Mar 25 2026
AZ Committee Meeting

▼Full Transcript Below

1. Public Comment
   ⏯️1:01:21-1:13:50
   ⏯️

2. Review District Team & Topics
   ⏯️7:54 Senior Director of School Operations Mark Pruitt

3. Update on Communications Action Planning
   ⏯️7:54 Chief Communications Officer Ms. Alva Mobley reported
   ○ Student Services - Dr. Sarah Celestin
   ○ Meadowood - Dr. Sarah Celestin 

4. Update on Student Services Action Planning
   ⏯️7:54 Senior Director Student Services & Special Education Dr. Sarah Celestin reported

5. Update on Meadowood Action Planning
   ⏯️7:54 Senior Director Student Services & Special Education Dr. Sarah Celestin reported

6. Update on Attendance Zones & School Choice Action Planning
   ⏯️7:54 Director of Information Technology Shawn Snyder reported

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⏯️2:21 Mark Pruitt: Okay, we are going to go ahead and get started. We have a packed agenda tonight. I believe we are going to have several public comments, and so I want to maximize our time. My name is Mark Pruitt. I am the Senior Director of Secondary Education. I'd like to welcome everyone to our second attendance zone and restructuring review committee. And from a committee member, could I have a motion to bring the meeting to order?

⏯️2:46 Susan Sander: So moved, Susan Sander. 

⏯️2:46 Brian Mattix: Second.

⏯️2:47 Mark Pruitt: Seconded by Mr. Mattix. Assuming we're all in favor of that, the meeting has been called to order. Second slide, our agenda tonight, which I had set out previously, after we approved some minutes and public comment at the beginning—I only listed it once, but we are going to do it at the beginning and the end. We'll go through very quickly our meeting norms, committee charge, the district theme and topics, and our meeting calendar, all of which we set up at the last meeting. I will then give a brief action planning overview of where we are as a district at this time. Then, the majority of the time, I'd like to hand off to our four focus areas, where we have folks presenting tonight from Communications, Ms. Alva Mobley; Student Services and Meadowood, Dr. Sarah Celestin; and Attendance Zones and School Choice, Mr. Shawn Snyder and I are working together on that. We'll then have a second round of public comment for anyone who did not give it the first time, and then adjourn the meeting.

⏯️4:01 Mark Pruitt: All right. Now, everyone hopefully has a copy of the minutes in front of them. That was it. You see a line out there of the January 27th—it was rescheduled to February 5th. So, we'll let you have a chance to take a look at those. They were sent out to the committee a day or two after the last meeting. And then at that point, if anyone would like to make a motion to accept the minutes or have a need to amend the minutes, please let us know that as well.

⏯️4:36 Devon Hynson: Where's the—like what do we do with the public comments? So, somebody makes a public comment...

⏯️4:42 Mark Pruitt: We have a transcript of it. We have a recording of it on the video and audio. This is on our website. The minutes are not a transcript, but we do have the video and audio of every meeting up on our website.

⏯️5:09 Devon Hynson: So do we—are we addressing those comments, or how does that—they just make the comment?

⏯️5:20 Mark Pruitt: I’m not understanding.

⏯️5:22 Devon Hynson: Well, what I'm saying is if people are making public comments, right, there's a purpose and a meaning for them to make a comment. So are we just putting it on a drive and then coming back to the next meeting? Like, how does their comment connect with the work that we're doing?

⏯️5:40 Mark Pruitt: I think that this committee—we're going to follow the charge of the board for this committee. Certainly, any member of the public can use that information to inform their contributions to the committee.

⏯️5:58 Unknown Speaker: Mr. Pruitt, I would just say like—I haven't—this is my first night at this committee, but I think, for example, last week at the board meeting, there were several public comments. I had taken a lot of notes on them because some of them related to either the Meadowood Student Services group, so I was planning to bring those comments back to the workgroup to work through. But I don't want to speak for everyone, but that's how I processed the comments last week. I took notes on them, and then I was going to bring them back to our workgroup to work. But I don't know for this committee. I wasn't here for the first meeting, so I'm not sure.

⏯️6:30 Devon Hynson: I'm just saying, let's think outside the box. If we're saying as a board that people should have the opportunity to give meaningful input, they take time out of their day, they come here, and they give input. Like, what is the connection between their input and our consideration of their input leading into what we're planning? You understand what I'm saying? Like, does anybody understand what I'm saying? Because it seems like people are just saying things, we take it—and I'm not saying that this is anybody's fault—I'm saying we're taking it, we're storing it somewhere, and it never drives the work that we're doing or even consider. So there really is no meaningful engagement. We're basically saying you have an opportunity to say something; we're not saying that you can really collaborate or engage, we're just saying we'll hear you.

⏯️7:27 Mark Pruitt: I think at a board meeting, all seven members are at the meeting that have an opportunity to have that in their decision-making moving forward. And then certainly, any member who's overseeing the committee can take that information, use it to inform their work, and certainly the three board members and any board member who's in the audience certainly use that to inform their decision-making moving forward.

⏯️7:50 Devon Hynson: So what do you think? Does that make sense? Does that even seem fair?

⏯️7:57 Mark Pruitt: I think this is a public meeting that follows open meeting laws and public comment. So we can hear the public comment, and so the representative committee takes that information and can choose to use that to inform their decision-making.

⏯️8:17 Devon Hynson: Oh, so your expectation is that the board members would take the information that they give and try to put that into the work that we're doing as a committee? Is that the suggestion?

⏯️8:27 Mark Pruitt: Anyone else can contribute to this—

⏯️8:29 Susan Sander: Can we make a motion to approve the minutes from the last meeting?

⏯️8:33 Mark Pruitt: Sure. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes?

⏯️8:36 Susan Sander: So moved.

⏯️8:36 Mark Pruitt: Do we have a second?

⏯️8:39 Anthony Gray-Boulden: Second.

⏯️8:41 Mark Pruitt: All in favor?

⏯️8:44 Committee Members: Aye.

⏯️8:44 Mark Pruitt: Anyone not in favor? Fair to say that's unanimous. Can I move on?

⏯️8:57 Devon Hynson: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

⏯️9:00 Mark Pruitt: All right. So, we're now to public comment. We will do public comment two times during the meeting. For those who may be running late getting here or for those who have to leave early, they can do it now, you know, and not later. But you cannot give public comment twice, okay? So it's something I think is real important at this time of the evening, you know, people are rushing around. So we'll start off with in-person public comment. Do we have anyone to give in-person public comment? Mr. Leonard?

⏯️9:36 Vic Leonard: Thanks for the opportunity. As a former Red Clay teacher with decades of service to our school community, I want you to know I care very deeply about the welfare of all our schools and students. I do worry about our feeder schools. Many have had issues over the years, especially with enrollment. The goal of our board is to address those issues and base our decisions on current data and information. I recognize that we have significant concerns raised regarding the McKean Innovation Center and Restructuring plan. I want to assure you that I have heard and carefully considered the feedback shared by our community.

The board directed district administration to provide clear and consistent communication to all interested parties, and that was the vote that we had back in July. Unfortunately, that level of communication did not occur, even with the numerous formal and informal directives to this administration over the last six months. When information is not clearly communicated, it also leads to uncertainty and assumptions, which we understand has contributed to the concerns expressed.

Again, our goal as a board has been to thoroughly address the challenges associated with the underenrollment across the secondary schools. As you are all aware, the Redding Consortium has put forward a recommendation that will ultimately be considered by the General Assembly. We believe it was important for the district to take a proactive approach rather than have decisions imposed upon us at the state level. That said, I value the voices of our community. After listening to your feedback, I support pausing the plans for the Innovation Center. This pause may allow us to spend the next year developing a comprehensive communication strategy, engaging meaningfully with stakeholders, and gathering input to guide a decision that reflects the collective interest of our community.

I sincerely appreciate the time, perspectives, and comments each of you has brought to the conversation. Your voices matter, and they are an essential part of the process. I look forward to hearing updates on this restructured plan as you do, and working together as a community to develop a long-term plan that helps all of our students’ balance. Identifying problems is the easy part; developing solutions is more difficult and will take teamwork for all stakeholders. I stand ready to work with our community as partners on the Red Clay team. Thank you.

⏯12:05 Mark Pruitt: Thank you, Mr. Leonard. In-person public comment: just politely raise your hand, and then whoever's up next—do we have a second in-person public comment? Ms. Howard?

⏯12:24 Jenny Howard: Okay. Good evening. My name is Jenny Howard, and I'm here to ask this committee to fully review the district's own equity and enrollment data before moving forward with any plans that further disrupt our comprehensive high schools.

The superintendent's report from October of 2022 lays out patterns we cannot ignore. For example, districtwide low-income enrollment has declined from 34.81% in 2013 to 24% in 2022, while our magnet and charter schools continue to enroll far fewer percentages of low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities. These disparities are not new; they're consistent across a decade of data.

The report also shows the impact of these enrollment patterns on AI. AIHS has experienced a 52% enrollment decline from 2009 to 2021. During that same period, magnet and charter programs expanded significantly, drawing students away from our comprehensive schools. Conrad grew by more than 200%. CSW increased its Red Clay enrollment by nearly 50%.

It seems like the district already knows the problem, yet we're refusing to address the inequities that have been created. The shifts in students attending magnet schools and charters have real consequences: fewer resources, fewer course offerings, and fewer opportunities for the students who remain in our comprehensive schools. Before any decisions are made that could deepen these inequities, I'm asking you to take a step back and examine the data you already have. We owe it to our students and families to make decisions that are transparent, data-informed, and centered on equity, not decisions that unintentionally accelerate the decline of the very schools that serve the broadest range of learners. Thank you.

⏯14:12 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Next in-person public comment Ms. James. Ready?

⏯14:26 Karen James: Thank you. Good evening. My name is Karen James, and I'm the mother of Natalie, a sophomore in the Meadowood program at McKean. My husband and I both attended AI High School. Please bear with me as some of my thoughts were shared before me last week, but they are worth repeating for those in attendance tonight.

Our daughter Natalie is 15 years old chronologically, but is only 15 months old mentally. She cannot walk or talk, or do most anything on her own. She wears a diaper and cannot feed herself or communicate effectively. Her IEP is 45 pages long. Natalie's student life and care will be much better served if Meadowood remained at McKean.

The district is simply not ready to move forward with their plan. The budget, the liability risks due to busing challenges, as well as the probability of students not fulfilling their IEPs due to time spent in transport versus the classroom are all factors that need deeper consideration from decision-makers. I encourage board members to go back to the drawing board with administration and ask for clearer and better communication about the plan, the budget, and logistics of daily schedules for both Gen Ed and Special Ed students, as well as information that can be shared with parents, staff, students, and community at large with regards to how this move will impact district funding next year and in 5, 10, and 20 years.

You may be surprised to learn that I'm a member of the Meadowood Committee for Secondary Feeders. I volunteered to serve so I could contribute my parent perspective toward the initiative, but I soon learned that was hard to do, as parents, teachers, and therapists on the committee were all denied to tour of AI High School to see the building for ourselves. Only administrators on the committee were allowed to see AI. How can we, the committee, make informed decisions and have productive discussions about a proposed Meadowood move to AI if we aren't allowed into the high school? It makes no sense.

In addition, agendas for the meeting are not shared in a timely manner, so members don't know what will be discussed until sometime the day of the meeting, leaving us no time to prepare thoughtful contributions. It seems there is no true collaboration and there's a lack of transparency when it comes to both the Innovation Center and the Meadowood move. It's sadly a very reactive approach to a very big problem.

This plan is not ready to take off in any manner. It's currently a lose-lose status, but when it comes to all Red Clay students, we should all be in win-win mode. Please stop or delay the plan until you are certain all IDEA laws will be met. Thank you for your time.

⏯16:42 Mark Pruitt: Thank you, Ms. James. 

⏯16:49 Andrea Arena: Hi, my name is Andrea Arena, and I spoke at the last meeting. And so, again, I have some information that might be repeated, but there's different people here tonight.

So, I'm speaking to you as both a concerned member of the community and mother of a non-verbal child with disabilities, who attends the Meadowood program in Red Clay. If you're not aware, the Meadowood program is a specialized program in Red Clay that serves students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in kindergarten through age 22. Both the Meadowood program and the autism program are housed within McKean High School.

I stand before you as a member of the public at large to communicate that we're not in agreement with the Innovation Center idea due to there not being any plan of action, no budget, no public taxpayer transparency regarding the inevitable increased taxes and cost to every single family in this district. 

The Innovation Center was voted upon with nothing in place. With no budget or plan to date, the taxpayers will indeed be paying for this innovation, to include but not limited to: bus transportation during the school day to and from the Innovation Center, added insurance costs to cover additional liability, hiring another nurse on staff at Meadowood to accompany medically complex students for the Meadowood program to and from the feeder school on the buses, additional specialized training that would be required to ensure the safe transport of the medically complex students, construction costs to ensure that the feeder schools are ADA compliant, and the list goes on.

⏯18:18 Andrea Arena: To further the point, special education—specifically the Meadowood program and the autism program—were not considered from the beginning. There was no one on the original committee to advocate and ensure this fragile special education community was considered. The whole special education community has been an afterthought since the Innovation Center idea was introduced and ultimately voted upon. More importantly, there's no concrete plans for how both the autism program and the Meadowood program housed within McKean.

My concerns: the root cause of the numbers dropping at AI was never put through a discovery process to elicit a solution. Instead, the Innovation Center idea was introduced. McKean and its students and staff should not be collateral damage in the attempt to revive a struggling school through the idea of an Innovation Center. Red Clay community data-pointed questions and surveys to the parents and students should be required to make sure that the public is fully aware of exactly what's happening in the school district with clarity and purpose.

And the example I'd like to use: in the two articles that were just written, people were quoted from the district that this is a VoTech school. That's absolute misinformation. It's a CTE. It's pathways. It's not a VoTech. That's their own district. So it's incredibly misleading to the public.

Bus parent transportation timelines for both the Meadowood program and the autism program are not realistic for this gradual roll. Currently, the projected schedule to busing to the Innovation Center is based on a proposed 10-minute load-in, 10-minute transport, and 10-minute loadout to the Innovation Center, doubling per day per student. That's over 67 hours of missed educational instruction per student due to that bus. With that said...

⏯20:11 Mark Pruitt: Ms. Arena? 15 seconds.

⏯20:20 Andrea Arena: Oh! I’m so sorry. [laughter]

⏯20:24 Andrea Arena: But that said, bus transportation to the Innovation Center takes time away from the student's educational time and doesn't meet the requirements of their IEP. That is reportable and illegal. The Innovation Center pathways will not be made accessible to the students of Meadowood or autism; that's a violation of FAPE. There's no plan of action, there's no budget, there's been no taxpayer transparency regarding this. In summary, we're looking for the members of this committee to make this decision to stop the Innovation Center idea. I thank you for your immediate attention and advocacy and action.

⏯20:52 Mark Pruitt: Thank you. Next in-person public comment is Gianna. I would also like to thank Gianna for her assistance with our operations team this evening. We went around getting everyone's name for public comment for the record.

⏯21:12 Gianna Howard: Hi, my name is Gianna and I go to HB. I want to talk about my friend Danny. I met Danny last year through the Best Buddies program. He has Down syndrome and he is one of the kindest people I've ever met. Danny is in high school now in the Meadowood program at McKean. Danny loves his school. He knows the building, he knows the teachers, and he knows where he's supposed to be. He also loves his culinary classes; they're his favorite part of the day. They help him feel confident and included.

When I heard about the Innovation plan, I got worried for him. Moving him to a different school could change everything he knew. It will take him away from the routines and people who help him feel safe, and it might limit his access to the programs he loves and works so hard in. I may only be 12, but I understand that when a decision can change someone's whole world, their needs should come first. Please think about Danny and other students like him before making changes that could take them away from their routines and people who help them feel safe. Thank you.

⏯22:26 Mark Pruitt: In-person—next in-person public comment. Do we have any?

⏯22:33 Beth Jefferson: Jen McGrath is going to speak at the end virtually.

⏯22:36 Mark Pruitt: Oh, we definitely—we'll do this again at the end. No question. Do we have any online public comment?

⏯22:44 Beth Jefferson: We have two people online that would like to make public comment, that would like to do it at the end. I think VJ Leonard, did you want to make public comment now?

⏯22:59 VJ Leonard: Yeah, I can do that. Can everyone hear me okay?

⏯23:05 Mark Pruitt: Yeah.

⏯23:05 VJ Leonard: Am I being heard?

⏯23:10 Committee Members: We can hear you.

⏯23:13 VJ Leonard: Okay. Did the time start? Okay, okay. So I'm going to go quick, and I'm sorry because I was kind of caught in between a few things, but I do want to get the viewpoint out for many, in general here.

Good evening, members of the committee and members of the Red Clay community. My name is Dr. VJ Leonard. I'm an 18th-year teacher at Alexis I. duPont High School, a longtime member and grievance chair of the Red Clay Education Association, and a former DSEA executive board member.

I want to begin with a concern. I'm genuinely confounded that a meeting of this importance was not widely advertised. I regularly attend board meetings, yet I still hear from stakeholders who don't understand what's happening or weren't aware of key discussions. That has to improve. Communication cannot be an afterthought.

In my 18 years in education, and through my doctoral research, I followed students 5 to 10 years after graduation. Too many of them, even those who did everything we asked, are still not gainfully employed. The most common reason is a lack of real-world preparation during high school. I see it every year. Our students enter 9th grade already passionate and skilled in automotive work, culinary arts, cosmetology, media production, animal care, but they can't access those pathways. They weren't accepted into Delcastle, couldn't navigate school choice, or there simply wasn't capacity. By graduation, that motivation is often gone.

That is why, despite a lack of specificity and the communication missteps, I support the Innovation Center. For the first time in decades, we are attempting to address the needs of students who have been left behind by our current system. That said, this process needed far more engagement: ongoing conversations, regular town halls, and consistent follow-through. When that doesn't happen, misinformation fills the gap.

Even so, I do have confidence in the people leading this work through working with them personally over many years. Dr. Green has long supported innovative concepts like shared VoTech spaces. He is one of the strongest communicators in the district when he speaks, and I look forward to hearing more clearly and consistently from him in the months ahead. Mr. Pruitt brings deep technical expertise, and a strength in process and logistics. His experience ensures that the operational side of this plan can be well done, and I believe we'll begin to see that clarity today and moving forward. Dr. Ammann, our CFO and Assistant Superintendent, is one of the most fiscally responsible leaders in the state; I have full confidence that nothing about this plan will be financially reckless. Dr. Celestin, who leads Student Services, is among the very best in Delaware. Her work with programs like Meadowood speaks for itself, and I trust her judgment completely when it comes to what is best for students. I look forward to hearing from her more regarding this plan tonight. And our current school board continues to evolve into a thoughtful, balanced body, one that prioritizes what is best for all students, and consisting of community advocates, educators, coaches, alumni, and passionate and well-informed others.

All these people understand what's at stake. So the question becomes: what is the alternative? For over 30 years, we have not found a solution for these students. We cannot accept that. If we commit to doing this the right way with transparency, communication, and true partnership—and even consider a pause to reset if needed—the Innovation Center represents not just change, but hope, a path to careers and sustainable futures for our students. Thank you.

⏯26:15 Mark Pruitt: Thank you, Mr. Leonard. Next slide. Our meeting norms, which we agreed to at the last meeting, for the sake of time, I'll let you look at those quickly. Next slide.

Here's the charge of this committee: receive progress reports from the district, provide assurance that the Reimagining Secondary Education plan is executed as approved by the board, voice perspective and ask questions, and provide updates to the Board of Education.

I will take this opportunity as the facilitator of this committee, and someone who's become the face of this work over the past three years, to speak to some of the concerns of the community and members of our own district. I've been working in this district for 31 years. The one thing that does not surprise me at all is the concern and pushback about schools that mean so much to so many people. It does not surprise me at all that the Meadowood community is proud of the work they do. There's not going to be a "but" at the end of this, but we need it. I could certainly do that as well, and I think you'll hear that as we work through the slides.

I can say that as someone who lives in this community, has worked in this community, sent their kids to school in this community, that I am a proud graduate of McKean High School. I am a first-generation college graduate in my family. I then had the opportunity to join the McKean faculty as a staff member and coach, and work with great young educators like Mr. Mattix, who would say the same thing about me, having spent countless hours at the school.

You know, so as an alum, as a coach, as a teacher, it does not surprise me one bit that the pride in that community is pushing back against such change. I can assure you that I'm meeting friends of mine from high school for dinner and I am persona non grata when I'm quoted in WDEL.

Having said that, you know, I think the data that we're going to look at—I also think it was responsible of me to speak here because I was at the board meeting last week, right? There was a motion to pause, or a potential motion to pause by Ms. Landis. There's what we're hearing from the community. So, you know, I thought it would be irresponsible to go through these slides and this agenda without sort of setting the stage and understanding that Dr. Green, myself, and the district team, you know, understand what we're dealing with.

So while we are going to continue with these slides and this agenda as the board has charged us to do, just as we move forward with the charge of the district from July, I wanted—I thought it was important to understand that we hear you. We understand the complexity of this issue. And I know Dr. Green does, I know Dr. Celestin does, you're going to hear from Mr. Snyder tonight—you know, that this was going to be a difficult task. But I think the data that you see in front of me, the inequity that you see in front of you, requires change that will be very difficult for some of our stakeholders.

in this district, you know, whatever that is and whenever that is. We have a school district that has more schools at the high school level that do not have attendance zones than schools that do have attendance zones. I'm very aware of it because I was appointed principal of one of them for 14 years at Conrad. I really challenge you to come up with a school district that has less comprehensive feeder attendance zone schools than they do special schools in their district. It's a very unusual dynamic that's been built for 30 years now.

When I taught at McKean High School, there were 1,300 students in the building. I had the opportunity to coach the freshman team, the JV team, and the varsity teams—won two conference championships. I talked to coaches yesterday at a subcommittee about student life, and the goal of the teams at our schools at Dickinson, AI, and McKean are to keep them alive, hopefully have enough kids to have a team at the varsity level. So things have changed significantly over my career.

I believe every time I've spoken to McKean staff, my heart breaks. When I hear the Meadowood parents and the pride they have in the program, you know, my heart breaks. But I do think the data you'll see, the core problem that we have, warrants a change that will impact the learners not currently in 10th, 11th, 12th, but 6th grade, 4th grade, 2nd grade, preschool, and generations to come. I think it's important work, and, you know, I appreciate you for allowing me somewhat of a public comment here before we get started.

⏯️32:09 Mark Pruitt: Okay. Last month we set up the following cadence to the buckets of information or topics. There is one note: we have a traveling transportation director, so she asked if she could switch, or vice versa. So nutrition and transportation are going to switch for those two meetings. Other than that, everyone is aware of their presentation time, and we're on schedule.

Next slide. The next four slides—well, next two slides talk about actions that we've taken as a steering committee at the district office. You're going to hear about four of those in depth tonight. You can certainly read through these slides in depth when I send them out this morning; they'll be on the website tomorrow.

But a couple worth noting on that of work we've completed since our last meeting: facilities walkthroughs, major capital renovations with the facilities office, adjustments to major capital projects and plans. All of our workgroups have started. I've had the opportunity to meet McKean Innovation Center workgroup made up of 21 educators. We spent the entire meeting—we spent about 10 minutes of our time talking about why this is a great idea; spent the rest of the meeting poking holes in it: "Why is this not going to work?" It went on for quite a while.

That became our agenda for the next 18 months, every six weeks of meetings. That was the—when you're given a one-page charge of something approved by the district, and you need to be collaborative with the different stakeholder groups, particularly those stakeholder groups that are educators and do the work, it's important that you give time for them to provide feedback and be a part of what their future will be because they know the kids best.

⏯️34:12 Mark Pruitt: We have been collaborating with RCEA, trying to move forward with a memorandum of understanding for voluntary transfer, which our goal is to have that in place by the summer. And also, set up behind the scenes a lot of work of setting up a steering committee of industry experts, postsecondary leadership, University of Delaware, to guide us in the development of the Innovation Center. We have had individual meetings with 16 members of the committee, and we now have our first full meeting scheduled for the middle of April. We're excited to get their input based on the work that we need to do best by all of our students.

⏯️35:03 Mark Pruitt: We can now move to future planning. You have two slides. Future planning: again, there's a lot going on. That's the next two months. That is the end of March through June 1st. It includes—we're developing a needs-based staffing model to use for setting up schools that will go suddenly from 540 students at AI High School to 1,000 students at AI High School. Not only what are those numbers, but who are those students likely coming to us, and what are their needs so we have the right staffing in front of them?

With doing that, you're essentially doubling the size of a school at AI and doubling the size of the school at Skyline, making them sustainable with enrollment and viable.

⏯️35:52 Mark Pruitt: Looking at—we've had the opportunity to engage student groups. I mentioned that at the last board meeting. Meeting with student life, the DIAA athletic implications of changing enrollment, important to some people in this room, and supporting their students in the transition. Not only—you know, we have a lot of committees set up and work about instructionally and logistically what this work is going to look like, but we know students involved beyond the instructional day are far more likely to be successful at the high school level. I was really excited to engage with those educators yesterday. Yes?

⏯️36:30 Morgan Dukes: Two questions.

⏯️36:30 Mark Pruitt: Absolutely.

⏯️36:31 Morgan Dukes: The first: I know that in the last meeting you had shared these slides, and there was one line item that was supposed to be completed December 19th, I think that was like a cost analysis one-pager, and it was marked as "in progress." I didn't know—the dates didn't go back far enough, so I didn't know if that had been completed at this point or if it's still in progress.

⏯️36:55 Mark Pruitt: The data analysis one-pager was an internal document that—I'll tell you what, I'm going to speak to that in the slides later. If I haven't answered your question when we get to that, make sure you flag me down.

⏯️37:07 Morgan Dukes: Okay. My second question is: I know that the last time we looked at these future planning items that still needed to be completed, there were significantly less. So is it fair to say that as the workgroups are working through some of these things, we're adding to this document as we discover those things that need to still be added?

⏯️37:28 Mark Pruitt: This is a living document that Dr. Celestin, Mr. Snyder, Ms. Mobley go into, and we are constantly engaging with different subcommittees, stakeholder groups. I never have an opportunity to meet with someone and not go, “That’s a good point,” right? I think you're going to see that grow. I think if you look at—we go out much further than this. We go out another year with that document, and it's much more skeletal at this point, right? So as it gets close, we know what we're doing, but we certainly have a skeleton built out through August 2027.

⏯️38:09 Najma Landis: I have a follow-up question for that. So as more things are being added to the list and some things are not accomplished as soon as—at what point do things become priority? Like, we've heard comments from the community, we've heard staff bring things up: "This needs to take priority before we look at anything else." Is that occurring? And if so, like, is it all hands on deck to address those concerns?

⏯️38:49 Mark Pruitt: Certainly, we knew when we started putting this skeletal plan together that there were things that had to happen. And again, I'll give you two examples. One, we needed to have an MOU in place for our educators as to how they were transferring. This is not your routine VT, right? Just needed to be sure that they felt comfortable. They continue to say, "We don't have all the information." We've sent a draft out to their organization. They're asking questions, giving us feedback.

I just had a meeting with Steven Fackenthall, Vickie Caprinolo today, and they said, "We understand that, but a lot of the questions are in their hands now. What don't you like about this, and what can we adjust to make you more comfortable?" But we knew we had to have a staffing MOU in place prior to the year because our goal, at our teachers' request, was for them to know of any changes by mid-year next year. Thought that was important.

Another example is attendance zones have to be adjusted by September at the latest, okay? Our goal is June because by law we have to inform our parents of adjusted attendance codes in advance of November 1 Choice so they can make informed decisions for where their students will attend school. So there are a number of things in place that have to be completed.

⏯40:17 Najma Landis: And with regards to the MOU, and I'm sorry if later parts cover this, is it not the same team that's currently negotiating your CPA or RCEA…

⏯40:29 Mark Pruitt: I don't believe so. At this point, they've asked us questions a couple times, we've gotten back. Steve and Vickie have said, "You know what, we got to get in the room now. Let's see if we can't get in the room and start to hash that out." I can tell you that the district is committed to everyone in this district keeping a job in this district. We don't want to lose anyone. And we'll go beyond that: we want teachers to be where they want to be, right? We want to absolutely minimize—we want a high school English teacher to continue teaching high school English, we want a biology teacher or a middle school science teacher to continue teaching middle school science. We're going to do our very best to ensure that happens.

Other questions? Pause now before we move on to the next slide. Any other questions at this point? It's a lot of information before I hand off to our first guest. Okay.

⏯41:38 Susan Sander: Mark, will these slides be available? The slides you just—

⏯41:43 Mark Pruitt: These slides will—I will email the committee tomorrow, and they will be on our website for the public tomorrow.

⏯41:49 Najma Landis: So technically, the slide—the link, it's the same link because it's a running...

⏯41:56 Mark Pruitt: It's a running slide. This is meeting two, but it's slide 28 to 63 or something. So this is going to be one—however many times we meet slideshow, so you don't have to go to find different slides every time. That's the way I like to do it. It makes it easy to me, and hopefully everybody else appreciates that as well. It is worth noting with this document, this is a snapshot of a living document. We absolutely have had something that was a little more flexible that was January 31st that may be now April 31st, right? "You know what, let me bump that back." So every time we take a snapshot of this, it's going to change a little bit. Okay. Alva?

⏯42:47 Alva Mobley: Okay. Let's look at our communications action plan to date. This timeline represents our foundation we've established for reimagining secondary education. As you can see, our outreach began back in October 2025. Our initial phase focused heavily on internal alignment, ensuring that our staff at our schools, the affected schools, were the first to be briefed. That was followed by our launch districtwide, all Red Clay staff and all Red Clay families, back in November.

Since then, we've established a few key milestones. First, we created a dedicated website in December to serve as a hub for all information. Since then, we've maintained a presence at board committee meetings, including our first session that was held in January of this year. As of today, March 2025, we're checking off our committee meeting number two, which is also on that list.

While this tracker shows a steady internal rhythm of work, we recognize that "in progress" and "did not begin" reflects work that still needs to be done. Obviously, we're going to consider all the feedback we've received from our families, our board, and the community, and that's going to help evolve our next steps in our plan.

⏯44:27 Alva Mobley: Next slide, please, Beth. In this slide, we'll detail expanding the list to include much more frequent communication and more proactive touchpoints. Again, these slides will be available on our website for further review.

But moving on, I want to be clear: we have heard again from our community, from our families, and our board, and we appreciate your feedback and especially your concerns. We recognize that while behind the scenes the work has been very intensive, the visibility of that work hasn't always reached our community's dinner table, and we want to do a better job at doing that.

⏯45:08 Alva Mobley: Starting this Thursday, we are moving from an as-needed communication style to a more predictable cadence. Beth is going to put that link that shows—sorry, Beth, the next—right before that one linked first. Okay, thank you. You can see the "Did You Know" initiative linked here. It won't be just an email; this will be a bi-weekly approach, a multi-channel update designed to keep the Reimagining Secondary Education at the forefront of our conversations. This will be sent out every other Thursday and will include updated information bi-weekly to our families. It will be found on our social media pages and on our website. Thank you, Beth. And please go back. Okay, thank you.

⏯46:05 Alva Mobley: To complement those quick responses and updates, we're also introducing a 60-day comprehensive report. This will be a deep dive into the why and the how of our restructuring process, ensuring that every stakeholder, family members—even, it will be available in different languages as well. Just go back to the slide that—yeah, right there. There you go. Thank you.

Again, we're going to be providing a 60-day comprehensive report as well that will provide a deeper dive into information. So, again, this will be more extensive information. You'll be able to find it. Again, we're going to publish it first on our social media pages. It will go out at the same time to our families via email, on our websites, and where needed, if it's something vital, we'll also send a text message to the families to take a look at the emails that there's more important information coming out.

⏯47:15 Alva Mobley: Finally, I'd like to address the most important element of the plan, which is trust. We understand that when there's a gap in communication, a different narrative can develop and is often filled with anxiety and misinformation. So we're here tonight to work on closing that gap in communication.

Communications will be a fixture at all of the committee meetings. So me or someone from my team will be present at all of the committee meetings to ensure that the information is captured right away and we're able to tell the story instantly as we receive it.

⏯47:54 Alva Mobley: We're also shifting to a social-first approach that I just explained, to make sure that the information is dropped immediately on social media, where we realize most of our families go for information. But of course, that will be followed up with multi-channel communication via email, website, voice messages when needed. We'll also have video messaging, infographics, and reports available.

We'd like to recognize again the importance of this plan being more visible to our families, so we're going to work to make that our priority. I'm going to make sure that it's my priority as well. We want to work to build back the trust in our community and ensure that they're receiving the information timely. Our goal is simple moving forward: to move from the launch phase of this plan to a more partnership phase, to win back the trust of our families in the communication process, and to make sure that you guys are receiving the most reliable information possible. Any questions?

⏯49:06 Susan Sander: One question. Right now, the information on the Innovation Center is in a section called "Reimagining Secondary Education." Will this be more on the banner, Innovation Center, so it will be easier to find the information?

⏯49:23 Alva Mobley: So you mean on the banner of the report and the fact sheet?

⏯49:29 Susan Sander: The Red Clay main page.

⏯49:32 Alva Mobley: That is the banner image. Reimagining Secondary Education will be contained within the Reimagining Secondary Education section.

⏯49:44 Susan Sander: So it will be contained within the Secondary, Reimagining Secondary Education as opposed to just "Innovation Center news"?

⏯49:47 Alva Mobley: Absolutely, because it's not just the Innovation Center that's affected.

⏯49:52 Mark Pruitt: We've been working—I know that the Innovation Center has become a topic that we go depending on what group you're with, but this change is far larger than an Innovation Center, right? This is about equity and sustainable enrollment. This is about Skyline to Skyline. And the Innovation Center is a piece of it.

⏯50:21 Susan Sander: Would it help to say for information on the changes happening within Red Clay, go to Secondary Education.

⏯50:29 Mark Pruitt: Okay.

⏯50:30 Alva Mobley: Certainly. Definitely.  

⏯50:31 Susan Sander: So people go, "Oh, that's where I go."

⏯50:33 Alva Mobley: Yep. Thank you.

⏯50:36 Susan Sander: No, thank you. Wonderful.

⏯50:39 Mark Pruitt: Ms. Landis?

⏯50:41 Najma Landis: Yes, speaking to the board-district synergy piece on two slides ago, the summary updates that are being provided to the board—can that include workgroup meetings? Like if we can get updates on what the workgroup discussed, that would be helpful.

⏯51:09 Heather Godwin: Are you thinking the workgroup updates that happen at this meeting or in between as well?

⏯51:13 Najma Landis: In between, as well. 

⏯51:35 Mark Pruitt: Any other questions, comments, ideas? Thank you very much. At this point we are going with Dr. Celestin over here. She is actually overseeing and facilitating two of our workgroups, so she's going to go through two groups now.

⏯51:54 Sarah Celestin: Good evening. It's good to see so many of you, and we have a lot of people that are here that are on some or both of these workgroups, so it's good that they're here, too, from their perspective.

So I'm going to first talk about the Student Services workgroup, which is a pretty large workgroup because it encompasses many different things. This is just a snapshot, and as Mr. Pruitt said, this goes out way beyond this. So I think this snapshot goes into this summer, but it goes way beyond that.

And I think, Morgan, you had a good question earlier about kind of how we're updating. So I don't want to speak for all the workgroup leads, but I know that what I do is after our workgroup meetings, I take the notes from that meeting. So you'll see like kind of toward the second half of this screenshot here on this slide, a lot of these things that are loaded in the second half, some of them were there before but weren't as specific, and some of them were added just after our last workgroup meeting because we talked about, for example, looking at best practices to replicate across the settings, looking at collaboration with the Tech Office and Data Service Center.

⏯52:55 Sarah Celestin: Things like—we worked in our last meeting, I'm going to talk a bit about this, about the continuum of services and course coding in special ed and multilingual learners. So some of these items that are kind of fleshed out later on were actually added after our last workgroup meeting that we just had. So that's kind of—you know, I don't want to speak for all the workgroup leads, but basically what we initially did when we received this format, we kind of created a skeleton outline of the topics we knew we were going to need to address and the timing of that. And then as we have workgroup meetings, we're loading in more specific details. So that's why you'll see, as Mr. Pruitt said, these things are changing and evolving as they go.

And then also, you'll see that this particular workgroup, because it's so large, we have four subcommittees, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about those groups and what they're working on.

⏯53:49 Sarah Celestin: All right, so we can go to the next one. All right, so Student Services had two meetings so far. We were originally scheduled to launch in January and ran into some inclement weather closures, so our first meeting was February 5th, and then we had a second meeting on March 19th.

The way we structured ourselves—and I will say Deb Sheperd, who is one of our supervisors in Student Services, helps to facilitate this with me. So the way we structured our first meeting was really a time for people to be able to kind of vocalize and get out on the table barriers and concerns. So we structured the meeting around different topics that we'll talk about in just a second, and then people started to kind of load in, and we had some really rich discussion on barriers and challenges that they saw from their perspective.

The second meeting, each subcommittee had had at least one meeting, and then those subcommittees reported out, and we talked a little bit about the common trends of issues across the committees, which is what I'm going to share with you this evening.

⏯54:48 Sarah Celestin: You'll see that this is a pretty large committee. The way that we solicited members was in a couple of different ways. When we went out in October to the faculty meetings, we asked for folks that would be interested in serving on these groups, and Mr. Pruitt had a survey form people could sign up for. So some of the folks that are from the high schools came from that.

Others came from other meetings. We had regular monthly specialist meetings with folks like Morgan as a special ed coordinator, psychologists, counselors, and so on. And so some of those folks actually volunteered in those meetings as we were saying, "Hey, this is coming up, we're going to be launching this group, we need representation, we want to hear our voices from all the high schools."

⏯55:30 Sarah Celestin: So you'll see that we kicked off with—we have four representatives right now from AI High School, five from Dickinson, 10 from McKean, nine from district office. And you might be saying, "Well, why are there so many from district office?" I think you'll see in just a second, because we go across multiple different departments.

And then the initial plan was that we were going to start with staff and then bring community members on this spring. However, we did have one community member that had actually signed up in the fall when Mr. Pruitt was soliciting, and so we brought that community member on from the beginning. We actually talked at our last meeting about starting to recruit additional community members with different perspectives. The community member that we currently have is a person who lives in the district and has previously worked in the district, but is retired. What we talked about was looking at different stakeholder groups in the community and also family members. So that's going to be something that's growing as well.

⏯56:25 Sarah Celestin: So our four subcommittees are:

1. Student Services: The Student Services subcommittee—Heather is a member of that group—they are looking at student supports that are not special ed or ML related. So they're looking at things like counseling, mental health services, social work, multi-tiered systems of support for non-academic areas—so things like behavior, crisis response, culture building, school culture building.

2. Special Education: Then we have our Special Education subcommittee, which is a pretty large group. I know there's been a lot of comment about Meadowood, but as you can imagine, we have over 3,500 students with IEPs in the district. And so this group, the Special Education group here, is looking holistically at all the areas of special education. It also includes representatives from autism services, because autism services goes across all three high schools, and so there are representatives from that group that are part of the Special Education subcommittee.

3. Health and Wellness: Mandy Pennington coordinates that subcommittee that's looking at nursing as well as our school-based health centers.

4. Multilingual Learners: Which is coordinated by Carol Beck, supervisor for our ML department. That is looking at our ML staff, so our ML teachers as well as paraeducators, and looking at the service delivery models.

⏯57:50 Sarah Celestin: So you can see the cadence of our meetings. Originally, our game plan was that the big group was going to meet every other month, and that the subcommittees were going to meet in between. What we found after our first meeting—people put so much out there and decided, "You know what, we need to meet monthly as a big group and have subcommittee meetings in between."

I just want to publicly say thank you to all of the volunteers on this group because they are very committed. They have jumped in, and in addition to our full group meetings every month, they are having subcommittee meetings and doing a lot of more of the detailed discussions about the nitty-gritty of things.

So we can go, Beth, we can go to the next slide. What I decided to do for tonight—because I really talked to Mr. Pruitt, and I knew that we only had so much time, and I really could have done like multiple slides for each of these subjects. So what I did was I took the notes from our last meeting, and I looked at what were the four items that those groups were really focusing on in their subcommittee work. And then you'll see some things in bold, which means that they are across multiple groups, right?

⏯58:56 Sarah Celestin: So just to kind of summarize: Student Services group, they were talking about scheduling practices. So this is looking at how school counselors schedule. What was revealed in their first subcommittee meeting was some discussion about differences in how scheduling is working across the high schools and wanting to create commonality and kind of a shared practice that could be utilizing best practice. This was a big discussion across all of our groups: What are the best practices that are happening across our high schools that we want to replicate? And part of that is because we want continuity so that Dickinson and AI are doing things similarly, so that when those students are going to the Innovation Center, it's really seamless, right?

⏯59:38 Sarah Celestin: And we also talked about how this could also inform practices at Conrad and CAB as we're kind of aligning our practice in the comprehensive high schools. So you'll see here that group also was digging into communication systems and crisis response. We do have a pretty detailed crisis response plan already in the district, but there was a lot of discussion around what does this look like with students traveling and moving. 

A big discussion was around tier one practices. So what we mean by that are right now each of our high schools set their own schoolwide expectations. So in terms of, you know—so for example, McKean, you'll see that they have a logo that says "We are A-R-E McKean," and they have expectations related to the A, R, and E that are common for all the students in the school. Dickinson, you know, they have all of their RAMily, and they have a RAM Way, and the RAM Way spells out the expectations and how they work with their students. 

And so each of our high schools has something like that. I know CAB just launched their kind of new expectations. So we talked about the importance of having a shared viewpoint on the expectations so that students are traveling and are sharing across buildings, going into the Innovation Center together, that there's common kind of culture building and expectations. We also talked a lot about professional learning connected with that in terms of consistency. 

On the special education side. These are a lot of big topics that have a lot of details under them. So you'll see in bold, a continuum of services and service delivery models. So one of the things that we did, and we spent a lot of time on in our subcommittee meeting, was outlining the different service delivery methodology at each high school. So there are some things that are the same and some things that are different. And so we talked about that, and the staff that were on there. I think it was really a great discussion where staff were saying, "Oh, you call this this, but this is the same in my high school. It's just called this." 

⏯1:01:39 Sarah Celestin: Or, for example, with self-contained small group special education classes, two of the three high schools have that for four subjects. One has that for world language as well. So there was a discussion about how could we make that happen? How could we expand that model? We also had a really rich discussion about what should the special ed support look like in the pathway CTE classes, right? Some of these things, there's already momentum and movement. But I think what was happening in the discussion was we were seeing where we needed to kind of line up and have things in common. 

⏯1:02:10 Sarah Celestin: There was a large discussion about special transportation. When we talk about special transportation, typically we're talking about students going to and from school that need transportation accommodations, bus aides, maybe smaller van or small bus transportation for specific needs, lift services. So, one of the discussions we were having was around the special transportation accommodations and how that would translate in movement to and from the Innovation Center because we have students—and I know there's been a lot of comment about Meadowood, but I just do want to say that we have students with disabilities both within Meadowood and many students outside of Meadowood that have special transportation needs. And so that is a big discussion that is really being discussed in this group. 

⏯1:02:56 Sarah Celestin: Medication and equipment management: again, if there's students that have equipment or medication in their home school and they're going to the Innovation Center, what is that going to look like? That also overlapped with some of the discussion with the nurses transition supports, which was also overlapping with multilingual learners. This really talks about how to support students in transitioning and changing schools. And then you'll see something that says specialist travel, teacher travel. This really deals with teacher assignments and what is going to be the expectation of teachers moving back and forth to the Innovation Center versus having people dedicated in one space. So an example of this would be there's a discussion in the special ed group about: Should we plan for staffing for the special educators to be content specific? So we have special educators that are staying in the traditional comprehensive buildings and then special educators at McKean that would be dedicated and really focused on supporting in pathways. Right now, when you have the special educators at the high school, a lot of them are kind of a jack-of-all-trades, right? They are floating and supporting across multiple content areas. So, we were having a discussion about, with the growth and the change of model, could we have more dedicated staff that would be really focused on certain contents and be able to provide specialized instruction in those content areas. Under Health and Wellness, again, you can see here some of their discussion overlaps a little bit with Shawn's department. There was a lot of discussion with the nurses around alignment of health systems, health accounting, making sure that nurses across buildings could see students and be able to access their information. We had a pretty rich discussion about rescue meds, student safety, and when I say—I can't even do the conversation justice. It was very detailed. So, we were talking about to the level of how health insurance typically will only pay for one, possibly two rescue meds. Usually the families have one at home, the students have one at school. If the students are going to the Innovation Center, we were having the discussion about movement of rescue meds versus having multiple rescue meds at the schools to the point of like cost of that and how that couldn’t fall on the families if their insurance wouldn’t pay for it, how that would be facilitated. So, a lot of these I feel like I'm not doing it justice because each of these bullets is a pretty in-depth conversation. 

⏯1:05:24 Sarah Celestin: Lunch coverage and attendance tracking: this had to do with the nurses talked a lot about the level of support they provide at lunch and looking at the tentative schedule, thinking about students that may need like glucose monitoring or specific supports at lunchtime, and is that going to be happening at the Innovation Center or at home campus? Attendance tracking: so a little bit around that was students who might be like if they're tardy, maybe are they coming to the home campus first, especially if they need a nursing check-in first thing in the morning, and then how would that work in terms of movement? So a lot of the nurses' discussion was around movement. 

⏯1:06:07 Sarah Celestin: Cross-site documentation: again, that really goes into health accounting, Shawn. So there was a lot of overlap there. And then we also started a conversation about health centers. The health center conversation is much more involved. The conversation that Mandy and I were having with this group was with the school nurses, but for the school-based health centers, that needs to be involving ChristianaCare. So that's really a next step for us is bringing ChristianaCare to the table to talk about the structure for the health centers. 

⏯1:06:34 Sarah Celestin: For our multilingual learners, you can see some of these items overlap with the special education side of things. So things like course offerings and service delivery models, it was very interesting that some of the conversation that group was having was overlapping with special ed in terms of: Are teachers going to be floating? Are they going to be staying in one space? What would specialized instruction, English language development instruction in the career pathways look like at the Innovation Center versus back at the comprehensive high schools? Also, the high schools—my understanding, I was not in this breakout, but talking to Carol Beck—one of the things she explained to me was that across the three high schools, there are some differences in course offerings for multilingual learners. And so, similar to what we talked about in special ed, they would like to see some consistency and streamline that so that the teachers are using the same service delivery method. There was a big discussion about having designated counselors that could provide bilingual support and be able to interface with families more readily, having bilingual office supports in each school, and then the transition and travel was across. 

⏯1:07:43 Sarah Celestin: You'll see that there's two big things at the bottom that I wanted to just mention briefly, and I think these are also coming up in other workgroups. I know I'm on Dr. Bond's professional learning workgroup, and these came up there. So culture and climate across all the groups is a very, very big discussion. If I could summarize it, I would say that people are very attuned and thinking about, as staff move and as students move, how do we create kind of a new culture and community that's welcoming to everyone, right? That it's not like—I know the one group I was in that was discussing this, I happened to be with a lot of McKean staff and they were sharing that they were really concerned that if they were moved to Dickinson, for example, that they just need to like assimilate to the RAM way, the RAMily, and that, you know, they would kind of feel like a little bit lost in the sauce, right? And so we had some discussion about: What proactively can we do next school year once we know who's moving where? What can we do to help facilitate school culture and climate building for both the staff and also for the students? I mean, this was getting specific like welcome packages, swag, all kinds of things. 

⏯1:08:56 Sarah Celestin: The other thing that was talked about a lot was staffing and common role expectations. So, one of the things that's interesting, more in terms of the specialists, is that there are some differences in how they're utilized, right? So, for example, across our social workers, there's some differences in how they're utilized across schools. So we were talking about thinking about staffing not just from the numbers perspective of who's going where and how many people are going where, but also role expectations and having more commonality across the high schools. So a lot of these things then feed into that Excel list because each of these items here has to be fully flushed out. So you can see we have a lot of work to do, which is why we have the four subcommittees in this group, because each of these items is going to take a lot of intensive work to get to a final product. So that's where we are for student services, and I'll just invite Heather, Morgan, those of you that are on, if you want to share anything I'm missing. I tried to summarize the best I could. I know you have so much that you've talked about, but I don't know if there's anything you want to share from your perspective.

⏯️1:10:07 Heather Godwin: I think this is really capturing what we've been talking about. I think that, you know, when you see the list of how many committees there are and how many subcommittees there are, it feels overwhelming. But if there weren't people doing all of these groups that think about all those nuanced things, like there's no one person who's going to think about, "What about the rescue meds?" right? Like, you need the right person at the table to talk about that. So I think a lot of these things are—we have the right people who are saying, "Hey, let's help with that." So I'm really happy to be in a place where I can be a part of many committees.

⏯️1:10:37 Morgan Dukes: Yeah, I think so far our work has really focused on like identifying those areas that need to be flushed out. We haven't, because we've only had two meetings, it's hard to really dig in and start to solve those problems. But I think that there are certainly problems that can be solved, but it's going to take a lot of time. And just even getting into what the heart of the issue is took a lot of time. So...

⏯️1:11:04 Heather Godwin: It's definitely very time-intensive.

⏯️1:11:06 Sarah Celestin: And I think I know Mr. Leonard mentioned something earlier about like shifting from identifying problems to solutions, and I think we are kind of in the middle of that right now because our first meeting was very focused on letting people—we really wanted, Ms. Shepard and I were trying to create a space to let people kind of get out all the barriers and concerns because we know people are feeling that and it's heavy for them. And so letting them get that out there so then we could start to kind of chip away on working through solutions. So basically what I would say where we're at is we had the kind of barrier concern meeting. We had the kind of—I would say meeting number two was more of an organizational meeting, like let's get everything out on the table in terms of the needs and kind of look at where we're common across. And now the subcommittees, we're going to be working. And so we have our meetings set up for April and May, and subcommittees are also meeting in between. So I don't know if anybody has questions or thoughts.

⏯️1:12:03 Shawn Snyder: My team will help with accounting today, actually. We have some proof of concept stuff we're working on for next week. So, I think I'll have a solution for you for the health accounting problems coming within the month.

⏯️1:12:12 Sarah Celestin: Yes. And thank you so much, Shawn. So, there is a line—you might have seen it—it said "in progress." It was talking about working with technology and also working with Data Service Center. So, we are working with them on several things. We're working with them on public accounting, cross-site enrollment, we're working on course codes. So, there's a lot of things coming out of our group that's working with Shawn and also working with Data Service Center.

Sorry, I thought you...

⏯️1:12:39 Susan Sander: No, I didn't have any. I'm just very impressed by all the work you've done so far.

⏯1:12:44 Sarah Celestin: It's a work in progress.

⏯1:12:45 Susan Sander: Tremendous.

⏯1:12:46 Sarah Celestin: And I agree with Morgan totally: there's a lot, there's a lot. So we are chipping away and working on it, and there's a lot of behind-the-scenes things. I feel badly for the subcommittee leads because there's a lot that they're doing behind the scenes. I hope I did it justice on this little chart here, but like I said, each of those bullets we could talk about much more in depth. Any questions? 

⏯1:13:09 Mark Pruitt: Any other questions, ideas for the Student Services workgroup? All right, I'd like to introduce Dr. Sarah Celestin. [laughter]

⏯1:13:23 Sarah Celestin: So I will say Kathy Mattix is my collaborator with this team. She's been helping. We've been kind of meeting together to kind of plan out agendas and plan for the meetings. So you can see here, again, a snapshot of where we are. You know, part of—there was a lot of prep work even getting ready for this group. So, for example, before this group's first meeting was February 12th—we've had two meetings so far—but leading up to that meeting, in order to be able to share information, there was a lot of prep. So I think there was a comment made—I think Ms. James had said something about the tour. So one of the things that we were doing in preparation for the workgroup was meeting with facilities, with Mr. Pruitt, with both Meadowood, Autism, as well as AI High School staff, going through the building to really kind of vet spaces, right? So we really felt like it was kind of really preliminary at that point because spaces hadn't even been identified. So like back in, I think there was a request in January about touring the group before we had a meeting. But we were still going through—Mr. Pruitt and Ms. Mattix had done a tour, and then, you'll see there, on February 10th we had a much larger group that did a tour to really look at things. And I'm going to give a building update because I know there's been a lot of discussion about accessibility and concerns. But part of what we did in that tour was really looking at classroom and therapy space, bathroom space, accessibility of entrances, accessibility to the cafeteria. So, we were really making with facilities a laundry list of all the things that would need improvement so that we could bring that to the group. You will see that on our list when Kathy and I did the update, we are planning to offer a workgroup tour later this spring. But we felt like doing that in January, we felt like we weren't even in a space—like we hadn't even finalized which rooms we were looking at yet at that point. And so that's why we had not done a tour prior to the workgroup meeting. But you'll see we have a lot of things going on. I'm going to give more detail about the facilities and finance—I have a slide on that—and you'll see there's a lot of other pieces that have been loaded that are specifically coming out of the workgroup. So down below, things around sensory spaces, accessible parking, expansion of Unified Special Olympics and Best Buddies. The last meeting we talked a bit about adaptive course offerings, which I'm going to share this evening, and so some of those bullets that are down lower again came out of our last workgroup meeting. So Beth, we can go to the next slide. 

⏯1:16:11 Sarah Celestin: This is what we've done so far: we've had two meetings, as I said, February 12th and March 12th. Similar to the Student Services group, the way we structured the first meeting was that Kathy and I felt like it was going to be very important for everybody involved to be able to share their concerns. And so the first meeting, we talked about the charge of the group, you know, that this is what the board has charged us to look at, but we wanted people to be able to have an open forum to get their barriers and concerns, any challenges. And so that was really the full first meeting was people vocalizing questions, concerns, challenges, right? The second meeting, what we did was we prioritized questions from the first meeting. So the first meeting, there was a lot of questions about some of the basics around the Innovation Center. So like, what would the tentative schedule look like? What pathways are going to be offered at the Innovation Center? And we had not shared that in our first meeting because we really let the first meeting be an open forum. And so at our second meeting, we kicked it off by doing a little bit of a presentation similar to what's been shared at the board around what the overview of the Innovation Center is, what pathways are slated to be there. We talked a little bit about the sample schedule that had been created in the fall—and again, I know that's a work in progress also with other workgroups that are working on scheduling—and so we shared that. And then we also gave some feedback on facilities accessibility at AI because that was one of the core things that came up in the first meeting that people were very concerned about. And then we started a very preliminary discussion on scheduling and course access. So I'm going to share more about that. You can see the representation: we have right now on our group, we have seven Meadowood staff, and those are all staff that are either teachers or specialists working at Meadowood at McKean. We have one McKean staff person, and Holly, who facilitates Best Buddies and is very involved in Special Olympics. So even though she is a world language teacher at McKean, she's very involved with us. There's two of us from district office, and then we have five families that include both high school and middle school families. I included this here just to give people an idea: so, one of the things we talked about at our second meeting, Julia Tullik, who's the assistant principal at Meadowood, she took a look at the last couple years, what pathways and what courses students have accessed regularly, so that people would have an idea of what things are going to be at the Innovation Center versus what would be at a comprehensive high school. 

⏯1:18:56 Sarah Celestin: So, you can see here that right now our Meadowood students are currently regularly accessing the marketing, the culinary, and the early childhood programs. Those three programs would all be located at the Innovation Center. They're all currently at McKean. They also are regularly accessing electives such as music, PE, and unified PE, which is a specialized course with Meadowood and students outside of Meadowood. And then right now we don't have anybody in art, but last year we had several students that were accessing the art class. We also historically had students access band—that was probably two years ago and before. One of the staff from Meadowood also talked about ideas on opportunities for expansion. So, this is the Meadowood adapted physical education teacher: she talked a lot about things that she feels could be expanded on at AI—unified PE, unified fitness, and weight room activities. And then I think that got people talking because after the meeting—I didn't put this on here, but after the meeting—I actually got some emails from some of the Meadowood McKean staff that started to brainstorm other ideas of things that they would like expanded on. So, I think it's kind of getting people's wheels turning on things that we could do. But I just wanted people to see, because I know the conversation right now—there's families that feel strongly that Meadowood should stay at McKean. There's also—I know that's been represented in public comment. I feel like I would be remiss in not stating that there are some families—so some families feel strongly in that way, that Meadowood should stay at McKean. There are some families that feel strongly that Meadowood needs to be in a comprehensive high school to be able to be a part of all the activities in a comprehensive school. And I think at our first meeting, one of the middle school families talked about that a bit. And so I think that what I'm feeling in the meeting is that there are differing opinions among families about whether it would make sense to stay at McKean or whether it makes sense to be part of a comprehensive high school. The reason I put this list here is because the career pathways, those would all be located at the Innovation Center, whereas those electives or expansion opportunities would all be at a comprehensive high school like AI, right? So we can go ahead back to the next slide. 

⏯1:21:18 Sarah Celestin:  So I know, in for the sake of time, I won't read through word for word, but our first meeting, what we tried to get out on paper was really listening to all of the stakeholders, families, the staff, about what they were really concerned about. And so this really fell across these five topic areas: scheduling, facilities, extracurriculars, transportation, and health. Some of them do overlap with some of the things I brought up from the Student Services group. But you can see one of the big discussions at the first meeting was: Is it a done deal that Meadowood is moving? Is it possible for them to stay at McKean? And families talked a lot about difficulties with transitions, that their kids have difficulties transitioning to new places, going to different places during the day, and there was a request to have an opportunity to stay at McKean. There also was a discussion about inclusion within high school classes, and like I said, so again, there's kind of some differing opinions there in terms of what people are really wanting for their children. 

⏯1:22:26 Sarah Celestin: Facilities: a lot of concerns overall about accessibility, and I'm going to table that for a second because I have another slide on that. Extracurriculars: I think McKean has done a tremendous job over the years—and kudos, Mr. Mattix and his team over the years—for really building out inclusive extracurricular opportunities. So people talk a lot about Special Olympics and Best Buddies; those are two opportunities there. But also the traditional extracurricular activities at McKean are also very accessible and have Meadowood students involved, right? So they have Special Olympics opportunities, unified sports, Best Buddies, but then also a lot of the other clubs and theater things that are going on are very inclusive. They have Meadowood students and students from the autism support classrooms and so on involved. So there was a lot of discussion about the need to expand that. To be honest, that conversation wasn't just about AI; that was about—they were really wanting to get expanded across the whole district.

⏯1:23:25 Sarah Celestin: Also talking about how we could facilitate PD opportunities for coaches to understand how to support students with disabilities in their programming. 

Transportation: a lot of this has already been echoed. It was talked about in Student Services under special transportation, also some of the public comments tonight, like being worried about the amount of time it would take students to transport to and from Innovation Center and whether that would decrease time for IEP services. Because one of the things we talked about at the last meeting was that on the schedule right now, there's a mock schedule that has like these 10 minutes we get here, we get bus loaded, at 10 minutes we get over to McKean. But we know that for some of our students that need wheelchair accessibility, that need equipment moved, that would take a longer time. So we would definitely need an adapted schedule, and we talked about that a bit at our last meeting. 

Health: again, a lot of the health pieces overlap with the health subcommittee, so things like medication, transport, accessibility of nursing, all of that. I just have one more slide. I know I'm probably over time. I'm sorry, Mark.

⏯1:24:34 Mark Pruitt: You're doing great.

⏯1:24:36 Sarah Celestin: So, I do want to talk about accessibility because this is something that I shared at the last workgroup meeting, and I know there's been a lot of concerns about this. So I mentioned that when Mark, myself, Marcin, who is our facilities director, Kathy, and Emily, who oversee Meadowood and autism, we went through AI. We spent a lot of time talking about accessibility issues. So the way this is set up is it looks at specific things. Down the left side, you can see the current status and then what we have discussed as a renovation plan. 

So accessibility in and out of the building: a great feature of AI is that the front is very accessible. Like all of the front entrances are accessible across the front of the building, both the main entrance and then there's another entrance further down. The problem is really the backside. So there where the auditorium and the gym is, right now there are two different staircases there and it would absolutely need ramp access. Talking with Mr. Pruitt, he was talking about when he was there as an assistant principal and that this has been an ongoing issue that we need access there. Frankly, I think, Mark, you said it best: no matter what happens with Meadowood, we need access there because there are community members coming in for events and things, we need that to be accessible. So we have worked on a plan with facilities to look at adding a ramp over by the auditorium gym entry, which is accessible to the side parking lot. This would allow easy access to both the auditorium and the gym and an exit out of the back of the school that's accessible. And I'm going to talk about funding in just a second—I'll do that all at the same time. So that's really the main accessibility issue, getting in and out. 

Bathrooms is a very big discussion, and we spent a lot of time—probably, Mark, more time than Marcin thought we were going to—talking about bathrooms. We went through, I think, the majority of the bathrooms in the building on the first floor, looking at which ones were going to make the most sense to be renovated for Meadowood. And what we came to was that there is a bathroom suite next to the nurse that is not really utilized right now. It does need renovation and updates, but there's great potential there because there are currently two restrooms plus a storage closet that's not really in use. So Marcin talked about that we could basically gut that, he could work with the Meadowood team and the physical therapists on detailing out exactly what that would look like with the hygiene stations and high-low tables. Um, so—

⏯️1:27:14 Mark Pruitt: Also worth noting that that nursing suite and those bathrooms part of major capital funding. He just has to do a change to up one year.

⏯️1:27:25 Sarah Celestin: Yes. Yes. So, you'll see there under renovation plan, as Mark said, it's not just the bathrooms. That entire section, the nursing suite and that bathroom corridor with the storage area is all going to be redone. And when we met, I was going to talk about finance at the end, but I guess I can just do one at a time. We met after we did the walkthrough, we met with finance and with facilities to look at the funding side of it. And the good news is that for all of these items that are listed here, we have the money. It's just moving the timeline, right? So, as Mark said, for the renovation of the nursing suite that was scheduled to be done in 2028, Dr. Ammann said we have the funds in major cap. We just have to put in a change order to move it up and to be able to get it done early. So, it's not that we don't have the funds. It's really just working with the finance office to move the funds to be available earlier. It was on the project schedule for major cap; it was listed later. 

The other piece we looked at is elevator access. So there is currently an elevator that works consistently there. The challenge that we had discussed about the elevator is it is an elevator that's really designed for—you could have one wheelchair and one to two people, or you can have multiple people. But if you're putting in like a power chair, you would only be able to really fit two people at most with that power chair. So we had a lot of discussion, a lot of brainstorming around what we could do around that, to the point where facilities was looking at the size of the elevator shaft, whether we could expand it, all these things. But what we ultimately came to is that there is a great opportunity. There is, if anybody's been at AI, there's a courtyard in the center. It's like a big rectangle with a courtyard. There's an entrance to the outside, to the courtyard, that actually goes down, and the cafeteria is right there. And so Marcin had a terrific idea to create an interior enclosed ramp that would go from that entrance next to the courtyard all the way into the cafeteria straight in, that would allow for classes to move together and not have to be like standing and waiting for the elevator, right? So the class could move together and go right down that interior ramp right into the cafeteria. That ramp and the ramp above, we have the funding for both of those in minor cap, in the minor capital improvements. And Ted said that that would be available. And so Marcin, after we met, he said he was going to contact an architect to start the process of looking at what this would look like from the architect side. 

So that's where we are with the accessibility features of A.I. There's certainly, absolutely things that need to be addressed. I feel like the team really looked—I mean, we talked about multiple different bathroom options, but this option with the nurses' suite definitely seems like it is going to be the most advantageous. And then, you know, when we first met with Marcin on the walkthrough, we were concerned about funding, especially for the nursing suite renovation and bathrooms, and then, Dr. Ammann, when we met with him, said that that's all doable, that we have the funding available. So that's where we are right now. I know this doesn't include dollar figures; that would really be a next step. But we do know from finance that the funding is available.

⏯️1:30:41 Mark Pruitt: I have slides to speak to funding.

⏯️1:30:43 Sarah Celestin: That's really—I know that was a very quick overview. I will say the other piece, I know communication—you know, Alva's the master of communication. I try to better my skills with communication, um, but one of the things that we are doing is we are providing regular updates to two groups, in addition to the work groups. So, we have a special ed parent council that we also have been providing updates to since the fall. And we also have an RCEA special ed work group that is made up of staff, both teachers and specialists throughout the district, that we meet with every other month. And we've been providing updates to them as well. So, in addition, I know Alva obviously has the master communication plan, but we also have been on the special ed side making sure to keep those groups informed as we go.

⏯️1:31:32 Mark Pruitt: Questions? Ms. Landis?

⏯️1:31:35 Najma Landis: Thank you for the detailed breakdown of each of the areas. With regard to the accessibility in and out of buildings, has the work group begun to look at how those correlate to AI's current emergency or evacuation plans? And—

⏯️1:31:54 Sarah Celestin: Yes, and we actually had some discussion. So, I know, Mark, you had spoken about that while we were there, and then I actually spoke to Mr. Downs after there about their evacuation plans, and they do have—they have included that in their evacuation plan. So they have multiple entrances they go out of, but they also have evac chairs if they absolutely have to go down the steps. They do have evacuation chairs that we utilize. We use evacuation chairs in all of our buildings anytime we need to get downstairs, like if students were upstairs and we need to get down a stairwell. So I did talk to Mr. Downs about that, but I don't know, Mark, if there's anything else—

⏯️1:32:31 Mark Pruitt: What's the context here? You're—

⏯️1:32:34 Najma Landis: So I'm thinking of like fire drills or an active shooter, making sure that the flow out of exits is not hampered so that all of our students are able to exit safely and in a timely—

⏯️1:32:50 Mark Pruitt: It would obviously be part of the school's safety plan once those plans were in place. I actually think it's critical to have the second departure and entrance point in that building. AI, and I worked there quite a few years ago now, and it seemed like an odd fit to have someone enter the building through the front for an event, whether it was for a fire drill, whether it was for a basketball game, you know, whatever the case would be. So I think this enhances that, doesn't hinder that in any way. But some adjustments to mapping of students getting out of the building—in a fire drill, it's a little different than with an emergency active shooter drill, right? You're getting away from danger and not necessarily following a scripted plan.

⏯️1:33:45 Sarah Celestin: Other questions? And I would just say, I know we're over time, so if people have follow-up questions, I'm happy to talk later.

⏯️1:33:51 Mark Pruitt: It is 7:30, which is our hard deadline. We have one more item to go. Okay, and I'm going to leave it up to the committee. We certainly are going to allow anyone to give public comment, but I'm going to leave it up to the committee as to whether they would like to have attendance zones presented right now. 

Now, I will say this, attendance zones are going to be a presentation item at our board meeting on April 15th in far more depth than sort of the preview that this group's going to get now. And so I would really open it up to all of the members of the committee as to whether we should transition to public comment, or should we—or does the majority or consensus—

⏯️1:34:42 Shawn Snyder: Don't worry about—I'll come back next month, but don't worry about me. Whatever you think's best for the community and getting the message out, that's what—

⏯️1:34:47 Susan Sander: Now I’d like to hear the attendance zones. But I'm sure you want to give consideration to the people that are waiting to make public comment as well. 

⏯️1:34:55 Mark Pruitt: Should we allow them to make public comment now? If anyone has to leave, that's fine for the attendance zone presentation. All right, try to meet people's needs. 

Okay, then we will reverse the order and pivot to—because I feel like what you're going to get now with the attendance zones is going to look a lot different after the update at the next meeting. It is going to be what we did at the board meeting, what we've done to communicate that since then. It's just going to be a lot different. Just wait. 

Okay. So at this point, we'll pivot to online public comment, or if anyone that did not give public comment earlier would like to give it now, we'll start with online.

⏯️1:35:35 Beth Jefferson: All right, I'm going to ask Brenda Steffon if you could please take yourself off mute for public comment.

⏯️1:35:41 Brenda Steffon: Hi there. This is Brenda Steffon. I'm one of the executive board members of the Friends of AI. I had a few questions that were mostly in our role here in this part of this committee. We feel is just to bring awareness and to bridge gaps with community as we support the efforts of our organization. And one thing that I've noticed, and it was addressed in the presentation regarding services and also with Meadowood, is that I've heard two of the public comments given tonight that were also the same comments and same people from the board meeting last week. And I'm just wanting to ask if these people are really still feeling these things a week later. Is there a way to fold them in to have some conversation with committee members or somebody where they can feel seen and heard and have some of their concerns addressed maybe on a more personal level? I also want to say, though, that we do not represent the staff and the faculty of AI, you know, we do want to say in our conversations that we have with faculty that, you know, we want to ensure that there's a sense of safety with their jobs. I know that it has been worked out with the teachers' union, but let’s be real, how long is that period valid for? So there are some concerns maybe to help—what's the word I want to say?—assure teachers, like how long is this period where there's no firing or moving around going to be in effect? That is a concern. So just, again, building a sense of trust back out in the community. And the last one deals with these different communities of children and kids, particularly speaking to the high school environments where, you know, we know that there are kids that are living very adult lives right now due to their family circumstances or how they are participating financially to help sustain their families. So if we're talking about inclusion, I want to make sure that there's a conversation on addressing the needs of these communities of children who are being adults at age 14, 15, 16. We talk about that maybe in regards to specific areas of the city of Wilmington, but also in the suburbs, too. We want to be mindful of this ability to get community, to get a culture and a climate that is understanding of everyone's position, and how the ways that your counselors are going to help, and also like—I'm sorry, I'm very tired. It's been a very long week of advocacy here—but also like just how we're going to have that conversation more in depth with the families and the kids to know like, "Hey, I will have a place here." You know? So, again, appreciate all the efforts being put forth, and thank you very much.

⏯️1:38:46 Beth Jefferson: Okay, can I ask Jared Obstfeld to unmute yourself?

⏯️1:38:55 Jared Obstfeld: Good evening, and thanks for the opportunity to speak. My name is Jared Obstfeld and I'm representing Friends of AI, a community and alumni group of over 3,500 members across the Red Clay Consolidated School District. I do want to thank everybody for their comments tonight about hearing the community, about community engagement, and I just wanted to make some comment about that. I want to speak directly to a concern that we've heard consistently, and that is the lack of meaningful communication and true community engagement surrounding the proposed Innovation Center. While we understand that the district has outlined steps in its roadmap indicating that communication has taken place, the reality that we're hearing from families across Red Clay tells a real different story. So many community members, both in the city and surrounding areas, have shared with us that they've received no direct communication at all—not by mail or email or even through their schools. And that disconnect matters. So this is not just about one project. It's about trust. And there's long-standing distrust within the Red Clay community built over years of decisions that many feel were made without sufficient transparency, engagement, or follow-through. That history is important because it shapes how this current proposal is being received. Because of that, the board and district must put real work and thoughtful consideration into rebuilding trust and respect within the community. And it's important to remember that you were elected to represent us, the families and residents of Red Clay, and to help shape the future of our children by ensuring equity and opportunity within our education system. So when a decision of this magnitude is introduced, one that could significantly impact multiple school communities, it is not enough to check a box that communications occurred. Engagement must be intentional, accessible, and inclusive. And it must meet families where they are, not where we assume they are. So we're asking the committee to rethink and strengthen how information is shared and how feedback is collected. That means proactive outreach, clear and consistent messaging, and creating real opportunities for dialogue, not just presentation. Friends of AI stands with McKean and the community and the Red Clay community as a whole in asking for transparency, accountability, and inclusion in this process. We all want the same outcome—a solution that truly serves all students equitably. But that can only happen if the community is fully informed, genuinely heard, and meaningfully involved. And I encourage you all to continue to do the work with us as the community because, ultimately, nobody knows best how we want to be communicated with than us. And we want to work closely together with you to improve that. So thank you.  

⏯️1:41:45 Beth Jefferson: Hadrian Cissell, if you could please unmute yourself.

⏯️1:41:51 Hadrian Cissell: Food evening. This is Hadrian Cissell. I just had some thoughts that I wrote down as I was listening to everything that people said. Regarding like the communication about the proposed Innovation Center and communicating to parents and families like what's happening with it: I got a lot more, honestly—like, personally, I got a lot more communication and alerts about The Anxious Generation webinar and like what's going on with that. Like I got multiple text messages, I got emails about it, and I didn't get emails or text messages about like this meeting, for example. Like, but I see like a huge problem with this entire plan is demographics because it's concentrating high-need students at one comprehensive high school. And I'm also amazed that there are funds for renovations and updates and busing to and back and forth from McKean, but somehow there isn't enough money for equitable busing across the district. And that was an idea that like the original attendance zone committee meeting group wanted, but then the district administration said there wasn't funding for that. So I'm just amazed that there's like funding for all these renovations and updates and busing back and forth to McKean and there wasn't for equitable busing across the district. So I, like as a parent community member, I'm just kind of dumbfounded, honestly. So thank you. That's my comment.

⏯️1:43:41 Beth Jefferson: Thank you. Jen McGrath, could you please unmute yourself for public comments?

⏯️1:43:47 Jen McGrath: Yes. Good evening, members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment. My name is Dr. Jennifer McGrath. I'm a Meadowood program parent, high school nurse, and community member.  I'm here today to advocate for the safety and well-being of our special needs students as we consider the plan to bus them between two school buildings during the day. While I understand the intention behind the decision, I have significant concerns about the timeframe and how a rushed structure could impact the delivery of safe, appropriate medical care. First, access to the nurse's office and building relationships with the school nurse are essential for these students. Many of our students rely on consistent, predictable access to medical support throughout the day. This includes adequate storage space for supplies, direct and accessible routes to the health office to promote student independence, and close proximity to their classrooms. Splitting time between two buildings disrupts this access and creates additional barriers. I'm also concerned about what happens during transport, specifically what trained personnel is going to be available on school buses throughout the day. We cannot require legally non-medical staff to administer any emergency life-saving medications such as epinephrine, glucagon, seizure medications, and without appropriately trained personnel, we're placing students at risk during this additional transit time. Additionally, when students are divided between multiple buildings, continuity of nursing care is compromised. Consistent communication, documentation, and oversight are critical in managing complex medical needs of this vulnerable population. We need a clearly defined system to ensure seamless communication between locations so that no aspect of a student's care is compromised. There are also logistical and legal concerns regarding medications. We must take the time to establish safe and compliant processes for storage, administration, and transport for both daily and emergency medications, and also tube feedings. This includes controlled substances and life-saving medications such as inhalers, EpiPens, glucagon, and life-saving seizure treatments. These medications must be readily accessible at all times. However, it's not appropriate to expect students to carry nor administer these medications to themselves, nor can we place the responsibility on any untrained staff. Insurance limitations additionally prevent families from providing duplicate medications at multiple locations. This creates a gap that must be addressed at the system level, not shifted onto students, families, or staff. In closing, I urge the community to carefully consider these concerns and develop comprehensive, clearly defined plans that prioritize student safety, limit liability, maintain continuity of care, and ensure that all medical needs are met without compromise. This vulnerable population deserves a system that supports them fully, not one that introduces additional risks. Thank you for your time and consideration.

⏯️1:46:49 Beth Jefferson: Thank you. Amy Reynoso, could you please unmute yourself for public comment?

⏯️1:46:58 Amy Reynoso: Did you say Amy?

⏯️1:47:00 Beth Jefferson: Yes.

⏯️1:47:01 Amy Reynoso: Oh, hi. Good evening, everyone. My name is Amy Reynoso. Mr. Pruitt, you opened the meeting by stating that change is hard and that the pushback is coming because of a passion for community. And I just want to be very clear that framing the concerns of parents as a simple resistance to change is a fundamental misunderstanding. Families are not afraid of change; they're afraid of a lack of value. Parents want a school where their child's time is used wisely. I am shocked that this plan has found 45 minutes for kids to sit on a bus when middle school kids don't have a single minute to move their bodies for recess. Like, it's mind-boggling to me that there's this time that you guys have discovered, this time in the day for transportation. And also, I just want to let you know that I personally am community-free. Um, I did withdraw my son from Dickinson in the middle of sixth grade. We are now homeschoolers, so I don't align with any community that I'm trying to preserve, and I have no passion for any community at all. I thought we would come back for high school, but this plan confirms why I want to stay away. Um, I just, honestly, it's so sad that the only people that are really rooting for this plan, it seems that it's the district people. And I know you guys all have good hearts and you're good people. I'm not assuming anything bad when I say that. I just think that you're not putting yourself in what they call the user experience. Like, you guys have got to look at yourselves as parents. Would you want to send your kid to this, riding on a bus from home to home school to McKean, to back and forth? All that's ridiculous. Anyway, I'm sorry. I just—I know last time I made public comment, I know everyone was like raising their eyebrows and it was cringey, but it also needs to be said, and so I am going to say it. And I apologize for being so blunt about it, but I also want to say that I love the esports program at AI, and if—I mean, our feeder's McKean—if we could get over to AI, if we had a bus, I mean, we'd be all over that. It's an amazing program. So, I don't know. You guys gotta go back and figure out like why are families leaving? Why did four of my son's teachers go to Newark Charter? I mean, come on. We got to keep families and teachers. Thank you.

⏯️1:49:50 Mark Pruitt: Thank you, Ms. Reynoso. That's it. Now it's 7:47, and so I will ask again from the committee. Do we want to table the last group, or keep going, or do some combination for folks that have to get home to their lives—

⏯️1:50:13 Susan Sander: I’d like to keep going. 

⏯️1:50:14 Mark Pruitt: Welcome to do that. Okay, keep going? All right, here we go. Mr. Snyder, click away.

⏯️1:50:24 Shawn Snyder: Okay, so we will have, as Mr. Pruitt said, we're going to have a board presentation that we're still preparing now on April 15th to go over some of this information that will change from now to then, because we're still going back and forth with the University of Delaware and John Laznik with data sets. So, if you see this information in a couple of weeks and you're like, "That's a little different," it's supposed to be a little different. As we get new information, we update slides. 

So, proposed changes will follow the school board's charge and approved core principles: strong and balanced enrollment across schools, align high school boundaries to K-8 attendance zones when possible, and consider geography and Neighborhood Schools Act when possible. Other considerations are demographic breakdown, capacity of schools, space for Meadowood program, and then the last thing obviously is school choice, which is one of the harder things to predict since every family does have a choice in where they attend. So, we can set up feeder patterns, but capacities allow you to not use that feeder pattern and select a different school in Delaware. 

So, our current attendance zones look like this. The green borders delineate high school feeder boundaries. Middle school feeder: A.I. Middle School is red, H.B. is dark blue, Skyline is light blue, and Stanton is green. And it's kind of an overwhelming graphic, so take a moment to kind of take that all in. This graphic does not exist out there in the real world; we had to make it. So, that is something we wanted to make sure we show. Now, I don't believe anybody in this room made this feeder pattern. I think that probably is several, many years old.

⏯️1:51:58 Mark Pruitt: Middle schools were 2015.

⏯️1:52:00 Shawn Snyder: Okay.

⏯️1:52:01 Mark Pruitt: The high schools were not addressed at that time, which is why they don't mesh. So, high schools were 2002.

⏯️1:52:09 Shawn Snyder: Okay. Are we ready to move on to the next slide, or do you want a few more moments for that? Okay, let's go to the next slide. So, this is my favorite slash least favorite slide to look at because it kind of gives me a headache. But this gives you an idea of elementary school. Makes some sense for the most part. You start in elementary school, those kids come together and rise together to a middle school unless they engage in school choice. You know, like my best friend in the world was who I met in kindergarten, and I talk to him almost every day, and we went through school the whole way together, kindergarten through 12. That can be challenging in our current feeder pattern. It works for the most part, like I said, from elementary school to middle school, although you can see some schools we do break up. Brandywine Springs goes into two different places, and Warner goes into two different places. Now, look at the middle school to high school Shoots and Ladders game. It is a tremendous set of arrows that just go willy-nilly every direction. It's kind of hard to follow. And, you know, if your journey as maybe a Warner student in four or five, you could end up in Skyline and HB, and then from there you might end up at AI High, McKean, Dickinson—completely broken apart. No natural feeder, no sense of community the whole way through school. Not even possible. 

That is one of the charges of the committee, I believe, is to simplify this to create some of those natural communities that should happen when you go to elementary school together, and you go to middle school together, and you go to high school together. Let's go to the next slide. So, new high school attendance zones. This is the AI duPont to Dickinson dual zone plan. The numbers are a little bit small, I apologize, and I'm having trouble reading them from this spot. Mark, can you help me out just a little bit? Blue is AI obviously, yellow is McKean, and then Dickinson is the light blue.

⏯️1:53:57 Mark Pruitt: So the old feeder pattern, the new feeder patterns are above the line.

⏯️1:54:03 Shawn Snyder: Yes. Thank you. And I'll give Mark some credit, he made this slide, so he definitely can speak to it from an artistic standpoint. But that's bifurcating. Instead of having three attendance zones, now we have two attendance zones. And that's geographically what that would look like. Can we take it to the next slide? All right. 

So, current draft enrollment projections: AI High now 543 students total today, 760 at John Dickinson (that includes the high school, not the middle school, I believe), and then McKean at 917. Projections. If everything goes according to plan and people do not de-choice and try to go back to their feeder pattern school between AI High and John Dickinson School, we would expect the projection of those two schools to be around that size. Now obviously, I would not put a large sum of money on it being exactly 1,124 that year. That is not how these things work out. But it should be relative. You should be within a range of error with a couple percentage points in one direction or another based upon all the data sets that we have. The worst-case scenarios is not what I want to say, it’s not a great way to call it, but if everybody made a choice to stay where they were and to not go back to their feeder pattern and a couple of other choice decisions got made, you could end up maximally with 1,284 and 1,045 at AI High and John Dickinson School. I don't necessarily think that's a number that we would achieve, but it is mathematically possible to end up with that many students at both spaces. Mark, can you talk a little bit about the green dots on there as well for me?

⏯️1:55:47 Mark Pruitt: Yeah. Well, I mean, the dots put on there, this is a University of Delaware slide that we spoke to briefly. The green dots are of current McKean students, the dark blue are current AI students, and the light blue or what appears to be white are current Dickinson students. 

⏯️1:56:06 Shawn Snyder: So, what we did was we took all of the data associated with currently enrolled students, and then ourselves mapped them using a couple of different mapping tools to find their physical addresses on this map so that we could see the density of areas that we were drawing students from. And then when we did that, we also wanted, with the University of Delaware, to look at ways that we can make sure that these feeder patterns ended up a result of both a demographically diverse or even looking actually at special needs demographics to see if by accident more special needs students will naturally flow to one school or another, and how we can maybe balance that out through adjusting these feeder patterns. We wouldn't want to end up creating a school accidentally that had underrepresented groups in it. That may happen through school choice, but we don't want to make it that way.

Right, let's go and click to the next slide. And that's questions and perspectives. I know those are very data-dense slides; there's a lot of data behind them. And it is an inexact science, so I'm not sitting up here talking like this is perfect and I absolutely know two years from now where everybody is going to go to school. There is a level of guessing and modeling when it comes to school choice and when it comes to feeder counts.

⏯️1:57:20 Mark Pruitt: It's worth noting that in addition to the plan the board has already approved, this also needs board approval. 

⏯️1:57:29 Shawn Snyder: Yes, because there will be a feeder pattern change. 

⏯️1:57:31 Mark Pruitt: A lot of the core principles were given to us as a charge with the board. The committee then built it into that: straight-line feeder patterns. You go to Stanton, you attend here. If you go to AI Middle, you attend here, so on and so forth. There'll be far more slides in that presentation at the board meeting next month. But, you know, a lot of that information that you work with the University of Delaware—their experts, why they do what they do—is they realize that 36.7% of students that live in the Red Clay feeder pattern attend their attendance zone high school. And they can break out for us where they're attending otherwise. 

The data that they do not have current is private school students that live in those attendance zones. So, we've had to dig into previous data to find that information. All right, so you take 37%, project that out. I'm really getting what I would say wonky here, but we're going to go into a lot more depth at next month's meeting as to how you make projections like that. 

⏯️1:58:47 Shawn Snyder: And there are private school reports, where the reports have data lags—they are often two or three years old—to combine with data sets that are current. Obviously, if you're working with data that is not... you don't like to hear that it's not great, but it is the data set that we have at the moment. We have reached out to DOE to see if we can get a better data set and more complete to try and get that. I'm not necessarily optimistic that we'll get that data set, but we have inquired.

⏯️1:59:15 Beth Jefferson: I don't mean to interrupt. I thought one of our committee members, Cristina Kalesse, is on Zoom and she asked, "Can you go back to the vision map? Is the line drawn to create the screen pattern?" So A.I.'s little kids would all go... Ms. Kalesse, would you mind unmuting yourself?

⏯️1:59:34 Shawn Snyder: Well, all I have is with the line.

⏯️1:59:35 Cristina Kalesse: Yeah, I'm here. Sorry. 

⏯️1:59:39 Shawn Snyder: That is just what we're doing now, not what we're going to do.

⏯️1:59:42 Mark Pruitt: Go ahead, Cristina.

⏯️1:59:43 Cristina Kalesse: Yeah. So, my question was—I think I missed this, Mark, because it's kind of spotty on the Zoom and I apologize—the plan is that like AI Middle kids or Stanton kids or Skyline kids or HB kids, they would have a straight feeder? So, all of the AI Middle kids would, if this is the plan, go to like AI High School? There wouldn't be the division of them between three high schools? Correct?

⏯️2:00:07 Mark Pruitt: That is correct. AI Middle, which I believe will be the map we put up, AI Middle School will go to AI High School. HB will go to AI High School. Stanton will go to McKean. The only school... Stanton will go to Dickinson. And the only divided school would be Skyline, which is split in half. It is a non-contiguous feeder pattern as it is, to create approximately the same number of students in each school and a geographic pattern to the district.

⏯️2:00:53 Cristina Kalesse: Okay. Thank you.

⏯️2:00:59 Shawn Snyder: Other questions?

⏯️2:01:00 Morgan Dukes: I know that one of the things I've heard from public comment and community members in general is related to the entire city being slated to go to AI I know that the term segregation has been thrown around. So my question is, has any consideration been given to dividing the city or looking into potentially having Skyline be a straight line if some things are shifted around?

⏯️2:01:25 Mark Pruitt: We're certainly considering that, and we'll certainly bring the impact on demographic changes to the board when we give the presentation. 

⏯️2:01:33 Shawn Snyder: The first question that John Laznik asked actually, was, "Do you want to consider demographic concerns?" 

⏯️2:01:37 Mark Pruitt: We said yes.

⏯️2:01:38 Shawn Snyder: And we're like, "absolutely." So I do envision that we're going to bring data sets that will allow the board to kind of dig into that a little bit and make some decisions. But it's tough, like where do you draw a line in a neighborhood, you know? And no matter how you do that activity, it's unlikely that everybody's going to like the way that happens. But there is school choice on top of that as well. 

⏯️2:02:03 Devon Hynson: Mark, did you guys check to see if there's any case law? Delaware Schools Act?

⏯️2:02:06 Mark Pruitt: Well, we did. Yeah, we are. The Neighborhood Schools Act was mentioned in the slides earlier, right?

⏯️2:02:09 Devon Hynson: Some of that is just on its face. It can’t pass the legal muscle. It's going to constitute resegregation. It's already been litigated multiple times in Delaware when they tried to do that. And I believe one of the cases was Red Clay. But you guys do what [inaudible]

⏯️2:02:36 Mark Pruitt: Yes, Miss Landis? 

⏯️2:02:36 Najma Landis: When you say current draft enrollment projections, is that including the Class of 2030 or is it just students who are currently in...

⏯️2:02:50 Mark Pruitt: Those projections are the following grades currently: 7, 8, 9, 10. Okay. Now they are 7, 8, 9, 10 without allowing grandfathered students that are currently in a school to finish out in that school. Okay. So, if you're currently at Dickinson and your attendance zone changes to AI, or you are an AI student and you filled out a choice application to go to Dickinson, we expect that in all cases that you would remain if you want to finish out. That could also impact why it would approach the higher-end number at one school or the other.

⏯️2:03:42 Najma Landis: Thank you for clarifying.

⏯️2:03:44 Mark Pruitt: Yep. Brian?

⏯️2:03:44 Brian Mattix: I think I know the answer, but the draft enrollment projections on the high side is enrollment projections, not building capacity?

⏯️2:03:53 Shawn Snyder: That’s correct. 

⏯️2:03:53 Mark Pruitt: They are enrollment projections. Okay. And they are enrollment projections for two reasons: short-term grandfathering students that are at one school—we're not going to make them move to another school, okay—second, does the decision to move... whenever you change attendance zones, you have to build in and expect that potentially families will make different decisions based on those new attendance zones, or based on the Innovation Center, or based on whatever the case may be. And so that high number is built in to adjust for that. Any other questions? Next slide. 

⏯️2:04:40 Shawn Snyder: Oh, and I will say that any school district that redoes a feeder patterns, and I worked in every school district prior to this and we did this work there. They all use University of Delaware's Center for Applied Demography. It's actually like the one most of the country likes to use. We're lucky to have it in our backyard. John Laznik is the gold standard for this type of work in the United States. So we're fortunate to have him. And so we didn't go to UD because we could see them from our front porch; we went to them because they are one of the best at this activity. Just looking at the financial implications, not my slide.

⏯️2:05:10 Mark Pruitt: I'm going to do that.

⏯️2:05:11 Shawn Snyder: Okay.

⏯️2:05:12 Mark Pruitt: This slide, there's been several questions about finance. This is the last slide, by the way. Several budgetary implications. 

Dr. Ammann is presenting next month. Okay. So please give me grace in terms of language and vocabulary with finance, but he did feel like it was important—he could not make it tonight—I feel like it was important to get out as, you know, he's still getting some quotes and things for renovations. 

But here is a simple breakdown of what he believes his final analysis will be in May. 

One, there really are two types of costs into six different domains, okay? A startup cost, which is a one-time startup fee for these changes. All right, they are one-time costs, okay, that will not happen in future years. The second one are annual costs, right? Because of these changes, there will be an annual increase in costs or decrease in costs, okay? 

⏯️2:06:18 Mark Pruitt: So you look at staffing: there is no startup impact, there's no frontload impact to that. There is a slight decrease in cost to the district, okay, because of overlapping positions. Currently, we fund Skyline and AI with Excellence Units to keep those schools sustainable, okay, upwards of 12 excellence units.

⏯️2:06:49 Shawn Snyder: You expand upon that a little further because not everybody's in the lingo?

⏯️2:06:52 Mark Pruitt: So we give them more units than they earn—more teachers than they earn.

⏯️2:06:56 Shawn Snyder: And how do we earn units?

⏯️2:06:58 Mark Pruitt: We earn units by the number of students in a building.

⏯️2:07:00 Shawn Snyder: Thanks.

⏯️2:07:01 Mark Pruitt: Okay. Based on their need. And so, you know, we provide additional teachers at a few of our schools because they do not earn enough teachers to run a sustainable, comprehensive high school or middle school, okay? So we provide them additional units. When our numbers get to sustainable numbers,so they may not earn five English teachers, and it's not broken out that way, but they need to have five English teachers so they can have all the classes they need or would do it, right? If you're a middle school, you need to have a female P.E. teacher and a male P.E. teacher—different ways of looking at why that is, okay? So, there is potentially some area to do that. Additionally...

⏯️2:07:50 Committee Member: That sounds to me like you're going to cut teachers...

⏯️2:07:52 Mark Pruitt: We are not going to cut teachers because the natural attrition of retirement and resignation always exceeds any of that, and so we could absorb that through natural attrition. Okay, so that's staff. 

The second potential issue of cost deals with extra pay or what teachers call EPER positions. You have a teacher in the building, you got coaches, assistant coaches, department chairs, club advisors, so on and so forth. We are going, simply put, we are going from when right now we've got six football coaches coaching 20 kids at AI, Dickinson, and McKean, they've got a great coach-to-player ratio to do that because it's sort of a safety issue by department. I'm just trying to give small numbers that make it make sense. You know, when you move to two schools, two head coaches are coaching larger numbers of kids. There's potentially some small savings there. There are no startup costs with that. 

⏯️2:08:59 Mark Pruitt: Facilities, there is the most significant initial increase. You've heard us talk about major capital funding or minor capital funding. Meadowood and the adjustments needed to make sure that accommodating standards are up to Red Clay standard is going to have a cost. Dr. Celestin spoke to that, and a couple of... and some reoutfitting of a couple of classrooms at McKean High School. So, we're picking up a Com Arts program at AI, bringing it over to McKean. You need to re-outfit the program to the classroom to do that. Picking up a Robotics program at Dickinson, setting it down... the equipment is all there, but setting it down and re-outfitting it so that it's a Robotics lab there. That issue, that startup issue, is the most significant cost—the major capital or minor capital expenditure. 

⏯️2:09:57 Mark Pruitt: Transportation, is no startup impact with that. Anything that we would do with transportation would be ongoing, okay? And it's to be determined as to whether... one of the reasons why we're waiting on a final analysis is our engagement with the State of Delaware, okay? Because we get reimbursed based on our transportation, and our transportation office and Dr. Ammann are engaging with them before he can determine whether that's an annual cost or an annual savings. 

⏯️2:10:34 Mark Pruitt: School budgets, no startup impact, and what I would say a very slight savings. Okay, I'll give you an example: AI has half the number of students that Conrad has, but they do not have half the budget that Conrad has. We have a base budget for schools, and then there are much slighter increases based on the number of students in that school. So when you remove... so for example, if you make Conrad's... if you move students, put more students at Dickinson or AI, you're still only running one bus to a cheerleading event or one bus to a band event. You're not running additional buses for that, okay? So potentially a very slight savings there—negligible, but possibly slight savings. 

⏯️2:11:27 Mark Pruitt: And teaching and learning, no annual impact, but some startup costs in the way of professional learning, building new school cultures, IB training for teachers, and potentially new curriculum for any new CTE program we put into the Innovation Center. That is not a detailed financial report, but we did feel by what we heard last week, what we knew was coming with the questions we got from Meadowood, that it was worth a preview of what Dr. Ammann and his team believe is going to be the case. There'll be far more detail in May when we have our next meeting. Questions? Yes.

⏯️2:12:18 Morgan Dukes: I know that we've said before the district has taken that stance that nobody's going to lose their jobs, but the extra pay portion are things that some teachers depend on. So those extra pay positions for coaching, for clubs, or after-school activities are things that people have included in their annual budget for their family, and that would be pay that they would be losing. If those positions are positions that they aren't able to get at that school that they're moved to, or maybe somebody at the existing school has it now, but then they lose it over someone else... so it's not a lost job, but it is a loss of pay.

⏯️2:12:58 Mark Pruitt: You are absolutely correct. It, however, is in RCEA's bargaining units in their contract; they have first right to those positions. We spend a lot of our time trying to get teachers to do things, and then going to people outside of education to fill in those gaps, other folks in the district to fill in those gaps. We would love to have our teachers fill all of those positions. 

In fact, when you're talking about athletics, Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association requires any permanent coach has to be a certified teacher. And in fact, if you do not have a certified teacher coaching that sport, you by definition have an emergency teacher. So that really has to be posted. That's not something we deal with a lot because our numbers are so small. We spend a lot of our time going, "Hey, can you do it one more year, right? Can you do one more year?" But that doesn't fall on deaf ears with me. I can imagine that there will be a couple of situations. But we are also willing to see where we are with data regarding that, and then does there need to be a transition period with department chairs, right? Like so you got two social studies teachers, does there need to be some period of time where we transition that? So I think that also plays to a staff culture issue. So, you know, I think we're open to anything in those discussions that makes something that RCEA is agreeable to. But you make a good point.

⏯️2:14:40 Brian Mattix: Just to add a counterpoint to that, Morgan, like because there's going to be more students, there'll be freshman coaches and JV coaches that they don't have those positions currently.

⏯️2:14:51 Morgan Dukes: I'm hopeful, but I know that there are some athletics right now that don't have a team at one school or the other. So to take the students from McKean and divide them up, they might have a sport at that point, or not. And, you know, so I'm hopeful that that will happen, but I'm not sure how likely it is in the long run. You just have to see where the students land, and go from there. So it's kind of a question mark.

⏯️2:15:21 Committee Member: It's a good question. 

⏯️2:15:22 Mark Pruitt: Any other questions, comments, feedback? 

⏯️2:15:28 David Hogan: That was going to be my question about hearing the finance piece. That'll be our meeting in May. Is there something at the board meeting in April?

⏯️2:15:38 Mark Pruitt: About finances? 

⏯️2:15:38 David Hogan: About finances.

⏯️2:15:40 Committee Member: Possibly, possibly not. 

⏯️2:15:45 Mark Pruitt: I've got so many going on now related to this. Finan—Are we giving a—We are on to give an update at the April board meeting. So we're going... usually we're going to go every other month, but we're on for this month. Because of it, and I could certainly build in something from Dr. Ammann. I cannot promise that Dr. Ammann's going to have what he plans to have in May. But he can certainly more eloquently and certainly more educated...

⏯️2:16:16 David Hogan: Because I know that that was part of some of the issue around public comment was more details of any kind about the finances.

⏯️2:16:27 Mark Pruitt: Keep in mind, keep in mind. We had a one-page charge that got approved by the board, and at that point we have to start walking into buildings. What do we need? Just have to identify that. We have to go out drawings for that. You have to get a cost associated with that. You've got to work... you know, there's a lot of different factors before you can come up with something as detailed as what we expect to have in May.

⏯️2:16:51 Committee Member: True.

⏯️2:16:55 Mark Pruitt: Okay. Anything else? It's a long meeting, I apologize. It was an extra 45 minutes. I do think we frontloaded four issues that were particularly important to the community and this committee. I tried to do that. I think you all agreed last meeting, which is why I think we ran a little long. I appreciate everyone's time. If at any point somebody's got childcare or something like that, you got to get up and walk out during the meeting, I totally understand on a Wednesday night at 7:30, something like that at future meetings. So having said that, motion to adjourn?

⏯️2:17:26 Susan Sander: So moved.

⏯️2:17:27 Mark Pruitt: So moved Ms. Sander? Second? Anthony Gray-Boulden is ready to go, he seconded.  

🌐Attendance Zone Restructuring & Review Committee Webpage

📁Attendance Zone Restructuring & Review Committee Rolling Slides page 28

📹 Attendance Zone & Restructuring Review Committee Mar 25, 2026 Recording

📋 Attendance Zone & Restructuring Review Committee Mar 25, 2026 Meeting Minutes

For convenience, the full text of the document is typed below. 

March 25, 2026 6:00 PM
RCCSD Board Rm, 1502 Spruce Ave, Wilmington, DE 19805

Attendance/Welcome/Call to Order
Anthony Boulden, Morgan Dukes, Heather Godwin, David Hogan, Devon Hynson, Christine Kalesse, Najma Landis, Georgia Matoulas, Brian Mattix, Mark Pruitt, Susan Sander.
Guests: Sarah Celestin, Alva Mobley, Shawn Snyder 

Meeting Items
Meeting called to order at 6pm.
Motion made by Susan Sander, seconded by Brian Mattix. Motion passed. 

● Approval of minutes from Feb 5th - Motion to approve by Susan Sander, seconded by Anthony Boulden. Motion passed. 

● Public Comment - Vic Leonard Sr, Jenny Howard, Gianna Howard, Andrea Arena, Karen James 

● Meeting Norms - Mark Pruitt 

● The Committee’s Charge - Mark Pruitt 

● The District Team & Topics - Mark Pruitt 

● Meeting Calendar & Topics - Mark Pruitt
○ It was noted that the speakers for Nutrition and Transportation switched months. Nutrition will present in May, Transportation in August 

● Action Planning Overview - Mark Pruitt
○ It was noted that these slides(#35-#38) are ”snapshots” of the documents and are updated as work groups meet 

● Focus Area Updates
○ Communications - Alva Mobley
○ Student Services - Dr. Sarah Celestin
○ Meadowood - Dr. Sarah Celestin 

● At 7:32 Mark Pruitt asked for committee consensus to continue or adjourn the meeting Red Clay Consolidated School District 1 after allowing additional public comment. The committee continued with the understanding that anyone could leave if needed. 

● Public Comment(this was moved up due to time in the event anyone needed to leave due to time constraints) - (all via Zoom) Brenda Steffon, Jared Obstfeld, Hadrian Cissell, Jen McGrath, Amy Reynoso 

● At 7:47 Mark Pruitt asked if the committee wanted to table the rest of the agenda or keep going. Consensus was to continue with the understanding that anyone who needed to leave due to time constraints. 

○ Attendance Zones & School Choice - Shawn Snyder 

● Adjourn - 8:15pm Susan Sander made a motion to adjourn the meeting, seconded by Anthony Boulden. Motion passed. 

Next Meeting May 28, 2026- 6:00 PM / RCCSD Board Rm, 1502 Spruce Ave, Wilmington, DE 19805