After a long wait, today Wegmans supermarket opened its doors next to the Odyssey Charter School campus. Some in the OCS community may be wondering how the large store and other businesses in Barley Mill Plaza will affect their daily lives on the OCS campus.

Elias Pappas, Head of Schools at Odyssey, thinks the new Wegmans and the other businesses will bring good things to OCS.

“I’m very excited that Wegman’s is coming in, and I’m very excited the restaurants are coming here, because they provide us an opportunity to make partnerships with our community,” said Pappas.

According to Pappas, Wegman’s has offered scholarships to two graduating seniors each year. He also anticipates businesses in Barley Mill Plaza possibly providing internships to OCS students.

This will be the first Wegmans store located in Delaware, and Pappas believes that will benefit OCS as well.

“With the only Wegmans in Delaware being the one here in the Barley Mill Plaza,” said Pappas, “it actually adds to the value of our own school and property. It elevates the value. And that’s a very important piece as well, because it benefits our school.”

The Wegmans’ loading dock is on the entrance road to the Odyssey campus, but Pappas said he is not too concerned about that.

“We don’t anticipate there being a problem with the loading dock,” said Pappas. “We’re looking at a lot of factors in the traffic patterns and all that kind of stuff and the thing with the loading bay is that technically large supermarket chains like Wegmans will do their loading late at night or early in the morning, beyond the timeframe of school operating hours.”

The school leader added that there is an additional important effect that could occur for Odyssey due to the new businesses nearby: an increase in student enrollment.

“It would probably have a positive impact on the enrollment of the school as well,” said Pappas, “because the more people that come into those plazas, the more people that notice what Odyssey is, right? And then the more people that notice what Odyssey is, the more interest they’ll have in being at a school like this.”