the CTE—my other wonder is, I don't know where the extra funding is coming from. And maybe I don't need to be, you know, told that specifically to just me, but if schools are funded by the number of students that are going to that school—and I heard at the last meeting, you know, the excitement of drawing more kids and there's going to be able to have more academics and more, you know, after-school activities, whatever it is, because there's more students in those buildings, and maybe some of them have special needs or some of them come from a lower socioeconomic class, whatever it is that the state is funding more—if we go from three schools—

⏯️31:34 Mark Pruitt: Just a few more seconds.

⏯️31:35 Lauren Boyle: All right. Well, I just want to know how do we still have the same amount of students and somehow only two schools, and yet there's more money? I don't know, I wish I was a little more coherent. I didn't plan to speak. Thank you for the opportunity.

⏯️31:55 Mark Pruitt: All right. At this point, you have the copies of tonight's agenda and minutes—hard copies in front of you. We'll give a moment to look over those minutes. They were sent out to the committee a week ago, and then we will take a motion to accept or amend those minutes.

⏯️32:15 Jose Matthews: So moved, Jose Matthews.

⏯️32:17 Mark Pruitt: Mr. Matthews makes a motion. Second?

⏯️32:21 Kendra Todd-Dixon: Second.

⏯️32:22 Mark Pruitt: Second from Ms. Todd-Dixon. Any questions, edits, amendments to the meeting—to the minutes, excuse me? Take a vote, all in favor?

⏯️32:32 Group: Aye.

⏯️32:33 Mark Pruitt: Any opposed? Passes unanimous.

All right, we've seen these next few slides many times, so we are going to go quickly here. The goal for the committee we've shared at the beginning of each meeting. Our meeting norms continue to be the same.

Timeline: you know, we did add one meeting, and we now stand at June 17, 2025, which is a community feedback analysis and complete the recommendation. That was our goal for this meeting, and we should be on target.

The current—the current recommendation as exists—as it exists went out to the community. It had core principles and alignment of attendance zones: creating straight-line feeder patterns that align high school attendance zones with existing middle school attendance zones; balanced enrollment; a commitment to distribute students equitably across attendance zone high schools; and program equity to ensure that all students, regardless of high school, have access to high-quality academic and extracurricular programs. So that started off the current recommendation as it exists.

The second one—the program change number one was the establishment of the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus. The committee currently recommends that Thomas McKean High School be reimagined as the Thomas McKean Innovation Campus through expanded partnerships with local colleges, universities, and the business community. This flagship hub will provide coursework in the following areas: CTE, industry-standard credentialing, early college credit opportunities.

And as part of the change, the number of comprehensive high school attendance zone schools would be reduced from three to two: Alexis I. duPont High School and the John Dickinson School. The two comprehensive high schools would split the Red Clay high school attendance zones equally, allowing for increased enrollment and more robust academic and extracurricular offerings. These two attendance zones better align with the middle school attendance zones, allowing for straight-line feeder patterns from middle school to high school. Short shuttle bus transportation would be provided from A.I. and Dickinson to the McKean Innovation Campus for career, technical, and early college coursework.

Second program change would be a relocation of the John Dickinson Middle Years Programme to allow for increased high school enrollment at the John Dickinson School. The committee recommends the relocation of the MYP middle school program from Dickinson to Skyline Middle School, allowing for more balanced enrollment across middle schools.

Additional recommendations for future consideration: first one is a second look at middle school attendance zones. Re-evaluate middle school attendance zones, especially as they pertain to Warner Elementary—the Warner Elementary School community—to improve feeder pattern continuity and equity. And second, virtual coursework programming: explore the development of virtual high school coursework to expand flexibility and learning opportunities for Red Clay students. That is the current recommendation as it exists from our work over the past six months.

Questions? What we're going to do tonight is look at—is listen to and look at some data summaries from the survey and the student focus groups, allow us to work with that and say, "Is this what we want to move forward with, or do we want to make an adjustment to the recommendation?"

First up, from Dr. Bond's Teaching and Learning Office, Karen Ammann and Ms. Karen Ammann and Mr. Brian Mattix, instructional technology. Karen Ammann oversees instructional technology for the district, and Brian Mattix oversees science and CTE programming for the district.

Rodel was unable to meet our needs of providing some feedback. We did have an opportunity to meet with their CTE leader about future CTE programming—I shared that at the last meeting—but they were unable to provide us any focus group work and facilitation of that. So what we added was to continue with student focus groups, but to add a public meeting, which we held last week. At this time, Ms. Ammann's going to take us through a summary of the work they did with students—both a middle school group and high school.

⏯️37:34 Karen Ammann: So, we were charged with meeting with these groups of students, and our focus were CTE pathways and what students wish were offered at their current schools, career fields of interest, and then what their perspectives were on the proposed CTE Innovation Hub. Along the way, you'll see in gray, on some slides, some student comments that were taken directly from the focus group.

So here's the census for the different groups. So it was two different meetings, each an hour long, so we met with middle school and high school separately.

So the methodology: it was over Zoom, it was 60 minutes. Brian and I were both the moderators, and our focus was CTE awareness, student interest, and feedback on the innovation center. And I just absolutely loved that right there, which was an AI High student: "I don't exactly know what job I want, but I'm getting closer and closer to it." And I thought, "Oh my goodness, if that doesn't speak volumes about our remarkable students."

So the key findings we are going to see here over the next couple of slides are broken down into three different topics: the innovation center coursework and pathways, professional and college partnerships, and then learning environment.

Courses and pathways: high school students felt that more access across all schools for the same pathways would be ideal. One student spoke that their school does not offer automotive tech, but he knows for sure that he has at least a handful of friends that, had it been offered at his school, they would have welcomed the opportunity to take auto tech as their pathway. But because it wasn't offered at their school, they had to choose something else.

The high school students are excited about the limited pathways that they have, but they'd also like to have some more understanding about what their future is holding as far as CTE is concerned. And their other real concern is that they'd like the opportunity to explore CTE pathways and try out a few before they absolutely have to make a commitment to one path. Words from an HB student.

Okay, so then professional and college partnerships: that was an area that was next. We definitely heard from—interestingly enough, I thought once we got to the middle school group, which was the second group that we talked to, I thought for sure, "What are we asking middle schoolers about career and professional experiences, right?" But out of the mouths of babes! So one of them says, "I had a job, I didn't like it, so it didn't really help me decide to do that. But what it did tell me is that I didn't like that job, so I need something else." And I thought, "Absolutely, that's all part of career exploration: finding out what you like and what you don't like."

High school students spoke just worlds about their mentorships, about their college partnerships that they had with professionals that they've worked with. One student mentioned that his networking through a career opportunity through CTE has led him now into an internship, and he knows he's going to be a grower, and he's going out, he's working with this huge farm, and he's really excited about it. So, and that was mirrored across all the different schools. Definitely interested in more professional opportunities and mentoring in the public and the private sector.

And then finally, the learning environment: certainly, as you saw a couple of slides ago, all students were in favor of the CTE pathways hub as a destination to go. Some of them were cautious; some of them were wondering about sports programs or after-school clubs, and so they're looking at it with a critical eye, and they're thinking about how it would impact their experiences at school. But overwhelmingly, the opportunities that it would afford them for CTE courses and pathways was definitely a win for both middle school and high school students.

And again, adding the opportunity to add to the pathways that we currently have in the hub for ones like plant sciences was definitely something that students were interested in. And then one learner cautioned us to remember that multilingual learners (MLL) need to have support at the hub as well as in their classrooms, and that we should definitely take care to keep that in mind. So that was also the—

Okay, so recommendations: they basically really like the concept of the innovation center. Definitely would like to see those pathways added that are there, and open up more pathways that are only specific at one or two high schools. They really had great conversations between themselves. And how do you cultivate on Zoom the collaboration between students? But we had one say, "Hey, I'd like to talk to the Dickinson students," and then ask each other questions. It was absolutely fantastic.

They're interested in more mentorship, more opportunities for jobs, and they feel that working through the hub would definitely give them those kinds of experiences. A better way to balance out the book work with the hands-on work, because 100%—all of them said that they enjoyed hands-on learning, project-based learning, work-based learning balanced with those books and the paper, traditional classroom experiences. Any questions?

⏯️43:49 Jose Matthews: So, a comment was just mentioned that Dickinson Middle IB program was left out the initial focus group. Is there a reason behind that?

⏯️44:00 Karen Ammann: I'm going to defer to Mr. Pruitt on that.

⏯️44:03 Mark Pruitt: No specific reason. We had five schools that we involved in the middle school programming to get just a selection of students—a cross-selection of students based on race and ethnicity, gender across our schools. Specifically, we were looking at students that attend our comprehensive attendance zone schools. And the only addition to that was we did include Brandywine Springs middle school program with the middle schoolers. But beyond that, we focused on our attendance zone students at our attendance zone schools and attendance zone high schools.

⏯️44:40 Jose Matthews: I guess the same could be said about Cab Calloway as well, so the rationale was—

⏯️44:46 Mark Pruitt: The rationale was that they made a decision—I mean, in all honesty, the rationale was made—I don't know that a whole lot went into it other than the fact that they made a decision to attend a performing arts school. And so, you know, they and their family made that decision, and we thought someone that was looking for a more comprehensive school experience might be better with a group of 10 students.

⏯️45:09 Jose Matthews: Thank you for that. 

⏯️45:11 Kecia Nesmith: Question: how were they determined—the number of students to participate determined?

⏯️45:21 Mark Pruitt: They were determined at the school level. How many?

⏯️45:24 Kecia Nesmith: Like, so in other words, so that's a good 8, 9, 10—call it 10 kids in each one? What was the rationale around that number to participate in one focus group? Like, I know you don't want to have too many kids in the focus group. 

⏯️45:38 Mark Pruitt: I think a 10 is pushing it in a focus group. 

⏯️45:41 Kecia Nesmith: Why not have more?

⏯️45:44 Mark Pruitt: More focus groups?

⏯️45:45 Kecia Nesmith: Two, yeah, like two for middle, two for high, or—Just a thought process, right?

⏯️45:50 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, I mean, I don't know that there is a thought process beyond we thought it was important to get feedback from a middle school focus group and a high school focus group.

⏯️46:02 Jose Matthews: Great, I like feedback.

⏯️46:04 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. And thank you to Ms. Ammann and Mr. Mattix is on vacation this week or he'd have been here. He's an expert. He’s our resident expert, CTE. Yes, Jennifer.

⏯️46:15 Jennifer Recchiuti: So I know the groups have to be smaller, but I feel like there's a lot of kids not being given this opportunity for input, especially middle schoolers, because they're the ones that are going to be going into the high school that are in sixth grade around the time period of when this program comes out. So I do think it would be beneficial to get every kid’s opinion, even though it's not like a focus group, but their opinions. You know, if we're going to go towards, you know, the innovation center, what are you looking to do? Do you start this in 8th grade where, you know, they're exposed to different things to get them thinking? I just think that we're missing a lot of children's inputs in this.

⏯️46:58 Mark Pruitt: I think student feedback—and I think that Brian and Lou and his team would certainly say when we're looking to finalize, if we were to go this direction, and we're looking to have a CTE hub, that student interests need to cross with industry standards, industry wages, and where jobs are over the next 10 years. So it's a fine line between someone saying—having a student say, "Well, you know, I want to do animal science," say, right, or veterinary tech—how many of those jobs are there? We want to set some students up for success in their future careers. So yeah, you have to constantly balance. But absolutely, he would say our work over the next two years would be to look at both of those factors in determining what programs we would offer.

⏯️47:52 Caitlin Merto: And I'm not sure if that's like—how I mean, CTE in Pennsylvania, we cannot start a program that is not also backed by, you know, the labor statistics.

⏯️48:00 Mark Pruitt: Labor market analysis, same in Delaware.

⏯️48:01 Caitlin Merto: That's why we have OAC meetings, we have to get letters of support to prove that there is still a need and that what we are doing is correct. 

But I think, unless I misunderstood, I feel like, to your point, it's not so much about what programs they would want to see. Like, I would be curious how middle school students feel about the complete change of the makeup of what high school would look like for them. 

And I understand the focus groups give us a great starting point, but if we build out a whole program and students aren't actually interested in being bussed or trying to go through these pathways, then we could potentially be closing—and I guess the families of middle schoolers, too, right?—like we could potentially be closing a school that we would actually see children matriculate to, and now might be pushing them in another direction. So that's just kind of a thought and concern.

And then as well, I mean, I know obviously there's a lot of work to be done, but as a CTE teacher, I understand the importance of providing students with an opportunity to explore a CTE early on. And especially if we're going to have a CTE innovation center, I'd be curious to see what that would look like. 

Like one time, my school district is trying to work on it, but like we walk into an auditorium and talk to kids for like five minutes each. That's not an effective way, and that's what we have right now. Is what we have right now, and we're trying to grow that. And like that's something that we were trying to do, but like they really need to have time to really explore. So I feel like that's an important piece to really allowing them to have a true decision.

⏯️49:42 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Any other comments? 

⏯️49:43 Kecia Nesmith: Two questions. First question is, in the focus group, did you hear any students say anything about engineering classes and STEM?

⏯️49:51 Karen Ammann: Yes.

⏯️49:52 Kecia Nesmith: Can you share a little bit?

⏯️49:53 Karen Ammann: Sure. Actually, engineering came up at both the middle school and the high school level. One gentleman would like fabric engineering, machine engineering—I'm not really sure what engineering that is myself, but Mr. Mattix totally understood it and was able to speak to it.

⏯️50:11 Shawn Snyder: Fabrication?

⏯️50:12 Karen Ammann: I think so, or machines. I'm not sure. Apparently they're kind of maybe synonymous. Thank you, CTE expert is right here.

So, they both had desires for that, and Brian was able to talk about what courses are offered right now that steer kids in that direction through school, but that we have a whole pathway for it. I do not believe that we do. 

The kids had some amazing—I mean, one gentleman said he wanted to be a professional volleyball player. This was one of our middle schoolers, and he was not going to take any CTE classes because we don't have professional volleyball! But then once we stepped back and we explained to him, "Hey, we might not, but we have pathways to support athleticism and being a healthy human. We have the nursing pathway, physical therapy pathway, we have other allied health pathways that could build a better athlete with better ground." He agreed that was important to be a better athlete and that he would [inaudible.]

I think that conversation leads to that exact point that somebody here made about middle schoolers needing to have more exposure, which they asked for, and to have opportunities to learn about them. So one of the things that Brian really got in the weeds with the kids was saying, "Well, how do you think—what would appeal to you about educating you guys on CTE and what that is?" And it's really funny because I think CTE is a definite high school term. I don't necessarily know that middle schoolers understood CTE pathways and what career and technical education was.

So Brian walked away from that and said, "Well, I know what my job is in the next year. I know what I need to do." And so high school students were offering, "I think an elevator speech, could you do a CTE fair?" Middle schoolers were asking if they could rotate through a marking period of exposure, maybe in that ninth grade year before they commit to the three-year program. Like, these were all brainstorms that were happening while we had this—while a small but mighty group of students that were just really uplifting to listen to.

I mean, truly, to walk away from that, and kids as young as, you know, seventh grade already having these conceived notions of careers and courses of study and mentorship, it was just fantastic. It truly was fantastic.

And then I went to my girls, who are a Conrad graduate and a Cab graduate, and I said, "Do you remember taking a CTE?" Now I have a 25-year-old and a 23-year-old, so it's been a minute. And they said, "No." And I thought, Okay, well, you were in physical therapy, and that was your CTE pathway through Conrad. And you were stage tech, and while that's considered a CTE pathway as well—although probably not 100% in that arena. So I think over course of time, the vocabulary that we're using as far as CTE and career and technical education—we would all do well to start to use those terminologies with kids from the get-go.

⏯️53:38 Kecia Nesmith: Then my final question is kind of to the committee. I don't know if it was an oversight on our part, or we thought it was happening and it didn't happen, but to your point about getting student input: because the survey was for adults, was there—do we have a survey? Was that considered? Where are we at with getting student surveys? I know it's hard at the end of the school year, they don't want to take the survey with that, but—

⏯️54:00 Mark Pruitt: I will say this: we had the survey queued up for students. Hanover steered us away from including students. The language in the survey—when we did our final pre-meeting before launching the survey, a lot of the language was about attendance zones, feeder patterns, choice schools. And they thought that we would get better data by including a parent/guardian as the feedback, because the questions were geared towards attendance zones. You know, what do you think is the most important? Aligning straight-line feeder patterns from middle school to high school? And their recommendation to us was that those questions would not give us accurate data for 11 through 18-year-olds.

⏯️54:55 Kecia Nesmith: So I'm thinking—so the one question in here that I think would have been relevant to find out about is how students feel about their transition years, whether it's a K to 5, 6 to 12, or if there's a middle level in between. I think that's something that could eventually—before decisions are actually, things are put in place, whatever that is—get that information. And I think the focus group question, maybe some of those questions truncated, could be another survey to gauge student interest, so that when—so what we do as a board is we decide, we give direction, and then the district figures it out, right? So I'm self-speaking board, not committee. So once those details come into play, I would just hope that we would get all of that feedback from all those stakeholder groups around that, because kids know a lot more than we think they know. And so I think that is helpful to find that out. But I think the information [inaudible].

⏯️55:56 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Karen, thank you very much. The next was the community survey conducted by Hanover Research. And I would ask one question to consider as we go through this data, right, or even take a moment: these questions had somewhat always a neutral response was a possibility.

So as we go through these questions, be thinking about: what does support or opposition look like when you look at summary data, right? Do I expect that if it's one more vote supporting than opposing, that that is a consensus or that's a majority? Or do I expect that there needs to be 90% to 10% support versus opposed, right? Like these are things when you're looking at data, you know, and trying to make decisions from survey data, I think that you need to consider as we go through.

So what we're going to do is go through the data quickly here as a whole group, and then look at that data again in smaller groups to answer some analysis questions from the survey.

All right, first, there were 1,128 respondents to the survey. The last time we had a community-wide survey like this, we had 530 responses. So while we would hope that we could have had as many as 50,000 respondents, certainly for the feedback that we get, 1,128 participants is about as good as we get—or at least in the last few years. I will say that we sent it out via email, posted on social media, sent text reminders. Our principals then turned it around to staff and did a variety of methods to try to get the word out. Yes?

⏯️57:53 Jennifer Recchiuti: I just want to make a comment about this. A thousand people is not a lot, especially where the majority of it is coming from staff members. But I can say from experience, my children's school did not send out any communication at this time. So I wanted to make that point that, you know, even though there was messages and stuff being sent out by like you guys, it was not communicated at least by my children's school.

⏯️58:18 Mark Pruitt: Okay.

⏯️58:21 Committee Member: Point out that the same for the town hall meeting also, I found out from a Facebook page.

⏯️58:29 Mark Pruitt: Let me ask: were you getting the district messages about it, the district emails?

⏯️58:33 Committee Member: I did not get any—

⏯️58:34 Mark Pruitt: It’s the same, because that would be the same delivery method as a school would, right? Whatever your email is, is the same delivery method.

⏯️58:43 Committee Member: I get plenty of district emails but I did not—

⏯️58:46 Committee Member: Those emails often go to promotions. I know I'm not supposed to, but—

⏯️58:52 Mark Pruitt: Did you say it was in promotions?

⏯️58:53 Committee Member: No, I don’t think it was—

⏯️58:55 Kecia Nesmith: We did talk about having principals share it, because a lot of parents read the emails from their schools, but they glance over the emails from district.

⏯️59:05 Committee Member: I definitely know we didn't get any from the school.

⏯️59:10 Jennifer Recchiuti: My children's school sends us like an email blast every single week—one coming from each one of their teachers. One's in middle school, one's in elementary school—and I did not see anything at all from either one of those teachers or the principal.

⏯️59:22 Committee Member: I think we're probably talking about the same school.

⏯️59:25 Jennifer Recchiuti: Brandywine Springs?

⏯️59:26 Committee Member: Yes.

⏯️59:28 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, I know. You know, we can talk with the communications department about how that went out. There was certainly a message to send it out at the school level.

Within the survey, 43% of respondents identified as parent/guardians, 46% as staff members, and 11% as community members. If you identified and said you were a staff member in the school, 71% of those persons were instructional staff, 4% school administrators, 21% other school staff support staff counselors, and 4% school office staff. Parents had identified the grades of their students—that was the distribution of their students and the grades of their students.

Parents were asked to identify if their student were a multi-language learner, special education student, gifted and talented student, or free and reduced lunch student, or none of the above.

Question asked if they attend their—if they—if their student currently attends their attendance zone school. 54% of the parent respondents said that their student attends their attendance zone school, and 44% said they do not attend their attendance zone school.

Race and ethnicity—

⏯️1:01:24 Val Gould: I have a question.

⏯️1:01:25 Mark Pruitt: Yes.

⏯️1:01:29 Val Gould: I have a comment about this.

⏯️1:01:32 Mark Pruitt: Go ahead, absolutely, yeah. Just jump in.

⏯️1:01:34 Val Gould: This page right here speaks to the concerns that I put out in the email regarding town hall—because I don't know how—so the total number of respondents, how many of those were families again?

⏯️1:01:58 Mark Pruitt: 46%. 47%.

⏯️1:02:04 Shawn Snyder: Let's say about 64%. Might be off by 10.

⏯️1:02:08 Val Gould: 67% of the family respondents were—no, 67% of the respondents were—

⏯️1:02:14 Mark Pruitt: No 67% of respondents were white. Including staff.

⏯️1:02:19 Val Gould: That—okay, considering how much of our district is not—not just white, this data is very concerning, and it speaks to the whole like—it doesn't seem like the district has a very good relationship with the vast majority of its families, students, whatever the case is. It's like this tells me that a lot of people don't care unless they’re white, and that's really, really, really upsetting to me. And it also says to me that the district is not making a concerted effort to engage the folks who are the least engaged and find out what those reasons are for lack of communications.

And so I just want to point that out, and that moving forward, this data is all great, but when the respondents look like that, that is not an accurate representation of this district. And that's me, as a researcher myself, says this data cannot be trusted to represent an adequate cross-section of this district, and that it should not be leaned on to make any decisions, and that's the case.

⏯️1:03:39 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. 

⏯️1:03:40 Shawn Snyder: If we were to go through with this kind of respondents file and weigh the categories based upon the distribution of the district, would that make you more comfortable with the dataset, or is it really the end—like the number of respondents?

⏯️1:03:52 Val Gould: Yeah, I mean, how many thousands of kids do we have in this district? 

⏯️1:03:56 Shawn Snyder: We have lots. 

⏯️1:03:57 Val Gould: And 1,128—a lot of them are staff. Over 50% were staff, and still 40%—I mean, we have how many—like, how many students?

⏯️1:04:09 Jennifer Recchiuti: Less than 10%.

⏯️1:04:10 Val Gould: Yeah, like that's nuts.

⏯️1:04:12 Shawn Snyder: It is incredibly challenging not for schools, but for any organization to get people to fill out surveys in this day and age. Like, if somebody sends me a survey, I just delete it. I don’t fill it out—

⏯️1:04:20 Val Gould: Yeah, no, 100%. So I mean, how do we—I think the district needs to make a very concerted—a very concerted and very overt and direct effort to engage families in every single school.

⏯️1:04:36 Kendra Todd-Dixon: I will jump in and say there could be a degree of fatigue that’s happened. We send out about 10 surveys to families every year, to students, aside from what the district and the state requires us to send out and promote. So there—at this time of the year, there's fatigue. There's fatigue with taking tests, there's fatigue with school in general, and there's fatigue—I don't know that there is some—some degree of like, "I don't care about this." I just think that when—

⏯️1:05:05 Val Gould: There absolutely could be but we talked about this. 

⏯️1:05:07 Kendra Todd-Dixon: And June, June the 5th or whatever this came out, there have to be a degree of fatigue.

⏯️1:05:11 Val Gould: And that's why at the beginning—and if—correct me if I'm wrong, but I think at the beginning of this process, we talked about we can't do this in June, because we're not going to get responses. And—

⏯️1:05:24 Kecia Nesmith: I'm gonna echo, I’m gonna echo—so I think that our board collective, the committee, administrators, parents, teachers, everybody serving this committee have good intention. And I think that that was the case all along.

But I don't want us to move—like you said, move forward. And I said this before, I was graciously quoted earlier in what I said, um, that we really need to be strategic about this and—and make sure that they're engaging families who are not typically engaged. I went to this—the WLC symposium today, and they talked about the inequity in education and the historical reasons for why parents don't care to do a survey, because they're worried about survival. But at the end of the day, if we look at the disparities of students of color, students who are living in poverty to those who are not—like me, right, because I don't live in poverty—then we are seeing this disparate outcome.

And so to the point of why the board, I believe, charged this—the school district, we have to engage them. We have to understand where they're coming from, and we have to teach and show—not teach, I'm sorry, we have to share and engage families better at different demographics so that you don't have a disproportionate number of families or teachers or whoever, students responding. Okay, people are not going to do surveys, to Kendra's point.

But I said this from the beginning, and I say it again now: I don't think we gave ourselves enough time to make a very good decision on where to go. Now, the "how" we shouldn't be worried about as much unless we see some major polls, but I definitely want to see some more engagement, and that's why we said to have a town hall back in—what did we start this, April? No, no, before April.

⏯️1:07:25 Val Gould: The town hall was— 

⏯️1:07:25 Kecia Nesmith: No, we said this way back last year. Well, we said to have a town—I said to have town hall and engage families. And I also said to bring people who are not represented here to this table, and that hasn't happened either, for whatever reason. And I'm not trying to point fingers, but I do think that we—the committee, board, had all—whatever decision we say to go to the board with, we have to have—we all have to be behind that. Not all, but we have to have the consensus. And then I—all the board has is—I think we're moving in the right direction, I just want to get a little bit more information and have a little bit more strategy around our decision.

⏯️1:08:04 Kendra Todd-Nixon: My—my next wonder would be: what other vehicles can be utilized that haven't been?

⏯️1:08:10 Kecia Nesmith: Door knocking.

⏯️1:08:11 Kendra Todd-Dixon: Okay. Does—is there research centered around what other, for our communities that are underrepresented? Are there any sort of researched methods to get them to the table? Because I'm thinking between social media's blast, Zoom opportunities in town—I'm just trying to figure out what other vehicles, because door knocking is not even beneficial for—in political matters—

⏯️1:08:36 Kecia Nesmith: Oh yes, it absolutely is.

⏯️1:08:36 Val Gould: It is. 

⏯️1:08:37 Kendra Todd-Dixon: It depends, because I've been a part of some campaigns and it turned out that always happened the way that—

⏯️1:08:41 Kecia Nesmith: The WLC has a good connection with a lot of the families, so we could use those community partners and other partners to get the message out. So to your—what you were asking, that—that's the idea that I had about getting those community—I think we even spoke about that: getting the community groups aware of what we're trying to do so that we can spread the word a little bit more. Because at the end of the day, we have to vote as a board, and I know how big this is going to be once we vote on whatever—whatever it is. And so did we do our due diligence ahead of time? Before you make a recommendation, you guys—we can make a recommendation as a committee, but once we have to vote, that's going to be a big deal, and I think we should make sure that we don't—

⏯️1:09:28 Caitlin Merto: So I feel like there are ways—door knocking, yes and like kind of looking at what the resources are. But on top of that, too, I'm an educator, I'm a parent. This is an exhausting time of the year, as we all mentioned. April would have definitely been better. To me, it's like, do we then explore having a more concerted effort at the beginning of the school year when we have back-to-school nights, when we have open houses? 

⏯️1:09:58 Val Gould: That's been brought up in—

⏯️1:09:59 Caitlin Merto: Like, I mean, I feel like that's a great way. I mean, and I—I live in a community where, you know, we do have the H.B. open house in two places, you know, and we've done the one at the West End Neighborhood House. And you could have someone there like to get the information to the parents that aren't able to get to the actual school. Or to Val's point in her email, we could have more than one town hall. There could be one at different locations throughout the district. They're going to be ones at different places throughout the district, which is then make it more accessible.

⏯️1:10:36 Kecia Nesmith: Yeah, and I just want to say our district leaders have responded to the call. So I'm not saying anything against Mark or the team or anything—that was the short timeline that the school board gave to make a decision, so that's where we are with that. I just want to clarify that this was a short period of time. 

⏯️1:10:55 Mark Pruitt: So this—this committee was—well, school board charged Dr. Green and his team, which I'm a part of, to—to—they gave us a charge, a timeline, and deliverables to be delivered in the form of a recommendation in July. And—and—and that's where we are, right?

So I think we probably need to have a—a deliverable and a recommendation. Even if added to our recommendation, however, there needs to be more time for the community to weigh in—like, could add something like that to a recommendation. I, you know, that really is up to the committee, and that's where we're trying to get, right? We're going to look at this data, then we're going to have an opportunity to say, "Do we want to edit or add anything to this recommendation?" And—and the timeline can certainly be, you know, our plan for the timeline—our plan can certainly involve—our recommendation can involve, you know, a recommended, you know, time frame to allow for—for community feedback to digest the situation, engage with stakeholders. That's up to the committee. Yes, Jennifer?

⏯️1:12:07 Jennifer Recchiuti: So the first one is I think a really good way to engage, you know, parents to do like surveys is during parent-teacher conferences. They're either coming in or they're coming in soon. That way you can vocally, you know, say like, "Hey, hey, please take the survey. This is what we're trying to engage in." You know, I know there are some that said like, you know, knock on your door, "I'm not going to answer," and I know that there's a lot of people that don't answer the doors either, even though I do think that is an option.

But I did want to make a point to something. I'm in a split household—my kids are in a split household. I'm separated from my children's father. I received the email. I'm the primary contact. He is also the secondary contact with his email, and I just confirmed with him he did not get the email. He is—they are Puerto Rican, I'm white, so obviously I fell in the white category. But I think that, you know, if there are split families, that other split family—that other secondary party, which is, I know, sometimes the male in the family, basically the woman typically takes charge of—of it, we're missing that secondary family. So I just want to make a comment on that.

⏯️1:13:17 Val Gould: Conferences probably wouldn't work very well in [inaudible] at Brandywine Springs [inaudible]  

⏯️1:13:34 Kendra Todd-Dixon: Secondary schools [inaudible] 

⏯️1:13:37 Val Gould: Like the one we’re sitting next to. Parent teacher conference looks very different.

⏯️1:13:43 Reggie Worlds: Mark, do you think it's better to just get through this data and then have small groups, and then come back to—

⏯️1:13:50 Mark Pruitt: I think so, I think so.

⏯️1:13:52 Reggie Worlds: Then let’s move forward.

⏯️1:13:56 Mark Pruitt: All right. Gender breakdown: what we did first, and you know, you saw these questions at the last meeting, but what we did first was look at four questions, right? Please say how important you feel following elements are as changes to a Red Clay attendance zones are being considered.

The first was ensuring there are enough students in each school to run equitable programming. Respondents to that question: 65% very important, 26% moderately important.

Ensuring straight-line feeders, keeping students together throughout their 6–12 educational experience: certainly support, but different data—38% very important, 43% moderately important. Again, you're going to have paper copies of this data in about five minutes.

Ensuring each attendance zone has a balanced enrollment of students: 51% very important, 35% moderately important.

Ensuring all Red Clay students have access to quality college and career programming: 85% very important, 11% moderately important.

Okay, we then asked, "Please select the factor you feel is the most important of those four." And 46%: ensuring all Red Clay students have access to quality college and career programming. Questions about that first question?

Here's disaggregated data that went along with that by community member, parent, and staff broken out. Again, you'll see that, but I don't think there's anything—again, the college and career programming was the most significant regardless of group.

Next one was about the programmatic changes, which included the innovation center at McKean and the move of Dickinson MYP from Dickinson to Skyline, right? What you see is 28% strongly support, 23%—I'm sorry, 23% strongly support, 28% somewhat support, totaling 51%. 19% strongly oppose, 15% somewhat oppose, totaling 34%. And 16% did not take a stance.

Here it is broken out by staff totals, and this I think is really important to consider, because we've heard this tonight, right? Like that our district office staff: 60%—30 total staff, 60% supported, 23% opposed, that is—that is both strongly and somewhat, okay. Elementary staff: 60% support, 20% oppose.

But then it drops off with our secondary school staff: 45% supported, 43% opposed. However, the two schools where the change was most significant, right, were flipped in that regard when compared to the other eight schools. Very, you know, a very challenging data to consider—the fact that they had significantly more participation in the survey, and that their survey—and that the data was entirely flipped when compared to the other schools.

⏯️1:18:37 Val Gould: Well, not—not to—it seemed like they really—they really support it.

⏯️1:18:47 Mark Pruitt: They really support it. 

⏯️1:18:50 Kecia Nesmith: Is that number reflective of the majority of staff?

⏯️1:18:54 Mark Pruitt: I would say that the number at Skyline is very proportionally—is the same as Dickinson and A.I., meaning they have 420 students in the school.

⏯️1:19:10 Kecia Nesmith: No, I'm talking about staff.

⏯️1:19:12 Shawn Snyder: Like the—the 33 responded, I’m sorry, the 37 that responded, you’re asking how many staff?

⏯️1:19:17 Kecia Nesmith: Teachers in there? Or are there 50 teachers, or—

⏯️1:19:19 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, 50.

⏯️1:19:20 Committee Member: So that's—that's a high percentage.

⏯️1:19:24 Mark Pruitt: That's a high percentage. It's a similar percentage—I certainly don't have that data in front of me, but I know these schools. It's a similar percentage of participation as McKean and AI.

I would also say that the AI survey is very similar in a participation rate. Of course, they only have 550 students in the school. 

Parent totals—very similar, 50 overall. 50% support the program changes, 32% oppose the program changes.

But again, I—if—I think there's a really important data source that if your student attends these schools and they're having a good experience, you—these types of decisions are very personal. Also worth noting that AI Middle was flipped in that regard, but only had four participants—a parent.

⏯️1:20:43 Kecia Nesmith: Only three Skyline Middle school parents.

⏯️1:20:47 Mark Pruitt: Mm-hmm.

⏯️1:20:52 Vic Leonard: Parents starting to become bored for whatever reason.

⏯️1:21:01 Mark Pruitt: Community members: 124—56% somewhat support or strongly support, 27% somewhat oppose or strongly oppose.

⏯️1:21:24 Tawanda Bond: Mark, can I just—can I make a quick—I'm looking at, for your—for your last slide, looking at the parent total. Just—just for the committee to consider: when you look at the data for the middle school, thinking about the actual charge and purpose of what the work that we're doing here, access for all of our—our kiddos moving up, if you look at the Brandywine Springs, HB, I know Skyline's number is low, but you have a lot of parents—I want to say a lot, relative a lot—of parents that are in support of the innovation center, because these are the kids that would be affected up into the high school programming if this were to happen. So I just wanted to kind of elevate that when you see these numbers. I know we have a lot of on the staff page respondents from the high schools, but again, just keeping in mind the—the real charge for us is access for our students. So I just wanted to kind of elevate that as we're looking at the data.

⏯️1:22:21 Kecia Nesmith: That's why we need to know what students think. Because, you know, we don't know the why behind the support, because it doesn’t ask to provide comments, right? Or—

⏯️1:22:33 Shawn Snyder: There were over 400 comments.

⏯️1:22:35 Kecia Nesmith: Okay, okay. But I just thought I would need to know that as well, because about the kids in their high school level. I think they know a little bit more about what they want. Sometimes parents overbear our children, like I told my son what to take next year. Like, he has an idea. So, you know, that parent influence is important and necessary, but for kids, we really need to know what they think.

⏯️1:23:02 Jennifer Recchiuti: Have you thought about doing like a survey or some type of questionnaire that goes to the middle school student that is asking them like, where are you thinking about going to high school? And give them like a ranking, like, what's your first top three choices? I know my sixth grader wouldn't know, but that could enlighten us to see, you know, are they wanting to go to Conrad—majority of them—or are they wanting to go somewhere else? It just might give insight into what are the kids thinking.

⏯️1:23:32 Shawn Snyder: I know the data on that choice—so I know where every sixth grader ends up. So that's—that's a couple of buttons and bringing the dataset to us at some point. I can't make it appear right now, but that is known data to us over years, where kids go on choice.

⏯️1:23:46 Jennifer Recchiuti: Yeah, I’d be very curious to see. 

⏯️1:23:48 Shawn Snyder: Yeah, like AI Middle School, we have a lot of students—AI Middle, I'm thinking anecdotally right now, that do go to a technical high school instead of—

⏯️1:23:56 Vic Leonard: Delcastle

⏯️1:23:56 Shawn Snyder: Hodgson, Delcastle, that's it, exactly. 

⏯️1:23:58 Vic Leonard: Yep.

⏯️1:23:59 Shawn Snyder: And we have talked to some of those students historically, and there were a number of factors. There were a couple programs they offer there that we can't even offer in our program—that's a different—they have like a 6-credit pathway there for a very high specific thing that only those schools can do. But there was also a really successful soccer program in a lot of students as well, and coach was doing a nice job, people wanted to play for him. So there were a lot of dynamics in that one conversation. But it's worth exploring and we have that data.

⏯️1:24:25 Jennifer Recchiuti: Okay, because that could also like narrow into like what middle schools that we might need to target more. So like we might need to like, you know, be active at Skyline engaging with those parents that, you know, they're a huge portion of it. So it's just—just an idea.

⏯️1:24:41 Shawn Snyder: It's tough, too, because—and I work in the Choice office—obviously, we get a lot of phone calls, and people's perceptions don't often match the actual reality, right?

⏯️1:24:48 Jennifer Recchiuti: Right.

⏯️1:24:48 Shawn Snyder: And I had somebody call recently, "I don't want my kid to go to Skyline because it's just bursting at the seams, there's too many kids there." It's like 400 kids now. Six years ago, there was like a thousand kids there, I believe, and then we had to have some adjustments to separate acres. But that—people still—some people still think that that's a building where there's no room for kids, and it's halfway.

So how to get that message out, I mean, Metrinko I think is doing a fantastic job getting the message out. I've been to his presentations. We need to get a bigger audience. I think some of it's to your point.

⏯️1:25:17 Jennifer Recchiuti: Thank you.

⏯️1:25:21 Thomas Brucker: I do have a question. Yeah, in one of the questions on the survey, one of the questions asked, "Are we in favor of repurposing McKean as the innovation center?" Does that also loop in the movement of the MYP program as well?

⏯️1:25:34 Mark Pruitt: Yeah. 

⏯️1:25:38 Thomas Brucker: Shouldn't that have not been two separate questions? Because there might be some people who might be all right with the innovation center, and then others who oppose the MYP, or vice versa, right? Putting two together, those could be viewed as two totally different things. And there could be a problem with that data—

⏯️1:25:53 Mark Pruitt: In favor of one and not the other?

⏯️1:25:55 Thomas Brucker: Yeah—

⏯️1:25:55 Mark Pruitt: I do think they fit together, you know, like, um—

⏯️1:25:57 Thomas Brucker: I don't know if the public would see it that way, and I'm wondering if that's going to affect the percentages that we're seeing as a result. Those who are saying "somewhat," or those who are on the fence, or those who are even opposed to it, they might be saying, "Well, I'm opposed to MYP, but I kind of like the—the innovation center, so I'm going to say somewhat opposed, because I like—no matter what, I don't want them moving MYP."

⏯️1:26:17 Mark Pruitt: I think—I think at our last meeting when we reviewed these draft questions was that they were in a package, right? Like—like you could not—you could not have an innovation center and have 300 students—300 seats remain at Dickinson Middle.

⏯️1:26:32 Thomas Brucker: I understand, and I think the committee understands that. I'm just wondering: was there a disclaimer in the survey to let them know like this is a package?

⏯️1:26:40 Mark Pruitt: No, it gave them the—it gave them the—the program changes and allowed them to respond to the program changes as a whole. I'm not disputing—

⏯️1:26:50 Thomas Brucker: Yeah, no, no.

⏯️1:26:51 Mark Pruitt: It sounds as though like I'm—I'm—I'm arguing that I disagree with you. I'm just saying what we did as a committee.

⏯️1:26:57 Shawn Snyder: Yeah, it's challenging to explain the domino effect of a decision when multiple dominoes could fall, but especially in a survey, where I think a town hall or a focus group probably is a better venue for explaining that.

⏯️1:27:07 Thomas Brucker: I'm just speaking anecdotally. 

⏯️1:27:08 Shawn Snyder: Makes sense. 

⏯️1:27:09 Thomas Brucker: I had a couple staff members come up to me in my own school and ask for clarification, and I said, "’I’d just go with your gut," you know.

⏯️1:27:17 Committee Member: I think, though, since the survey question represents the reality as it would come out, it's still a valid result, because it's the—it's the only way it could happen.

⏯️1:27:30 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, yeah, certainly worth the discussion.

All right. So there were two points for further consideration that we're going to recommend. One is, you know, "Do you oppose or support adjusting middle school feeder patterns to allow students in the Warner Elementary attendance zone to attend school closer to their homes?" Okay. This did—this slide—and I just pulled these PDF slides right out of Hanover—added a top-two bar, but don't—like, so it's the top five are the same as that we've been looking at. So it is 70% somewhat support or support, and only 7% oppose that type of—that type of analysis going forward by the district.

⏯️1:28:13 Shawn Snyder: And can I just point out one more thing about "neither oppose nor support"? Because sometimes I like that in a survey, and sometimes I don't. In my experience and just research that I've read, it generally—those folks skew positive only because you're thinking about like—they're basically saying like, in a lot of ways, "I don't know, I trust you guys to make a decision in some of these questions," or they're not a kind of person—like, "I don't really care" is really what they're saying in that answer.

So it's—in some of these, I kind of wish we didn't have support, but Hanover wanted that in the—in the design. But consider that, that if there—if you say, "I don't oppose or support," you don't show up to a thing like this and complain. You tend to accept whatever the board decides, I guess, in those—in those instances. There's a large group in some of these questions—I was surprised how large.

⏯️1:28:55 Mark Pruitt: Here's that data disaggregated, but I think that's clear, right? It was 70-something to 7%. Okay.

And the final one was, "Do you oppose or support pursuing the possibility of virtual programming options for high school students?"  Much lower level: 47% support that consideration, and 37% oppose that.

However, Shawn did make a—a great point: we're never going to compel, this is that that option be available, and that we would never compel someone for their attendance zone school to be a virtual school. So this is sort of a choice that we could consider. 

⏯️1:29:41 Kecia Nesmith: Real quick, because I think people think virtual is Zoom from home—

⏯️1:29:41 Committee Member: Yeah.

⏯️1:29:42 Kecia Nesmith: —and it's not what they think is third-party vendor. That's not what we were talking about. We were saying like having high school students be able to elect to take—to take a district curriculum-based, fully integrated, the right way, online course in addition to what they're doing in the building, and that provides for scheduling and whatnot. So I think—think that would have to be questioned.

⏯️1:30:06 Shawn Snyder: Yeah, would add more portfolio programs that people would have access to.

⏯️1:30:10 Mark Pruitt: And staff that are much more understanding of those types of things, maybe not experts. But there actually is a difference here in the disaggregated data: staff was, uh, 54% to 30%, whereas the—the community and—and parent group was much, much lower than that.

Okay, so turn it over to Shawn here.

⏯️1:30:33 Shawn Snyder: We had like 430 comments, I believe, so a lot of them chose to leave some very lengthy comments. And, we live in this marvelous age where I [inaudible] I didn't read them all, but it's hard to turn that data around in a tight timeline without leveraging AI.

The first sentence up there, I used AI.

⏯️1:30:50 Reggie Worlds: Say it again?

⏯️1:30:52 Shawn Snyder: It's hard to—to turn around the datasets in the time window that we have when they're in—when they're words, when they're paragraphs and large statements of comments, and there's 430 of them. So, I put these into—I stripped away any information that might identify who somebody was, and we leveraged the paid version of ChatGPT that I used to do an analysis on this to create some high-level categories of what the comments said.

That said, we're going to make all the comments available to everybody on July 30th but for the purposes of this, it would be like 7,000 more slides for me to go through them if we didn't do this this way.

So here's the categories that they kind of fell into:

General support for proximity-based schooling, that came up a whole bunch. "My kids should go to school near my house," that was a common theme that a lot of people felt.

Concern about equity and diversity: lots of concern about how we draw this. We should keep the outcome in mind. So don't just draw it on a map; make sure that map represents a group of kids that are going to show up, and we're going to have a diverse cross-section of our community in each one of our buildings.

Three was specific concerns related to McKean High School. There was a lot of uncertainty. A lot of the comments focused on the fact that we need to do a better job explaining what the plan is to the McKean group. They—they kind of, on their parent and teacher-wise, were like, "I don't—I don't get it. I'm worried I'm going to lose my job. I'm worried that my classroom is going to move around. I don't understand—are kids going over to the Innovation Center every day? Are they going once a week?" Now, I know the answers to all those things that we discussed in this room in my head, and I think that would assuage a lot of the concerns that I have from that crew on there. But they don't know that yet, so that's a task that these comments definitely serve.

Let's go to the next slide. Impact on feeder pattern and program continuity. There was concern about that. Obviously, people—you know, one person surfaced like, "I bought my house based on this, so I think that would—" Um, "I don't want that to change." I don't feel that was an elementary parent or whatever from their data—I don't think that would impact them necessarily, but once again, it's incumbent upon us to explain that to folks.

Calls for stakeholder engagement: I feel like we've covered that already in this room. Several comments agreed that they would like more engagement with more folks in the community, going to them, finding ways to make sure we get information from everybody—forums, community meetings, detailed informational resources, uh, all surfaced by this group today.

Miscellaneous concerns: that was kind of like it didn't fit anywhere else, but it popped up a whole bunch of times. A lot of it focused on logistics. There wasn't one of those that I looked at really from a logistics standpoint that I'm like, "That'll work itself out in the wash." Just being in schools a long time and knowing how schools work, I don't have like a ton of concern about how to make CTE programming enhanced at McKean, figuring out busing routes, all that stuff. We're all in the business of doing that, um, but it's, you know, because you don't know, and it's not tangible, so it's tough for folks to put your grasp on it.

Really, the next activity I want to show you what I did here, which is not necessarily a scientific study, but it's interesting. I was very impressed by the comments in general. I expected to go in here and it just be like "Murder is real," like everybody's really, really angry. Majority of the comments were constructive and positive, more professional from the staff at John Dickinson School. They might not be happy with the decision, they were very grounded in, "I don't quite understand what you're trying to do here. I—we don't want to mess this up, got a good thing going." And it definitely was clear we had to explain that better to at least have a chance to move forward.

Let me go to the next slide. So here's a little thing that I did with this tool also, and it's not an exact science. There is a technique that you can use—it's called TextBlob, and it assigns and describes negative, neutral, or positive connotations to text collections, and then basically, kind of gives you a clue as to what—how the person felt when they wrote it. It's actually the base of how all AI works: it guesses a letter, guesses a word, it guesses a sentence, but it also is kind of guessing the intent at first through really complicated ways we don't completely understand.

So when it did that, it tagged everything. I have a very detailed document if you want to see it about how we did this methodology-wise, and we're not going to read it right now. Phil, can we put that on—

The computer is like, "Hey, this is a great time to reboot." So through that, when we looked at the level of the school person, whether they were a parent or a teacher, and they worked in that level, it basically said these were the negative comments from those groups, neutral comments, positive comments.

Now, it looks for keywords on this, and it doesn't understand sarcasm. So if somebody said great idea, but they didn't really mean great idea, this will not do a good job with that. The comments were not sarcastic for the most part; they were—they were well-thought-out and they were polite. So I think it did do as optimal a job as possible describing some of that sentiment to the comments.

Next slide. Was that both sentiment slides?

⏯️1:35:52 Mark Pruitt: This is it.

⏯️1:35:54 Shawn Snyder: This is it, okay. So, and then finally, survey comment five, most common—putting them into category once again, looking for high-level keywords, looking for accommodation, and then doing a little scrubbing of the data on the back end. These were the things that came up over and over and over again:

Student need and program availability: that was really the overall arching theme of almost everybody. "I want my student to have access to all the good stuff no matter what my choice is."

People were very concerned about how the attendance would affect already established communities.

A lot of the comments for the Innovation Center were cautiously supportive. They were mostly supportive, frankly; they just want more information, they want to know more about it.

Feeder pattern and school choice: once again equity continued to come up in there, which I think people understand the activity when they bring that up.

And then obviously, number five: Middle Years Program and IB alignment came up over and over and over again, specifically from staff who have all surfaced some legitimate concerns and questions that we have to answer.

So, all that data. 

⏯️1:37:06 Mark Pruitt: So you're sitting in groups. It is 7:34.

I am going to hand you the same slide you just looked at. Be mindful that the original file, the original Excel file—every comment will be on it. May take us a little bit of time. We don't want to out someone in a comment even though they—oh, you already got these, sorry, um.

But they don't have the—will be up in the next couple of days. It's, you know, we—we certainly, if somebody completes a survey and types something that might be identifiable even if it's not their name, that's not our intent. So that—that might take a couple of days.

But you've got some good information in there. What I think your group is going to do, and I hope here in the next 15 minutes, after having seen the data, maybe refer back to the data, is: does the data compel us—does everything we know, we've heard from the last couple of meetings compel us to edit the recommendation as it currently exists?

Okay, what key theme or things to consider: what key themes or patterns emerge from the community's feedback on the recommended plan? Are there significant differences in opinions or priorities among different stakeholder groups? 

And finally, how can this community input be used to inform the final recommendations to the Board of Education? Not just the content within the recommendation, but anything that we would like to add to a recommendation that, by the way, is not tomorrow night—it's at the July 9th meeting.

I think there was a little bit—I got a couple emails or I got forwarded a couple emails from Dr. Green today that seemed to think that we were going to turn something around for tomorrow night’s board meeting.

⏯️1:38:50 Kecia Nesmith: This committee is making a—is going to create the recommendation to the board. We're missing a lot of people that we're going to do—you know how many—

⏯️1:38:58 Mark Pruitt:—One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, there's 15 of us here, and there are 19 on the committee.

⏯️1:39:07 Kecia Nesmith: so four non—Okay, so three non-district personnel, is that correct?

⏯️1:39:15 Mark Pruitt: Uh, Jodi Muffley, CTE teacher at AI High is not feeling well—

⏯️1:39:18 Val Gould: She's online.

⏯️1:39:20 Mark Pruitt: She’s on Zoom.

⏯️1:39:21 Mark Pruitt: Uh, you've got Maddie Reitemeyer, school counselor at AI High. She actually is a community member she was selected out of, but is staff. Uh, Gomes, Mr. Gomes—Antonio Gomes is out of town, he may also be online. And Emily Carroll, so they're all here. All right, 15 in person, four online.

⏯️1:39:42 Committee Members: No, we’re missing one more. 

⏯️1:39:45 Kecia Nesmith: Amin.  

⏯️1:39:46 Mark Pruitt: Did I count wrong?

⏯️1:39:47 Kecia Nesmith: Yeah, I think your—

⏯️1:39:49 Committee Member: Mr. Farooqui is not.

⏯️1:39:53 Mark Pruitt: He's not here. So we're 14 in person, 18 of 19 if you include Zoom. 

You're right there’s 13. We've had—we had 11 at one meeting. 

So that's where we are. I'll check in, and you'll be thinking what is it that we want to do, right? What do we want to add to the recommendation, or edit within the recommendation? You know, in your group. 

⏯️1:40:30 [Small Group discussions]  

⏯️1:52:31 Mark Pruitt: All right, I am going to ask to come together and just if someone would give a summary of the discussion. But then I would also then if we're going to recommend—we're going to make any edits to the recommendation, that would need to be one person's motion, seconded, and then a vote. But first, let's go around and just get a recap of the discussions here. Uh, Shawn or Vic's group, somebody, you want—

⏯️1:53:02 Shawn Snyder: Sure. I mean, I started—I'm not going to talk a whole bunch, because I know the data when I start talking—so I apologize, um, but they—a lot of good ideas around here. I think there was a lot of conversation about, you know, wanting to kind of find a way to make a recommendation that also included a little more time. So I think that was kind of the theme of the table.

There was concern—some of it from me, that we need to be careful taking too much time. I think that this—when I look back at the data, I haven't worked for Red Clay for 30 years. These committees have been formed previously, and in some ways, some of those committees might have kicked the can down the road and didn't make a hard decision, which led us to today. I feel a strong responsibility to not do that to my predecessors 5, 10 years from now, to look for systemic solutions.

So, that was kind of a lot of our talk. We talked about some of the specifics in each one of the schools and the concerns each one has. We talked about the inability to kind of close AI and put them over at one of the two schools, because there isn't—that's just math, there's not enough room. You’d have to move my MYP out to do that, so that doesn't feel like a solution that people would necessarily like, either.

So it's—it's complicated. But I think that what we landed on was staying with what we are, but maybe opening up the idea of having some more feedback and committee opportunities to get feedback from folks along the way and checking back in with them.

⏯️1:54:23 Caitlin Merto: And education was a big piece of it: educating people on what this is. 

⏯️1:54:27 Shawn Snyder: That was a big piece. Making sure we go to McKean and John Dickinson and explain this better, because the comments indicated we have not.

⏯️1:54:32 Thomas Brucker: Yes, that neutral category on one of the last pages of this data, there are people who do not understand this, there are people who are looking for more information, there are more people who can hopefully respond to a survey of this nature. And with more clarification, we want to see if there are more neutral going for positive, because we do not want a cohort of people who feel like they have been duped. If they have questions and the board agrees upon this before they get that clarification, and it turns out to be something that they don't like or they don't support, they are going to feel duped and unheard.

⏯️1:55:01 Shawn Snyder: And we definitely want to avoid that.

⏯️1:55:04 Thomas Brucker: Yes.

⏯️1:55:05 Shawn Snyder: That’s our group.

⏯️1:55:06 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. 

⏯️1:55:08 Tawanda Bond: I’ll start now for my team..

⏯️1:55:11 Mark Pruitt: I’m not making you the spokesperson—you're the captain.

⏯️1:55:17 Tawanda Bond: So, we talked about the themes, we had some overall positives. We did talk about as we continue work, kind of just like this group discussed, we need to do more—we’ll call it layman's terms—making sure that we are speaking to people, and that the people understand anything that we're doing around programming and committee work so that they can follow along with us.

We talked about schools being close to the community or the community staying together, and then I'll toss it over to you two to kind of wrap us up. Oh, stepping stones.

⏯️1:55:46 Jennifer Recchiuti: I do—I really love the idea of the Innovation Center. I think that we're in an age where there are some kids that are college-bound, universities, but then I also think there's a large majority of kids that aren't bound to that due to—it could be, you know, economics. Do they have the funding? So having, you know, an Innovation Center that opens them and gives them the ability to see, you know, what is the world like out there, and give them that opportunity. So I do think like stepping stones for all kids in our community is a really, really good thing.

⏯️1:56:23 Eric Sanford: Building on that, just also using—like looking at a facility like that as a career—like as a pathway to future careers, keeping in mind, one, you're still dealing with children that need that flexibility and that exploration to—they don't know what they're going to do yet. And also recognizing the fact that, I believe, it's 60% of the most high-demand jobs 10 years from now don't exist yet.  

⏯️1:57:02 Val Gould: So we talked a little bit about how we really want to make a recommendation that, regardless of whether it's this group, Rodel, the board, whoever, there needs to be a lot more data and then get an engagement from underrepresented families, and a definite focus on aligning attendance zones, because that is something that the board has direct control over and can do in a relatively rapid fashion.

But also we need to make sure that we are engaging in a bilingual manner, or in some cases maybe more than, you know—because when we say bilingual, I know it usually brings up Spanish, right? But like we have a lot of students who don't speak—whose family may not speak English, they may not speak Spanish, they might speak something else. So we need to make sure that they're engaging all those families.

But also one of our other discussion points was even with respondents being 67% white, there still seems to be a great concern over transparency, and they're concerned about whether or not they can trust what's happening. And I think—we think that really says something about other demographics in our district that maybe did not participate very heavily.

⏯️1:58:30 Reggie Worlds: Last, not least, we did talk about time frame. Shawn made a good point about not kicking the can down the road too much. But you cannot microwave generational decisions like this. This is not a decision that will impact two years down the road; this is a 10 to 15. And to do it in a six-month time frame, and meeting that was completely derailed a couple times over distracted ideas, it's not fair to the school community. This is stuff that will impact other families, so you did talk a lot about that. But I agree with your point: at some point it has to be a decision.

⏯️1:59:04 Shawn Snyder: You’ve got to balance it.

⏯️1:59:05 Reggie Worlds: You have to get balance. So, but maybe the time frame is pressed unnecessarily. So we need to be more realistic about the decision time that you're making. And the things that we can't control, we should control, which is, going back to Doc's point, is about attendance zone. Those are things that we definitely control right now, so.

⏯️1:59:26 Kecia Nesmith: Thank you. And I just wanted to say like I didn't want everybody who's put their whole year worth of time into this committee to feel like it was going off, right? Because there was a lot of things that came out or have come out about all of these decisions and all of the concerns of the school district. And I think that this is a good starting point, a model of engagement, right? When you have community members with teachers, with administrators, with school board members talking about something that's so important to your point that's going to go out, that, you know, sometimes it's—it's better to go deeper than go wider.

And I think sometimes getting all this information that we have, the ideas that have been generated, but also that input will help us make a better-informed decision. But also, the community has to be in support as well, because once we have a CTE program or we need some of the trades, where are these people coming from? So, just getting more engagement around the ideas, whether it be the Innovation Center or whether it not, what are we going to need as a school system to be able to make any idea come to fruition? And so, who needs to be at the table? Who needs to be engaged at some point? Um, so, you know, I guess that's all I want to say.

⏯️2:00:41 Mark Pruitt: So, I feel like there was a lot of similarity between these two groups here with, you know, we may need some additional time between the presentation in July and a board decision. Like within the recommendation, that this should not be—that we would recommend that the board not make a decision the following month. I think I—I, you know, um, I do think we should, you know—there, you've heard me say before, we're probably looking at, because the board was very interested in a new program timeline of August 2027. Okay. I think to do that, somewhere around October—

⏯️2:01:28 Committee Member: October.

⏯️2:01:28 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this, you know, uh, you know, the decision made in October. I think I could go back and listen to what was said here in regards to, you know, engaging in stakeholders, getting more feedback, allowing—educating different communities. I think I can capture all that. I can send that out to this group by next Friday, which will then give me a week and a half to—for you to come in and say, "Yep, that's what we said."

Okay, and do it, but I do think that probably this group—I—I'm not sure that was what—what was said, right? I think there were three—like, I feel like it was maybe we like these ideas, but maybe—

⏯️2:02:15 Reggie Worlds: I mean, he used the word "duped," and I think that was important to us to make sure that the whole community—and you said it a couple times, different group—everybody needs to be on board, or a consensus of the community needs to be on board. Otherwise, then it just doesn't feel right from the community. Not that there's bad ideas, but if everybody's not buying in, what they say they didn't hear—can we really justify making that decision?

⏯️2:02:38 Mark Pruitt: Mm-hmm.

⏯️2:02:39 Reggie Worlds: Regardless of what the decision is.

⏯️2:02:40 Caitlin Merto: What also came up in our group—and I feel like we haven't really hit on it yet, and to kind of Val's point—is like there needs to be more touchpoints, ways of getting information out than just sending out a mass email with a survey. Like, we talked about kind of like going into like the opening of school meetings, posting things on social media, like figure out the places where people are actually getting information and then making sure the information is there. Because we are just relying on one of the thousand emails that we get from the Red Clay Consolidated School District, which are great because we get information, but like we are not paying as much attention to them as we are getting it all in the same way. We need to use a different technique.

⏯️2:03:17 Mark Pruitt: That they don't complete a survey at all, or that they get the reminder from their kid's teacher. You know, there has to be a—There has to be a way to collect the data. 

⏯️2:03:30 Caitlin Merto: They need to educate, and then there needs to be some way—like, so the education piece of like, "This is what this plan really looks like," needs to go out in a multitude of ways. And then we need to figure out a way to collect feedback, whether it's a survey or something else. I don't—I'm not like—I feel like there'll be other ways of maybe doing it, but we need to get the data differently after we've educated people on what this really means and what it looks like.

⏯️2:03:55 Mark Pruitt: Okay. I'm, uh—I think I—I think I'm hearing right.

⏯️2:04:03 Eric Sanford: I just wanted to give an example of how I think it has been done right, which is how Brandywine Springs handled the Clean Streams campaign. We were getting daily updates from—I can't remember the person running it, but it was very clear, very short, and to the point. This is—it's not—wasn't a bunch of fluff to it, it was just, "This is what we would like, this is what the benefits would be. Please help us out."

⏯️2:04:27 Mark Pruitt: Okay.

⏯️2:04:28 Eric Sanford: But it was literally almost daily.

⏯️2:04:31 Jennifer Recchiuti: And Brandywine Springs won that year by the way.

⏯️2:04:34 Eric Sanford: For several years. 

⏯️2:04:34 Vic Leonard: I just want everybody to realize that we have one of our high schools that's bleeding, on average, 50 students a year right now. It's at 550, and I don't know what the bottom number is before you say "not sustainable." So, the option there, if you get down to that point where it's not sustainable, that school will close. We will lose that completely—the building and everything. Or, we have an Innovation Center; we repurpose one of our buildings. We’d have three schools still. Or the other one that came out of the task force, AI Task Force, was redo the attendance zones where we had 750, 750, 750 in every school, because A.I. High right now is 400 less in the last 20 years in attendance zone than the other two schools, which caused some of the issues we have now.

So, you lose a school completely, repurpose the school, or redo the attendance zone so they're all equal. That's the way I see it. But this seemed to be the best way right now, timewise, because I don't know how long we go losing 50 kids at 550 already—what that bottom line will be. And once we lose that school, we lose the building and everything, is that correct? That building goes away?

Not—maybe not that quickly, but certainly it's open—if it’s open for some period of time. It's open to a state charge—

⏯️2:05:55 Vic Leonard: Do nothing—that's—that's what happens. 

⏯️2:05:58 Reggie Worlds: Mark, can I ask one more question? But the point about realigning the attendance zones. It was on the dock originally, but it kind of moved to the side. Is there a way to—because we have control of that right now, is there something we—is that a recommendation that we can put back on this?

⏯️2:06:18 Mark Pruitt: Well, we could. I don't think that 2,100 students is enough students to divide up people. What you could do is have less students at Dickinson High School, more—you know, more attendance zone students at McKean and A.I. That's not really where we've gone here with this committee. I'm a little, you know, we—we, um—

I'll also say this. I'm hoping that we can at least pause all meetings or allow either to continue working with us a few months down the road, but an extra five minutes here is very much appreciated.

⏯️2:06:54 Shawn Snyder: If we went that route, school choice is in play that we always have to remember. So it's difficult to compel folks into a feeder pattern when there's programming passing on the school. People will—Reggie does just an amazing job at McKean; people want to go there. There's no doubt about that. So in that respect, you may not get the—you may not get 700 kids in each school, even though that's what the desire is. It’s not as simple as that with choice.

⏯️2:07:17 Mark Pruitt: We know there is, if you're not—if all schools are not at 85%, there is a tipping point. And we know that there's been a tipping point over the last 20 years. It's happened at McKean first, then Dickinson. A band-aid was, you know, so to speak, to keep it alive—it was under 500 high school students. They did add the MYP program in there, and it's actually brought it back to a point where they've had to stop choice for regular Dickinson students, and probably we won't allow choice for some high school IB. You—there's—we're going to have to look at that because that number is, you know, 1,100—they're just simply out of space. They've got teachers on carts, you know, but they still have a small high school because the middle school is there. Bottom line is, this problem is most recently at AI, but not unique to AI.

⏯️2:08:18 Committee Member: Make AI the Innovation Center.

⏯️2:08:23 Mark Pruitt: So, all right. What I think I've heard, and I will make a motion, only because, I think I've heard every group but the—you know, I'll make a motion to give the recommendation as discussed this evening, okay, in July. However, that we would let the board know that a decision would have to be made by October to continue with a timeline of 2027, which is what the school board directed us to do, okay?

During that 3-month period, we would work on educating the staff and parents and community on what it is this plan is, getting out different ways to give feedback from our students, from our community. I'll let you all look at this. Keep in mind, 20 people can't wordsmith, so if you see something that is content-wise wrong, let me know. But I think I captured right. But if you're going to put a couple words on me, you know, that—let's just get it out there so we have something accurate.

Thoughts about that July presentation? October, a decision would have to be made, or else a timeline would have to be pushed back. And in the meantime, continue to educate and find ways to engage with the community.

⏯️2:09:51 Caitlin Merto: Can we just make sure the language says "no earlier than October"? Because like if you say "by October," then you could vote in any of the meetings before October happened. I don't think the school board would do that, it's just as a person who deals with language. 

⏯️2:10:04 Shawn Snyder: I don’t think we can tell the school board when to vote.

⏯️2:10:05 Caitlin Merto: No? Okay.

⏯️2:10:10 Mark Pruitt: We have to be very clear that the time would be intense for the district, because I also think that this is a very difficult time to engage with people in public schools. But the second half of August is a great time to engage with people in public schools. 

So, I think we can get this done and get some feedback—some more feedback from our community, and certainly have a recommendation ready.

Okay, so for this recommendation, the content remains that, you know, the recommendation remains the same, that we recommend a vote not be had until October. However, if it goes beyond October, the timeline for implementation could not be done in 2027.

⏯️2:10:58 Kecia Nesmith: Can we vote on that though? So the members on—on that, what you're going to propose.

⏯️2:11:03 Mark Pruitt: I am—I'm going to now say, I just made a motion for that. Is there a second?

⏯️2:11:07 Tawanda Bond: Second.

⏯️2:11:09 Mark Pruitt: Dr. Bond, second. Discussion—we've already discussed, but any more discussion? All in favor? Aye? Hands for this one?

One, two, three, four. Let's get our—let's get some names associated with this as well.

⏯️2:11:27 Committee Member: Do you want me to call?

⏯️2:11:30 Committee Member: Yeah, let's do a roll call. 

⏯️2:11:32 Caitlin Merto: The motion was to…?

⏯️2:11:35 Mark Pruitt: The motion was to keep the recommendation the same in July, but add to the recommendation that we recommend not voting until October to allow the district time to collect more feedback, to allow the district time to educate the community, and note that if a decision is not made by October, that the timeline would have to be pushed back to 2028 implementation. 

⏯️2:12:01 Kecia Nesmith: Discussion though. Question. So if we say this is the recommendation, you vote on it by October, you'll get more information, but this is still the recommendation? Are we going to say—is the committee going to say that because of the data or information we have obtained, we have a different recommendation?

⏯️2:12:20 Mark Pruitt: Well, I would think that the bo—that the information—the information we get from the community will be reported directly to the board. 

⏯️2:12:27 Kecia Nesmith: But we'll be voting on the committee's recommendation. And that's what—I think what I hear is that we're not all in consensus around that recommendation.

⏯️2:12:35 Mark Pruitt: I don't—this is a recommendation, you're not voting on anything we say directly. You can—you can amend, whatever, you choose to make a motion—

⏯️2:12:46 Kecia Nesmith: I know that, but the political—the way that people are going to see it, they don't understand all of those nuances. They might say, "Oh, well, that committee said that we should do A, B, C, but they can vote on it in October." I just want to be clear that's what we're saying or not saying.

⏯️2:13:02 Mark Pruitt: I do not think we can ask this committee to continue to collect feedback, look at it again. This is a committee of 19 people who—

⏯️2:13:10 Committee Member: —Why not?

⏯️2:13:10 Mark Pruitt: —have all done—please. Please. Please!

⏯️2:13:15 Kecia Nesmith: Point of order.

⏯️2:13:18 Mark Pruitt: Because we've got seven members who volunteered for the committee. We could have a different committee, but I do think at some point it needs to be handed to the school board.

⏯️2:13:26 Kecia Nesmith: I think it should. I agree with you. I guess my point is, I don't want us to say as a committee—and take me out of it—but the committee members who've given their time—their community members, their district leaders, their teachers—to say, "This is what we actually recommend," because at this point, that's not what we actually recommend. We recommend that we obtain more data and information to make a more informed recommendation. And anybody's a volunteer—you don't have to stay here, but that's what I think the consensus is. I don't think the consensus is to make the recommendation that we had made, had written down. If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong, but that's how I interpret it.

⏯️2:14:05 Caitlin Merto: Well, that's why I would like it to be instead like, we are recommending that we explore the education piece and gathering feedback, and maybe we meet—and I will come and meet, whatever we need to do—but meet again to like actually put forth what the real recommendation is once we actually have real stakeholder feedback and opportunity for people to actually understand what's going on. 

⏯️2:14:24 Kecia Nesmith: That's different than what we were saying, that's why I wanted to clarify.

⏯️2:14:28 Committee Member: I think we take a vote on what Mr. Pruitt said, and you say yes or you say no.

⏯️2:14:33 Kecia Nesmith: Yep. Because he already made the motion and it was seconded.  Discussion?

⏯️2:14:35 Committee Member: It’s over. 

⏯️2:14:37 Mark Pruitt: All right, discussion’s over. A vote?

⏯️2:14:41 Kecia Nesmith: Ready for a question.

⏯️2:14:42 Kecia Nesmith: Ready?  And Octo—presentation in—in a recommendation in July, but we recommend there's no vote until October to allow time for feedback, education and feedback—further feedback from the community, which would be particularly effective in late August and September, could possibly be used to edit the recommendation. All right, and that was the recommendation that I made. I will send that out to you to make sure that that—you know, that it is what—what I intended it, you know, what I intended here. All right.

⏯️2:15:21 Mark Pruitt: In favor? 

⏯️2:15:26 Jason Bastianelli: Let’s do it person by person. Just call their name, your roll call.

⏯️2:15:26 Beth Jefferson: All right, Mr. Bastianelli?

⏯️2:15:29 Jason Bastianelli: Yes.

⏯️2:15:29 Beth Jefferson: Dr. Bond?

⏯️2:15:30 Tawanda Bond: Yes.

⏯️2:15:31 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Brucker?

⏯️2:15:32 Tom Brucker: No.

⏯️2:15:36 Beth Jefferson: Val Gould?

⏯️2:15:37 Val Gould: No.

⏯️2:15:39 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Leonard?

⏯️2:15:40 Vic Leonard: Yes.

⏯️2:15:42 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Matthews?

⏯️2:15:43 Jose Matthews: Yes.

⏯️2:15:44 Beth Jefferson: Ms. Merto?

⏯️2:15:45 Caitlin Merto: No.

⏯️2:15:51 Beth Jefferson: Dr. Nesmith?

⏯️2:15:52 Kecia Nesmith: No.

⏯️2:15:53 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Pruitt?

⏯️2:15:54 Mark Pruitt: Yes.

⏯️2:15:54 Beth Jefferson: Ms. Recchiuti? 

⏯️2:15:55 Jennifer Recchiuti: So, I just wanted a little bit of clarification real quick. So, it's saying that this is the recommendation, but there couldn't be edits once we get that feedback? Is that what—

⏯️2:16:07 Mark Pruitt: The board can—the board could charge the district with making edits to it based on the feedback from the community.

⏯️2:16:12 Jennifer Recchiuti: Okay, I'm going to vote no. 

⏯️2:16:14 Mark Pruitt:—that was—that—I—I certainly see what you're saying, but—but that—that was what I said. I feel like you got to vote on that. Okay.

⏯️2:16:24 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Sanford?

⏯️2:16:26 Eric Sanford: Yes.

⏯️2:16:28 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Snyder?

⏯️2:16:29 Shawn Snyder: Yes.

⏯️2:16:31 Beth Jefferson: Ms. Todd-Dixon?

⏯️2:16:33 Kendra Todd-Dixon: Yes.

⏯️2:16:34 Beth Jefferson: Mr. Worlds?

⏯️2:16:35 Reggie Worlds: No.

⏯️2:16:35 Beth Jefferson: No. All right, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—eight yes, one, two—

⏯️2:16:44 Kecia Nesmith: What about the the people online?

⏯️2:16:45 Jennifer Recchiuti: Yeah, the Zoom people.

⏯️2:16:49 Mark Pruitt: It doesn't matter. 

⏯️2:16:47 Beth Jefferson: Four, five, six—No.

⏯️2:16:49 Mark Pruitt: Eight is not—it would take 10 for this committee. The times when we only had 11 or 12 people, we've had 10 to 2, or 10 and 2 abstentions, or 11 to 1. So, that motion did not pass.

⏯️2:17:11 Committee Member: Can the people online vote, or no? Committee members online?

⏯️2:17:15 Mark Pruitt: I don't think they’re—

⏯️2:17:16 Committee Member: They haven’t done that—

⏯️2:17:16 Mark Pruitt: This is a webinar—this is not, you know, this is a webinar. We posted it as a webinar. 

⏯️2:17:21 Committee Member: —[inaudible]

⏯️2:17:22 Mark Pruitt: We’ve said the committee’s in-person.

⏯️2:17:23 Committee Member: Yup. This is a recommendation. The school board makes the final decision, absolutely. I recommend El Diablo. I think it's delicious. Some people might agree, some people might not, and at the end of the day, it's the school board's decision. [inaudible]

⏯️2:17:42 Kecia Nesmith: Is there another—

⏯️2:17:42 Mark Pruitt: Would someone—somebody can make another—

⏯️2:17:43 Shawn Snyder: Does anybody else have a version of the motion that they'd like to present that might be passable to the school board?

 ⏯️2:17:49 Mark Pruitt: Yes?

⏯️2:17:49 Caitlin Merto: I would like to present a motion that we engage in a campaign that will allow for education and gathering feedback from a larger stakeholder group, and that we reconvene the committee with whoever is able to still participate at sometime in the fall after we've been able to launch our educational campaign and gather feedback, and then come forward with a recommendation to the school board that then they can vote on in October.

⏯️2:18:20 Kecia Nesmith: Second.

⏯️2:18:23 Shawn Snyder: It's—it's a lot of work to put in September, October. I'm not saying it can't be done, it's just it is going to be challenging in that two-month window when we're opening the school back up to do that.

⏯️2:18:33 Val Gould: Want to do— 

⏯️2:18:34 Kecia Nesmith: She said fall though. She said fall.

⏯️2:18:35 Shawn Snyder: She did say fall, but October is—is the—you know—

⏯️2:18:38 Committee Member: Do the job, and do the job right.

⏯️2:18:35 Shawn Snyder: Whatever works. That’s—I just want to continue to surface like, it would be—it would be a shame to be in this room next year at this time and still be in this space, um, with no decision made. 

⏯️2:18:54 Val Gould: I don't think—

⏯️2:18:55 Shawn Snyder: So I want us to be cognizant of that.

⏯️2:18:56 Thomas Brucker: I think we're just waiting to get more input.

⏯️2:18:59 Shawn Snyder: I heard that. I heard that.

⏯️2:18:57 Thomas Brucker: We're just waiting for that August timeline.

⏯️2:19:01 Shawn Snyder: I'm sorry?

⏯️2:19:02 Val Gould: I don't think this [inaudible.]

⏯️2:19:04 Shawn Snyder: Then I'm for it.

⏯️2:19:09 Committee Member: Let's try that.

⏯️2:19:09 Tawanda Bond: I have a clarifying question. So, it's, with your recommendation, are you recommending that the recommendation go to the board for them to vote in October, but they will get the recommendation in October? So you—so the board will get the recommend—well, you can't do that.

[inaudible group discussion]

⏯️2:19:27 Caitlin Merto: I just said fall. I don't know what the laws are. If they need to find out in September to vote on in October, then that's what we do. 

I just think that we need to be able to gather and really campaign, like put it out there all different ways, gather information, and then be able to reconvene, evaluate, and then decide whether or not we still think that this is what we need to put forth.

⏯️2:19:47 Kecia Nesmith: So another point to think about is, okay, we're not in agreement here, right? So you could go forth with the original recommendation point-blank, and then we vote on it as a board point-blank. We could do it that way, but that's not necessarily what this committee has recommended. Yes, sir?

⏯️2:20:07 Eric Sanford: I have a question as a member of the board, actually. Where does the line fall between, as a board member gathering the opinions of who you represent and the opinions of what the committee brings? I'm trying to—

⏯️2:20:25 Kecia Nesmith: Every board member deals with that different.

⏯️2:20:31 Eric Sanford: Okay, just I'm wondering what—what could the committee gather and present that would be different from what the board is able to gather on their own?

⏯️2:20:37 Kecia Nesmith: So I think the consensus around the survey—so we had—what was it? 1% respondent rate to the survey? We didn't get the students’. That might inform. Okay, so if that's a recommendation, that might inform members. That might change their opinion about that, if whether they're yes or no on that recommendation. That could change their thought process around whether they want to vote yes or no on that recommendation. And it's a recommendation, but one of us would have to actually make a motion. So the recommendation—so what Mark is trying to say is: We might—this committee might—submit the recommendation, but the motion at the board meeting may not be the recommendation.

The motion be whatever whoever makes the motion, what it's going to be.

So to that point, I said you can—we have to have consensus here to whatever recommendation the committee had to the board, but the board can make whatever motion they want. Around that. I would hope that it would be around what the recommendation would be, but it doesn't have to be exactly that when the motions are made.

So, for example, if we say—I can say, "I move that we do not accept the recommendation of the committee." I could—that could be the motion, and then people could say yay or nay, or the opposite, or something else. So it's really just like Mark is saying: it's just a recommendation based on the work that this committee has done. What do we recommend to—I'll take myself out of it, I'm not, you know, but what do we recommend as a—as a committee? And I can abstain from the vote if that's helpful. 

⏯️2:22:18 Mark Pruitt: I don't—I don’t think

⏯️2:22:19 Kecia Nesmith: Because we're on the board, but—

⏯️2:22:21 Mark Pruitt: I think we do need to, um

⏯️2:22:24 Kecia Nesmith: —get what we want to recommend.

⏯️2:22:25 Mark Pruitt: Yeah, we were nearing a—

⏯️2:22:27 Val Gould: She made a motion.

⏯️2:22:27 Kecia Nesmith: And we seconded it. This is discussion, so—

⏯️2:22:32 Mark Pruitt: Okay. Yeah, I'm fine with that. This is the discussion. Thank you very much for pointing that out. So the motion was—say it again.

⏯️2:22:42 Caitlin Merto: That we utilize—that we recommend that we take more time to be able to launch an educational campaign about what this would actually look like, using different modalities, gather feedback, reconvene in the fall, and then present and create what our recommendation will be to present in the fall to the board for them to be able to vote. I don't feel totally comfortable making a decision—it's not part of the motion, but I don't feel comfortable until I have more guidance.

⏯️2:23:08 Vic Leonard: I think we need to specify a month—fall, like I say, if it goes beyond November, it's another year you add on to it down the road.

⏯️2:23:17 Kecia Nesmith: But Vic, we could say, "Okay, that's fine, but we want you to come back to us by XYZ date." We could say that as well. They don't have to give us—

⏯️2:23:24 Mark Pruitt: The committee?  

⏯️2:23:26 Kecia Nesmith: Yeah, so when—so that's the recommendation without a specific date, right? But we could say as a board, because we want—we want you to come back by November 1st or whatever it is with the recommendation, that's something that we could say as a board. So I don't think it's necessary that the committee has a specific date in that motion.

⏯️2:23:43 Tawanda Bond: Can I make a comment? Question. For the board—Mark, correct if I'm wrong—for the board to be able to vote in October, we will need to have you guys' recommendation in September. So essentially, just keeping in mind what the ask is. For us to do, to do a campaign in the community to get feedback—our students come back August—

⏯️2:24:07 Shawn Snyder: Basically September—

⏯️2:24:09 Tawanda Bond: Yes, so we—you get—

⏯️2:24:10 Val Gould: But the board can come back and say, "We want—we need your feedback." We don't have to establish it now.

⏯️2:24:16 Kecia Nesmith: She's not saying to make a vote by October, she's saying that we would give you a recommendation in the fall. She's saying that this committee would submit a recommendation—

⏯️2:24:25 Mark Pruitt: The current board’s charge— 

[inaudible group discussion]

⏯️2:24:33 Caitlin Merto: If the board comes back and says, "We need this information by the September board meeting," then we are given the time. We understand how much little time we have to actually gather and utilize this extra time of people actually coming into schools, getting the emergency cards, right? We can slip a little flyer in the emergency card, "Here's a QR code." 

⏯️2:24:50 Shawn Snyder: There’s no emergency card. 

⏯️2:24:51 Caitlin Merto: Okay, well, those little mailers that we get in the mail that comes like—okay, but like, you know what I'm saying? There are other ways, um—but like I said, the board can tell us like when they need it by, and then we can adjust and set our meetings based and our campaign based off what the board is requiring of us.

They can decide, "Is that we're presenting a September meeting, and then we vote in October?" I mean—

⏯️2:25:14 Shawn Snyder: I—I guess my final question from the committee: we do all that, we still get 1,500 responses on a survey, and we're sitting in the same boat in September.

Are you going to move forward then? I mean, that’s the—I don’t want to say like, “We can give it a better try…it still might not work.”

“We can go knock on doors…it might not work.”

⏯️2:25:33 Kecia Nesmith: The motion has been seconded. Can we take a vote?

⏯️2:25:33 Shawn Snyder: I hope it works, I really do.

⏯️2:25:34 Kecia Nesmith: So it can die. 

⏯️2:25:35 Mark Pruitt: Can take a roll call? 

⏯️2:25:37 Kendra Todd-Dixon: What are the differences between the two?

⏯️2:25:41 Mark Pruitt: Well, this one is saying that we—we—we—we are—I don't even know what recommendation I'm giving the board—that we're not—but we're not giving a recommendation now, here's—We are not ready to give a recommendation.

⏯️2:25:55 Val Gould: Right. We are not ready. We need more time. To gather more data.  

⏯️2:25:59 Kecia Nesmith: That’s not consensus among the group. Half of us are saying one thing, and half is saying another.

⏯️2:26:06 Val Gould: Her motion is that we need more time.

⏯️2:26:10 Vic Leonard: Two weeks in September, you have to gather data so we can uh…

⏯️2:26:15 Val Gould: It depends on what the board says.

⏯️2:26:17 Vic Leonard: Well, if it's not done in September, then it’s another year.

⏯️2:26:23 Mark Pruitt: Yes.

⏯️2:26:23 Vic Leonard: Because it needs to be presented twice.

⏯️2:26:25 Caitlin Merto: That's why this says fall, it leaves a nice wide open for the board to make a decision. I understand.

⏯️2:26:26 Vic Leonard: Well, fall is…

⏯️2:26:30 Tawanda Bond: If we could all talk in turn so we could all hear each other.

⏯️2:26:33 Mark Pruitt: Yes, Jen?

⏯️2:26:33 Jennifer Recchiuti: So I'm a little bit confused, because what I see is we have one recommendation. We don't have another recommendation on the table, that with the data that we get, it could flip to the other recommendation. Am I correct with that, or is there—

⏯️2:26:49 Shawn Snyder: That is the other problem, is we're going to go out and ask folks, "Do you like this idea?" Kind of a binary number, yes. But does it generate a second idea? 

⏯️2:26:55 Jennifer Recchiuti: Exactly, that's—that's what my concern is. Like, I'm all for like pausing the official recommendation if we're going to get more data. I don't think we're going to get as much data as we want in the small time period that we have.

⏯️2:27:08 Val Gould: Yeah, but we s—

⏯️2:27:08 Mark Pruitt: Hold on a second. 

⏯️2:27:10 Eric Sanford: I just wanted to make a comment that just reminds me of the conversation previously about the, um, the transportation from anywhere to anywhere, where I think it was you that brought up the point: there's nobody in this room that doesn't think it—it would be great to gather more data, but how realistic is it to—to meet the goals, the original goals?

⏯️2:27:32 Val Gould: Okay, but we are going on data that was collected in two weeks to begin with. So you're saying another two weeks couldn't possibly make a difference?

⏯️2:27:40 Eric Sanford: That's not at all what I said.

⏯️2:27:41 Val Gould: No, but I'm not saying you, but I'm saying like other people. Like, we can get more data in two weeks. We already got this data in two weeks or less than two weeks. Or less than two weeks.

⏯️2:27:49 Jennifer Recchiuti: My concern is that—

⏯️2:27:49 Val Gould: But there needs to be due diligence. There's not a—there's not an accurate cross-section of this district represented in this data.

⏯️2:27:58 Jennifer Recchiuti: I completely agree with you. My thing is, I do strategic data analysis for a living. To do a large plan like this, it should be something that is a lot longer and a lot more detailed than meeting one time a month. That is just my own professional opinion. But, you know, I think additional data is great, because there is a very small amount that was collected and there's a huge amount of people that are missing. But I don't see that happening in the time frame that we have. You have summer. I'm a mother, I'm not looking at school stuff right now. I'm going to start looking at it in Se—in August, and that's the realisticness of, you know, parent engagement. So I think—I think there's—

⏯️2:28:42 Kecia Nesmith: So, there's a vote—there's a motion on the table. Everybody can say yay or nay, and then we move on.

So if everybody disagrees with this motion, then it—it dies, and we—and then you could make another motion. We just have to get through the motion, then get out. That's—that's where we are.

⏯️2:29:00 Mark Pruitt: Okay, we'll vote on that motion.

⏯️2:29:03 Beth Jefferson: Okay. Bastianelli?

⏯️2:29:04 Jason Bastianelli: No.

⏯️2:29:06 Beth Jefferson: Bond?

⏯️2:29:06 Tawanda Bond: No.

⏯️2:29:07 Beth Jefferson: Rucker?

⏯️2:29:08 Mr. Rucker: Yes.

⏯️2:29:08 Beth Jefferson: Gould?

⏯️2:29:10 Val Gould: Yes.

⏯️2:29:12 Beth Jefferson: Leonard?

⏯️2:29:13 Mr. Leonard: No.

⏯️2:29:14 Beth Jefferson: Matthews?

⏯️2:29:15 Mr. Matthews: No.

⏯️2:29:16 Beth Jefferson: Merto?

⏯️2:29:17 Caitlin Merto: Yes.

⏯️2:29:19 Beth Jefferson: Nesmith?

⏯️2:29:20 Kecia Nesmith: Yes.

⏯️2:29:21 Beth Jefferson: Pruitt?

⏯️2:29:22 Mark Pruitt: No.

⏯️2:29:24 Beth Jefferson: Recchiuti?

⏯️2:29:25 Jennifer Recchiuti: No.

⏯️2:29:27 Beth Jefferson: Sanford?

⏯️2:29:28 Eric Sanford: No.

⏯️2:29:28 Beth Jefferson: Snyder?

⏯️2:29:30 Shawn Snyder: No.

⏯️2:29:31 Beth Jefferson: Todd-Dixon?

⏯️2:29:32 Kendra Todd-Dixon: No.

⏯️2:29:33 Beth Jefferson: Worlds?

⏯️2:29:34 Reggie Worlds: No.

⏯️2:29:40 Mark Pruitt: All right, it’s going to take, usually, you know, it's going to take 10 votes, and she'll have the totals there.

Um, I think at this point, I can certainly give a recommendation to the board that this is our current recommendation, that—that this committee really went beyond the 8:00 time frame in trying to determine, you know, educa—you know, educating the community better, needing more time to gather more feedback. That, 1100 you know, there was folks that thought it wasn't enough feedback, there were folks that thought it wasn't a good enough cross-section, there were, uh—there was a lack of education, you know, that the people weren't educated enough. I think that was clear in the data, that perception or that reality, or both. Um, and—and that, you know, the committee thinks that there should be, you know—generally there was consensus that the committee, um, thought that there—they would need more, uh, feedback from the community.

I think I can do that without a motion in this regard, that that's where we are, that's where the committee sort of stopped at that point.

⏯️2:30:46 Val Gould: I don't think that's where we are. I don’t think he has the 10 votes he needs.

⏯️2:30:48 Kecia Nesmith: It's an 8-6 vote, right? So, can we get—can you make them a—what do you call it? Can you make those the two members that are on the webinar—

⏯️2:31:00 Mark Pruitt: Hold on. I don't think I—I think the meeting was—all these meetings were—

⏯️2:31:04 Kecia Nesmith: In-person only? 

⏯️2:31:04 Mark Pruitt: —in person. They were clearly put in-person. You know—I—I have no idea whether they're going to support the first recommendation or the second—it doesn’t m—you know, but—I don’t think—it’s—I would not recommend doing that.

⏯️2:31:17 Kecia Nesmith: So, I don't think what you're saying is true, is what I'm saying. Because you have 8 and 6. 8 of—you don't have 10—8 say go forth with the recommendation and ask for a little bit more time, that's what the first motion was.

⏯️2:31:29 Mark Pruitt: Mm-hmm.

⏯️2:31:30 Kecia Nesmith: 8 to 6. So, to my point earlier, we don't have enough people here. Um, that didn't pass, and the—and the opposite didn't pass. But you can't say that we—we want more time as—as the—as the recommendation, because that's not what everybody said.

⏯️2:31:47 Mark Pruitt: All I was going to do was give a recap of where the committee stopped. At 8:30, at 8:45. 

⏯️2:31:53 Kecia Nesmith: But not a recommendation? So not make a recommendation?

⏯️2:31:55 Mark Pruitt: I'm going to say the recommendation as it existed going into the meeting. There was discussion, as best I can—people can certainly, you know, I can send you a transcript of what I'm going to read, you know, they—it's the comm—you know, I'm just going to do the best I can, uh, you know. Certainly, this is a meeting held in the public, um, and—and I think this group a tremendous job. I think this is a very difficult issue, you know, uh, a very difficult change for the school district. 

I've been in this district for about 30 years. I have—uh, I have taught at McKean High School, um, uh, real proud of my time there. I was an assistant principal at AI High School, a principal at a magnet school. Um, I've worked in these high schools for 30 years now, and this is the most difficult decision that, uh, I've ever seen put in front of high schoolers and middle schoolers, you know, middle school programming here in our district. There's no question about it. Um, I think the, uh, you know, and I knew—this is no surprise to me—that the folks impacted by that do the day-to-day, the great work in those schools, are going to, you know, defend the great work that they do. Um, that does not surprise me at all. Having said that, that does not, uh, leave me with concerns about equity regarding, uh, programming, college and career programming at the high school level. And I think a decision, a difficult decision, is going to need to be—to be made. So...

All right, so I will give everything about the discussion as best I possibly can, where the recommendation was coming into the night, what the meet—what the meeting looked like tonight. I think that was what the school board charged Dr. Green to do in November of 2024, um, and then, you know, we—we can dialogue with the board as to what the next steps are going to be.

⏯️2:33:56 Jason Bastianelli: Make a motion to adjourn. 

⏯️2:33:58 Jose Matthews: So moved. 

⏯️2:33:59 Mark Pruitt: All in favor? Unanimous support.

🌐Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee webpage 

June 17, 2025 Meeting Materials 

📁Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee Meeting Rolling Slides June 17, 2025 

📹Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee June 17 Meeting Recording

📄Secondary Attendance Zone & Programming Committee June 17 Meeting Minutes For convenience, the full meeting minutes are typed below.

June 17, 2025 / 6:00 PM / RCCSD
Board Rm, 1502 Spruce Ave, Wilmington, DE 19805
Zoom Meeting (For public only. Committee members are in person.)

Attendance/Welcome
Jason Bastianelli, Tawanda Bond, Thomas Brucker, Val Gould, Vic Leonard, Jose Matthews, Caitlin Merto, Kecia Nesmith, Mark Pruitt Jr , Jennifer Recchiuti, Eric Sanford, Shawn Snyder, Kendra Todd-Dixon, Reggie Worlds
Guest speaker - Ms. Karen Ammann 

Mr. Leonard made a motion to begin the meeting, seconded by Val Gould. Motion passed. 

Agenda Items 

● Public Comment - Kecia Nesmith, Katherine Mulrooney, Anthony Swierzbinski, Anne Budischak, Valerie Budischak, Thomas Glennon, Jenny Howard, Laura Boyle 

● Approve Minutes from May 21st. - Mr. Matthews made a motion to approve the minutes, seconded by Ms. Todd-Dixon. Motion passed. 

● The Committee’s Charge/Goal - Mr. Pruitt 

● Meeting Norms - Mr. Pruitt 

● Remaining Timeline - Mr. Pruitt 

● Analysis of Stakeholder Feedback ○ June 10th Public Meeting ○ Student Focus Groups - Ms. Ammann ○ Survey Data - Mr. Pruitt, Shawn Snyder - small group discussion(all) 

■ Discussion and sharing out of small groups. Discussion included: 

● Number of participants in survey. 

● Minority population participation in survey. 

● Survey responses to recommendation overall were positive. 

● Some respondents did not understand the survey. 

● Adjustments to Current Recommendation: 

• Mr. Pruitt made a motion to provide the current recommendation as discussed but also recommended that the board not take action until October to allow for a better understanding of the recommendation and more engagement with the community and stakeholder groups. 

Motion seconded by Dr. Bond. 8 yes votes, 6 no votes the motion did not pass. 

• Ms. Merto made a motion to engage in a campaign with stakeholders to educate and gather feedback on the current recommendation and then re-engage the committee and make a recommendation to the board in the fall. Seconded by Dr. Nesmith. 4 yes votes, 10 no votes the motion did not pass. 

● Plans for Board Presentation - Mr. Pruitt will present the committee’s work to the board on July 9th. 

● Public Comment- None 

● Adjourn - Mr. Bastianelli made a motion to adjourn the meeting, seconded by Mr. Matthews. Motion passed. 

Action Items: 

Slides of the presentation
Survey feedback will be posted on the website
Mr. Pruitt will present to the school board at the July 9th meeting. 

Next Meeting N/A