The Pine Heights School redevelopment hearing placed two sharply different futures for a neighborhood building before the town: a luxury condominium complex promoted by Randall Whitehead Sr. and an alternative high school championed by Douglas Mastriani and Tasha Thompkins. The hearing’s importance lay not only in the competing plans, but in the question beneath them: whether community space would chiefly serve property buyers or create educational opportunities for local young people.

Setting and Competing Plans

The meeting took place in Pine Heights Elementary School’s combination auditorium, a room that also served as gym and cafeteria. Its familiar scale struck Jessica Mastriani as surprisingly small. Folding chairs faced a long table, where a scale model showed the proposed conversion: the school’s windows and landscaping had been redone to make the site resemble an upscale condominium complex. The building itself had no air-conditioning, and the audience sat in the evening heat.

Handouts on the seats described Randall Whitehead Sr.’s plan for a luxury condo complex with a gym and a coffee shop on the first floor. The proposal was aimed at the growing number of DINKs—double-income households without children—commuting from the town to Indianapolis. Whitehead presented the units as a response to rising real-estate costs in a sought-after commuter community. Their prices, he said, would range from the low to the mid six figures, with the exact amount depending on amenities. He also insisted the conversion would not bring lower-income residents into the neighborhood.

The plan would remove the existing baseball field, which local families still used occasionally for informal softball games, and replace it with a landscaped public park and duck pond. Audience questions about parking and the field gave way to concerns about mosquitoes and West Nile virus. Even the park therefore entered the discussion as both an amenity in a sales pitch and a change to an existing, if intermittent, community use.

The Alternative-School Proposal

Douglas and Tasha proposed turning Pine Heights into an alternative high school, not another large, impersonal institution like Ernie Pyle High School. Tasha, an education major, described a model in which students could work at their own pace. Douglas set out its curricular distinction: rather than follow the standardized state curriculum, the school would emphasize music, drawing, sculpture, drama, and dance, with no sports. Tasha underscored that last point. Her emphasis resonated with Jessica’s recollection that Tasha’s football-playing brother had attracted attention while Tasha herself, shy and studious, had been treated as an afterthought in her family.

The school’s alternative status prompted immediate objections. One resident associated alternative schools with students expelled from mainstream schools and labeled them troublemakers. Others worried about property values or teenagers gathering unsupervised in the neighborhood. Douglas answered that alternative did not mean unsupervised: teachers would need state certification, and students would not be permitted to loiter on school grounds after hours. Tasha added that admission would be selective and applicants would need references. Their proposal thus answered fears about supervision and admissions while advancing a different account of which students and forms of learning deserved a place in the community.

Douglas Takes the Floor

After listening to the competing arguments, Douglas stood and asked the city councilperson how far the council’s review of the school proposal had progressed. The room’s response was mixed. Some residents voiced approval; another objected to teenagers roaming the neighborhood. In the ensuing exchange, Douglas moved the argument beyond the building itself. He contended that young people were being priced out of their own town by residents who worked in Indianapolis, while overcrowded public schools left talented teachers without local openings. An alternative school, he argued, could bring employment back into the community and give teenagers who felt lost in the large public high school a chance to succeed.

For Jessica, the sight of Douglas leading the discussion carried particular weight. She remembered him as a boy interested in comic books and keeping to himself, and as a student who had come home crying after larger children stole his lunch money and called him a spaz. Now residents were listening to him advocate change in a town where he no longer lived. Jessica recognized in his public speaking a talent she had not known he possessed. When several people applauded, she was moved to tears; afterward she told him his speech had been good. Douglas remained dissatisfied, believing he had swayed only a few listeners while Whitehead had persuaded others with promises about property values and an affluent future for the neighborhood.

Decision and Aftermath

The city councilperson promised that both the alternative-school proposal and Whitehead’s condominium plan would receive a thorough review, with a decision expected by the end of the month. The hearing therefore ended without choosing between the plans. Tasha, seeking to reassure Douglas, said her father knew the mayor and would speak to him; it was an election year, and the neighborhood mattered to him as well.

The conflict continued beyond the meeting. The next day, Jessica used Whitehead’s interest in Pine Heights as leverage in a negotiation with Randall Whitehead Sr. She proposed that he abandon the condominium conversion and make a substantial donation to establish the alternative school, in exchange for Jessica’s effort to keep him out of jail and civil court. The proposal tied the real-estate plan to a possible source of support for the school, though it did not erase the competing interests exposed at the hearing.

Later, Douglas described the desired outcome as a school that parents and students could love and take pride in. Tasha suggested that it might even be a place where Jessica would want to return to teach. That invitation links the hearing’s argument over educational design to the prospect of who might teach there: arts-based, self-paced education is presented not as decoration for a redevelopment plan, but as a way to make room for students, teachers, and local futures that the existing arrangements seemed to exclude.