Gov. Jack Markell joined state lawmakers and community leaders in Hockessin Tuesday to kick-start the realignment of school district lines in Delaware’s largest city.
Markell signed the two bills at Hockessin Colored School #107, the school attended by Shirley Bulah whose parents filed suit to desegregate Delaware schools. That case, upheld by both the state's Court of Chancery and Supreme Court, was eventually rolled into the Brown v. Board of Education case that forced school districts nationwide to integrate for the first time.
One bill creates the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission. The other requires that group to draw new school boundaries to take the Christina and Colonial School Districts out of Wilmington and transfer their city students and schools to the Red Clay School District.
Many city students have bused to schools several miles away since 1978 as part of a desegregation plan that was no longer enforced after 1996.
“40 years of using lines drawn by a federal judge is enough. We should respect the wishes of city children and parents and community leaders and their elected representatives and seize this moment of opportunity,” Markell said.
Tony Allen will chair the new commission. He says this is just the start of work to properly address the needs of Wilmington students and schools.
“House Bill 148 and Senate Bill 122 are not the silver bullet, but they do suggest that the time has come for the community to look at an illogical system of governance, funding, transitional needs and student performance that simply must change,” Allen said.
Allen led the Wilmington Education Advisory Council, which also advocated for creating a new funding model that would give more money to high-poverty schools.
Markell formed that advisory council shortly after launching his ill-received Priority Schools Plan. Underachieving schools identified under that initiative would've received some state money to boost test scores, but barring improvement, they would've been taken over by the state, turned into a charter school or shut down.
"If each of us had a blank slate to re-imagine the delivery of public education to the least advantaged throughout our state, none of us, none of use would design what we have today," Allen said.
The commission must work with the State Board of Education to draft their boundary proposal and deliver it to state lawmakers no later than March 31 next year.