Aug 19 2026
Board Meeting

1. Public Comment
   ⏯3:50 

   • Brenda Steffon (Friends of AI) raised concerns that AI High School’s enrollment has fallen to 470 and urged district to preserve the school. 

2. District Report: Career and College Readiness Data
    ⏯10:17-29:22

• Dr. Corey Heacock, Manager of Assessment and Professional Learning and Michael Simmonds, Director of Federal Programs give a presentation College Readiness and dropout rates.

⏯3:50 Brenda Steffon: Good evening. Thank you for the time. Superintendent Broomall and the members of the Red Clay Consolidated school board. My name is Brenda Steffon and I am here on behalf, again, for Friends of AI, and also as an honored alumni of 1988 from the same school. As usual, I'm here to ask about our enrollment issue. As I last heard a few weeks ago, our numbers for this coming school year, our numbers are at 470. That's 70 people, students, lost in a school year. And my concern is the same as well as the other 3,000 members of Friends of AI. 

Why are we considering not doing anything? This has been a repeated conversation starting with Mr. Parets, Vic Leonard, Greg Wilson, over 5 years ago. We have come to potential solutions. I know it's a massive one but now we have the only high school in Red Clay that continues to be underenrolled. The others have maintained capacity, if not exceded, in a waiting list. So the question now remains with the State Resolution on deck, where they can come in and potentially question why an underutilized facility, under enrolled facility, is remaining open. Is this really a quest for Charter to take over that building for their middle school proposal as well as a high school? Are we ignoring what the population at the current high school is not receiving a dynamic, full comprehensive educational curriculum. 

We have a new athletic director, and Monty Hayman has shown exceptional leadership in the football team. And his plan for the athletic department is student first, athletic person second. And he has a mentorship program. He has kids who has never thought about college actually apply and go for it. We have a chance here. What we need is continued leadership. We need to push for the school to have some sort of, I don't even know what, it feels like a dart board right now. And I stand here as a representative of 3,000 other alumnis who are concerned why every month we are here with the same conversation. We would love to extend that openness. We are always willing to have a conversation with Board, Administration, and would love to continue our efforts throughout this school year. Thank you for your time. 

⏯10:17 Hugh Broomall: And now I'm going to invite Mr. Pruitt, our Senior Director of Operations, to come up and he's going to do some data review on college readiness.

⏯10:28 Mark Pruitt: Good evening, Superintendent Broomall, President Twardus, Board members. I'm excited to be here tonight to provide a brief presentation, actually the first of what will be regular presentations of student outcomes aligned with our district's Strategic Plan. There are 4 objectives of our Strategic Plan that are focused on student outcomes. Tonight we're going to tell you a little bit about college and career readiness and its impact. The load is carried by our secondary students and of course our secondary educators. 

Objective 3 focuses on three goals. The first is college readiness for all students, which you'll hear some data tonight. The 2nd is career readiness in terms of completers of career and technical education programs, increasing our number of industry standard credentials and getting more students into our work based learning immersion program. And the final goal is to provide students with the characteristics and skills of Red Clay's Portrait of a Graduate. But tonight our focus is college readiness.

If you could go back one slide. We measure ourselves on college and career readiness. One more. We measure ourselves on college and career readiness with a goal one: Red Clay will increase the number of high school students participating in college level coursework, ensuring access for all students regardless of background. We define college level coursework as students taking advanced placement courses, often called AP through the college board. International Baccalaureate courses offered at The John Dickinson School, and dual enrollment courses offered at several of our post-secondary partners: The University of Delaware, Goldey Beacom College, Wilmington University, and Delaware Technical and Community College. 

We track these key performance indicators three ways: through seats in college level courses that is the total numbers of seats used in all of those courses. So that number can include one student representing three or four or even five college level courses. Secondly, we meausre ourselves against unique students taking our college level courses. So if one of our students takes a college level course during that high school year whether it's one or two or five, we're measuring by unique individual students. And third by the potential college credits earned. Did they have success in these courses? That is defined as a three or higher in advanced placement course. A four or higher, the AP is a 5 point rubric. A four or higher on an IB course, a seven point rubric. Or a B or higher in dual enrollment college course. It's worth noting that research is clear that students who have access to a college level course in high school are twice as likely to earn a post secondary degree.

At this time I'm going to turn over to Dr. Corey Heacock and Mr. Michael Simmonds who will take us through some of the data. 

⏯14:11 Corey Heacock: Good evening. So what we're looking on the screen right now, this is our college readiness metrics. The red bars are showing you the number of seats in college level courses: AP, IB or dual enrollment. Our baseline year for the strategic plan was 2023 so that's the bar that you're seeing on the far left. 

And you can see the last school year in 2025 was the first year we were taking data for our 5-year Strategic Plan. And the end of the most recent school year, 2026, is the second year of our Strategic Plan. So you can see that we went from having 2,495 seats in 2023 and we're up to 3,021 last school year. That's 25.1% increase in college seats. Now interestingly, when we looked at the data at the end of 25 we saw that seats were increasing at a faster rate than unique students, which tells us that students who were taking these the advanced courses are taking more of them. So this past school year we really worked with our high schools to try to get more unique students into college level courses. That's represented on the graph with the black line at the bottom. So you can see there we actually managed to attain a 24.4% increase in the number of unique students taking college level courses. We also have a college access team that meets regularly and one of the areas of focus for those unique students is trying to encourage students who may not have traditionally attempted a college level course to attempt a college level course. And I also want to note that all of our metrics in our Strategic Plan we try to align them to accountability measures for the state of Delaware, so everything we're looking at here does align with college readiness for the Delaware Student Success framework.  And the interesting thing is that accountability data for college readiness is captured in a student's 12th grade year. So if they're in a course in 10th grade or 11th grade and maybe they struggled with their first attempt at a college level course, if they take that course again in a subsequent year, and get one of those qualifying scores: a 3 on AP, 4 on IB or an A or B in dual enrollment, they will count as being college ready for their accountability year. 

The final line is the gray line that you see and this is amazing to me. By increasing opportunities for students we've had an almost 41% increase for the number of potential college credits earned. I say potential because depending on majors, colleges may or may not award the credit but that's huge. Ultimately that can be saving our students time and our families money as students progress to college and university.  

One of the other things we're very proud of is really looking to increase access to college level courses. We don't want this to be limited to a specific school or a specific program. We want to try to create opportunities across all 5 of our high schools. So the 4 AP courses listed on the screen were offered in all of our Red Clay high schools in 2026. That's AP African American Studies, that's an elective course for students. AP Precalculus which can count towards math credits towards graduation. AP Seminar which is an English course counts English credits towards graduation and AP Spanish Language and Culture. Now on the right there's a table. We are focused generally focused on the number of students having opportunities and the number of students seeing success as opposed to the percentages. Because what we're trying not to do is gate keep. 

If you focus only on the percent of students who potentially earn college credit you can get really high numbers if you restrict the students in your class. I was a former AP student, AP teacher. If I had only allowed 5 kids in my AP biology class, I can probably could have guaranteed a 100% pass rate on the AP Biology exam. But we don't want to restrict students from taking these courses. We want to broaden the opportunity. I did include percentages here because we have a high number of students participating in these access course. So you can see AP Seminar is one of my favorite ones to look at. That course, we no longer offer Honors English 10. So if students want to take advance English coursework in 10th grade, they take AP Seminar at all 5 of our high schools. We had 276 students participate last year and 64% of those students earned a 3 or higher on that AP Seminar exam. That's amazing and many of those students are going on to take AP Research, AP Language and Composition, AP Literature, so it's providing a foundation for future courses. 

AP Pre Calculus is another fabulous course that also replaced an honors math course. You can see 169 students participated last year and 64% of those students earned a 3 or higher on the AP exam. And then you can see the participation in AP African American Studies and AP Spanish Language and Culture is a little bit lower, but those courses aren't necessarily a graduation requirement for students. So I think sometimes kids want to get credits for graduation and so when you offer those electives sometimes the motivation may not be there. 

⏯19:54 Najma Landis: Can I ask a question real quick?

⏯19:56 Corey Heacock: Oh absolutely. 

⏯19:57 Najma Landis: For the AP courses. Are students required to take the exam if they are enrolled in an AP course? 

⏯20:05 Corey Heacock: Since the referendum passed, where we are paying for the AP exams, overwhelmingly the students are taking the exams. I think last year, and I'm the one who approves all the budgeting on that, I think maybe there were 2 or 3 total exams that were not taken by students. So overwhelmingly our students are taking the course and are taking the exams. 

⏯20:31 Najma Landis: Thank you.

⏯20:32 Jenny Howard:  Can I ask a question?

⏯20:33 Corey Heacock: Yep.

⏯20:34 Jenny Howard: So of the 4 classes that are offered in all of our Red Clay high schools, are you saying that some of our high schools might only have these 4?

⏯20:48 Corey Heacock: I don't know that any of them only have these 4. I know John Dickinson has fewer AP courses than other high schools, but they have an IB program. So that creates an opportunity. Also if AI High and at McKean we have the Early College Academy in collaboration with Goldey Beacom so those aren't AP courses, but they're still college level courses. But we do want to make sure that we are offering some opportunities that are consistent across all 5 of our high schools to provide some commonality and opportunity. 

⏯21:22 Jenny Howard: One more thing. So you mentioned the one that was a 10th grade class. So is this an AP class for each grade level then?

⏯21:30 Corey Heacock: Not necessarily. So AP Seminar, English, I was not an English teacher but the content seems to cycle around and repeat. So as a district we decided that we would offer AP Seminar in lieu of Honors English 10, which was the course that was previously offered in past years. Now with AP Precalculus for example, students are going to take in the sequence of math classes where it makes sense. Students are going to have to finish Algebra 2 before they jump into Pre-Calculus. That may be 10th grade for some students, it may be in 12th grade for a student and we welcome them into AP Pre Calculus regardless of when that falls in their high school trajectory. 

⏯22:12 Jenny Howard: That makes sense. Thank you. 

⏯22:17 Corey Heacock: Alright, any other questions on this one? Alright we'll go on to the next one then. This is a slide on graduation rates. The red bars are reflective of, not planning on reviewing the admin memo, but when that pops back up the red bar is reflective of Red Clay's graduation rates and the blue line graph is the state. There we go. 

Alright. So you can see our graduation rates are above the graduation rates for the State of Delaware. And one of the things that we really look at, and I was looking at, 24 really took a dip. Why did 24 take a dip? 25 we saw a little big of an increase. With our Strategic Plan we can capture a lot of metrics that also help talk about how engaged students are with school. And I think for high school students, they need to feel a connection to their school community to stay motivated, you know, to continue taking the courses and putting in the hard work to walk across the stage at the end of their high school career. 

So, one of the things I was looking at, we actually saw a really nice increase over the past year in participation in extracurricular activities. Actually from 2023 the baseline to 2026 there's actually been an 106% increase in participation in extracurricular activities at our  secondary schools and I think that goes hand in hand with you know the willingness to stick around and graduate and then also the Delaware school climate survey which all of our students take in the spring of every school year that's put out by the University of Delaware. I took a peek at the engagement metrics for our high schools. And in that year 2024 where we saw a dip, the average across all of our high schools was a 2.68. Now on their scale, you want to be above a three really. You want to be over above a 3.2. I won't get into the scaling. But a 2.68 less than ideal. You're not coded as red yet, but still still not ideal. Whereas most recently, we're up to a 3.11. So we are also seeing an increase in how students are reporting their level of engagement across our five high schools, which will also contribute to to students finishing high school. Okay. And our next slide we're going to go into the dropout rate which is related to graduation rate but I am going to pass it over to Mr. Mike Simmonds.

⏯24:45 Michael Simmonds: Good evening. Tonight I will be discussing the dropout rates. The purpose of this process is to make sure our dropout data is accurate. Each school serving students in nth grade and above is required to potentially put all the information into the DVR, which is a dropout verification form.

DOE bases numbers on when students enter their freshman year. If they leave before receiving a diploma for the following dropout reasons, being in the military, obtaining employment, being underage, truancy, they will count as a dropout. Criteria for not being identified as a dropout can be not having the sufficient information, sufficient documentation.

Also, students if they transfer from one Red Clay school to another school in Colonial, they will not be considered a dropout. Transferring to a private school will not be considered a dropout. Moving out of state will not be considered a dropout. If a student passes, they die, they will not be considered a dropout. They detained in a correctional facility. They will not be considered a dropout. The DVS window opens November 2nd, 2026. And the deadline for all appeals are December 26. There is only one round of appeals, which means it's important for the school to review their list and resolve issues during this window. 

Final dropout number rates are expected between February and March of 2027. When reviewing a list, students are considered potential dropouts. If the school agrees with the reason to drop that they are dropped out. If the school believes the student has any incorrect information at all, they have the opportunity to go into the DVS system and appeal it. Red Clay continues to make strong progress in reducing our dropout numbers. Over the past three years, our rate has declined from 1.8 to 0.7. In 2025, Red Clay's 0.7 rate was well below the state rate of 1.8. While this progress is encouraging, our focus remains on identifying students at risk early and providing students with all the information support that they need in order for them to be successful.

Any questions?

⏯26:48 Jose Matthews: I just want to make sure I'm understanding the data accurately. So, when we have um here on the x-axis the years uh for the dropouts, just making sure 2003 uh four and five. Those years are representative of the graduation year. So that would be June of 2025. Like that is the year?

⏯27:07 Michael Simmonds: Yes.

⏯27:07 Jose Matthews: Okay. I just want to make sure because I always look at school years. 

⏯27:11 Michael Simmonds: No problem. 

⏯27:12 Jose Matthews: And where do we have data for 25-26? 

⏯27:19 Michael Simmonds: Any information that you have. We just started working on this and I can give it to you, send it by email it's not a problem.

⏯27:22 Jose Matthews: That would be great. I, yeah, I would like to see this current year's dropout data and then also for graduation rates because I mean I think it's great that we have 25, but I mean I'm highly interested into seeing how we are doing just from this past current just so I had the most updated information.

⏯27:42 Najma Landis: May I ask a follow up question?

⏯27:44 Michael Simmonds: Sure. 

⏯27:45 Najma Landis: Are these also just reflective of students completing high school in four years or does it include students that take additional time? 

⏯27:54 Michael Simmonds: It includes students who take additional time. Yes. 

⏯27:55 Najma Landis: Thank you.

⏯27:57 Jose Matthews:  And when we send out that clarifying information with the last year's data, that could be sent out to the entire board and include Dr. Broomall and Maria Stevens.

⏯28:07 Michael Simmonds: Not a problem. Thank you. 

⏯28:09 Devon Hynson: So, let me clarify. You said, because let me. Najma, I'm sorry. You were saying students who take longer. I don't think that they're reflected in the dropout. They're reflected in the graduation rate. That's what you were asking, right?

⏯28:29 Najma Landis: No, so sometimes like if a student, at least it was under my impression, that students that take longer than four years can be considered, like they don't drop out, but they're not considered graduate because they don't graduate with their cohort year.

⏯28:46 Michael Simmonds: There's some situation we have to that are that's right are considered like slashes where they may not have obtained all of their credits in order to be a sophomore or a junior. They will not be considered a dropout. They still have time in order to complete their diploma. 

⏯28:59 Beth Twardus: Does that answer your question, Mr. Hynson?

⏯29:00 Devon Hynson: No. I was just trying to clarify because it it sounded like you you thought you you were being told that a dropout is somebody who takes longer and they're not. They they just not reflected in the graduation rate. You know what I'm saying? But a dropout is something different, like they got to drop out to drop out. 

🌐Aug 19 2026 Board Meeting Agenda

📁District Report Data Review: College Readiness, Graduation and Dropout Rates