Redistricting task force mulls standards for proposed New Castle County school district

Why Should Delaware Care?
In December, a state task force charged with reworking school district boundaries in Wilmington laid out a plan that would impact tens of thousands of families in New Castle County. Now, its subcommittees must work through details of how the district consolidation could happen, and what it would mean for students and educators.  

The Delaware task force that last year recommended the consolidation of four New Castle County school districts is now writing rules for how state officials could carry out the massive plan. 

Among the questions its members are considering are how far kids could be bused in a new northern Delaware district, and how much its teachers could be paid. 

It comes after five years of deliberation and debate among education leaders and advocates in Delaware’s largest city about where Wilmington’s students should go to school. 

Last winter, those conversations led the Redding Consortium — a state task force charged with redistricting Wilmington schools — to recommend that the state consolidate Delaware’s four northernmost school districts. Those include the Brandywine, Christina, Colonial and Red Clay Consolidated school districts. 

The recommendation represented a seismic shift in public education in Delaware that, if implemented, could be an answer to decades of questions around where Wilmington kids should attend school. But the idea of intertwining suburban schools more closely with students from the city also sparked a backlash last year.

In December, one Brandywine school board member said such a move would upset the “values” of their district. In response, some in the city characterized the criticism as being tinged with racism.

Now, the Redding Consortium is working to establish standards that a future New Castle County consolidated school district could use to determine attendance zones, feeder patterns and educator salaries.

While Redding Consortium officials say they will not make those decisions directly, their standards will set guidelines for how school officials proceed.

During a public meeting Monday of the Redding Consortium, officials discussed guidelines, such as fiscal responsibility, and how to ensure that kids enrolled in extracurricular activities have transportation home.  

Redding co-chair Sen. Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman (D-Wilmington) said during the meeting that such standards are important because the task force subcommittees will use them to create recommendations that the consortium will later vote on.  

They are doing so even as the idea of consolidating Delaware’s four northern school districts remain hypothetical. Delaware officials – including the State Board of Education, General Assembly, and Gov. Matt Meyer – have not yet approved the recommendation to consolidate the districts.

The earliest the consolidation plan could be approved by all three is next year. 

Also during the meeting Monday, Wilmington Mayor John Carney brought up the ongoing thorny issue of closing half-vacant schools. 

When discussing the state’s past efforts to desegregate schools by moving Wilmington kids outside of the city, Carney asserted that school officials today could instead close a suburban high school in the Christina School District and bring the kids “closer to home.”  

What led up to this? 

In 1968, Delaware officials consolidated 49 school districts into 26, but the state law that allowed the move excluded the Wilmington School District from being part of it. 

At the time, some believed the law was designed to keep Black children out of mostly white suburban schools, and a group of parents in the city sued shortly thereafter.

A federal court found in 1974 the state’s Educational Advancement Act to be unconstitutional, and ordered New Castle County to desegregate its schools again. By January 1978, a federal judge issued a desegregation plan that required kids in the city to be bused to suburban schools for nine years, while kids from the suburbs would be bused into the city for three years.

Some students were forcibly bused more than an hour to school from their homes.

By 1981, Delaware created the four districts within northern New Castle County – Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial, and Christina. The goal of the redistricting then was to assign a section of Wilmington to each mostly suburban district.

In 2000, Delaware lawmakers attempted to reduce lengthy student trips on buses by requiring districts to assign students to public schools closest to their homes.  

But today, high schoolers in Wilmington don’t have the option to attend a traditional high school within the city. And for some enrolled in the Christina School District, their high school can be 15 miles away in Glasgow.