For nearly six months last fall and winter, representatives of the Christina School District, the state Department of Education and Gov. John Carney’s office engaged in frequently tense negotiations before finally signing off on a Memorandum of Understanding that set up a framework for reorganizing and improving Christina’s schools in the city of Wilmington.
Since the agreement took effect in early March, most of the early milestones in the memorandum’s timeline have been met.
Those include securing $1.5 million in additional state funding for additional programming, $17.5 million to cover 80 percent of the cost of renovations at two schools that will be converted to serve students in first through eighth grade, starting with the 2019-2020 school year, and another $2 million to convert a third school to a “dual generation center” that would provide services for preschoolers through kindergartners on one floor and for adults on the other.
None of that has been easy – but the really hard work is only beginning.
“We need dramatic action before we can conclude whether this is a win for students or merely an adult way to plan and strategize,” says Atnre Alleyne, founder of TeenSHARP, a program that helps low-income students prepare for college, and Delaware CAN, an education reform advocacy network.
Alleyne’s point is quite clear: a lot of planning and strategizing will take place during the upcoming school year, and it will take at least a year, or more likely several years, to determine whether the plans put together in the next 12 months will have a positive impact.
Plenty has to be done: renovating school buildings, reassigning teachers, reassigning students and developing new feeder patterns, determining how to organize longer school days and a longer school year, developing wraparound programs to meet the special needs of low-income students who attend those schools. With help from the governor’s Family Services Cabinet Council, school-based health centers would be opened to prove a range of social-emotional, behavioral and mental health services for students. Making a checklist of these issues – which is essentially what the MOU did – is far simpler than resolving them.
Today, Aug. 31, is a deadline date for preparing a plan that outlines the steps needed to prepare transforming Bayard Middle School and Bancroft Elementary into grade 1-8 operations for next year, but that report is expected to be short on detail and long on planning recommendations.
The next deadline – Sept. 15 – could be the most difficult to meet. Already postponed once, it’s the make-or-break date for the Christina school board and administration to finish negotiating a separate MOU with the Christina Education Association, the district’s teachers union. Asked whether an agreement could be reached by then, union President Darren Tyson stated, simply and emphatically, “I’m praying.”
Neither Tyson nor Rick Gregg, the Christina superintendent, would get into the details of the talks, as the negotiating teams typically keep those matters confidential.
But Tyson did say this: “Any time you have negotiations, two things are on the top of the list: time and money.”
And time and money are crucial to these talks because the memorandum calls for the schools in Wilmington to “operate on a longer school day and longer school year as of the start of the 2019 school year.”
How much longer school days will be and how many days will be added to the school year have not been determined.
But longer days – and more of them – mean more work for teachers, and with that comes the expectation of additional compensation.
“The MOU has to be negotiated. Are teachers willing to forego [some of] the summer? The reality is that teachers have earned the right to have the summer off,” says Dorrell Green, director of the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the state Department of Education and the department’s leading voice in the MOU process.
And, Tyson notes, teachers with families will have concerns about caring for their own children if they have to work longer hours or in the months they are accustomed to being off.
Further, in the last 50 years or so, there have been no significant changes in the length of the school day and the school year in Delaware public schools, so this is a fresh topic for negotiations. Moving into this uncharted territory, it is not clear how much more time the district would like teachers to put in, and whether the additional state funding would be sufficient to cover additional payroll costs. On top of that, since the union-district memorandum will modify the existing union contract as it relates to schools in Wilmington, it seems inevitable that it will result in different sets of working conditions for Christina teachers – one for those who work in city schools and another for those who work in the suburbs.
Another area of concern – which may or may not be resolved through the negotiations – is high staff turnover and the resulting placement of the least experienced teachers in city schools.
There was hope of meeting the June 1 deadline established in the MOU when negotiations began in the spring “but we ran out of time,” Gregg says. Talks resumed in early August and should pick up now that the school year is beginning. He notes that, with teachers off for the summer, the union would not have been able to get its membership together for a ratification vote until sometime in September anyway.
Under the terms of the MOU, if the district and union don’t reach an agreement by Sept. 15, any party to the agreement – including the governor’s office and the Department of Education – can pull the plug and scuttle the entire plan. But the importance of school reform is such that participants might opt to keep talking rather than kill the plan.
“That’s a bridge we may have to come to,” Green says. “It’s a dynamic situation, something we have to maintain a sense of urgency around.”
And, with the results of the state’s 2018 Smarter Balanced Assessment showing city schools continue to lag behind state averages, Green asks, “can we afford to continue to move deadlines?”
Completing the agreement between the union and the district is essential for the planning process to continue because so many of the remaining steps include personnel considerations.
For example, the reconfiguration will result in the closing of two K-5 elementary schools, Elbert-Palmer and Pulaski, and transformation of a third, Stubbs, into a kindergarten center, necessitating not only student reassignments but teacher reassignments as well.
Also, the union will have a role, working with the other parties to the plan, in determining what will constitute a “full workday” at the reconfigured schools. And, after the first year, the MOU states, “each school’s teacher-leader team and school administration may modify the schedule.”
Still to be determined are what components will be included in the extended day and extended year programs. The MOU states that “the State will create a philanthropic Fund for Wilmington Schools,” making clear the expectation that additional programs will be funded, at least in part, by foundation and corporate grants. In addition, Christina officials and Green’s office are already talking to some nonprofit organizations about the possibility of bringing their programs into Christina’s city schools.
In early August, Green noted, representatives of 16 different community organizations attended a meeting with Bayard’s principal, with each group interested in supporting the school’s transformation.
The challenge is to figure out who does what best. “The resources are there,” he says. “It’s largely a matter of coordination, to align the services.”
One of the programs under consideration for the extended school year initiative is Tyler’s Camp, a middle school initiative that is an offshoot of the Summer Learning Collaborative, a 5-year-old nonprofit that has shown success in helping low-income children overcome summer learning loss. Tyler’s Camp, which features project-based learning experiences in science, engineering and the arts, offered programming at five sites this summer, including two in the Colonial School District and one in Red Clay. Gregg and Green have already discussed the possibility of bringing Tyler’s Camp to Christina with Catherine Lindroth, head of the Summer Learning Collaborative.
Tyson, the Christina Education Association president, says the union would not have an issue with outside vendors providing extended day or extended year services, provided that they give Christina personnel the opportunity to work in these programs. The collaborative has been hiring teachers for its camps and community center programs.
While much remains to be done this year, Green is satisfied with what has been accomplished thus far, and hopeful that progress can continue after the Christina district and its teachers reach their agreement.
“We’re changing the nature of the conversation, and we’re changing some relationships that historically haven’t been so good,” he says. “But ultimately, what matters is what we’re doing for the children.”
