WITN’s ‘Big Picture’ presents Imagine Delaware Forum on Education
March 25, 2015 – WITN Channel 22
“My experience of Wilmington schools and the governance system goes back. I am a product of Red Clay. I went through the Red Clay school system. I was a product of bussing also: graduate of A.I High School in 1997. So, I certainly experienced Wilmington under four, well five including the Vo-Tech district, but I wasn’t aware of the governance system as a student. I came back into the system in 2008 as a mom, and have a child that I have in a local school, and after she was in school for a few years I became the PTA president, and being that her school is high poverty, urban, traditional school, we certainly have a lot of the challenges that everyone is talking about tonight. In order to as a parent advocate for the best thing for your child, there’s a lot of layers to go through in order to find that right person to talk to who can help route the resources that you need to help your kid. We would try to reach out to our district, and go to board meetings and things like that, and that’s an intimidating thing enough as a parent to do, to have to do that, and what happens when you have four districts fracturing that parent voice, you have the city broken up into all these little pieces, and so many that need to be spoken to in order to get the resources that are needed for the kids. And I think a great example recently is when we had the referendum. Red Clay, we were able to pass our referendum to get some more resources that our kids can access, and Christina’s didn’t pass. So if you think about it in that sense, we have a very uneven routing of resources to kids across the landscape of Wilmington. With all of the thousands of kids that we’ve got, they’re not all necessarily receiving the same resources because there’s all different kinds of bodies making decisions about which resources are going to reach the classroom. It’s quite obvious that there are so many different groups making those decisions. It absolutely makes it difficult.
“As a parent, I think a lot of what’s being said speaks to the inconsistency of the schools within the city, and it’s not just the addition of charters that did it. I graduated in 1997 and came back with a child in 2008, and the system was vastly changed in Wilmington, from when I had left, and it was charters and it was choice and it was the Neighborhood Schools Act, and what we were left with was a system of schools with vast gaps and isolated poverty, and students that were isolated, and really a lot of chaos and hysteria for parents to deal with in trying to figure out how to navigate this new landscape of Wilmington and the county at large. I would hope that a comprehensive plan, statewide potentially, would add some stability because I think as a parent we’re really looking for a stable landscape of schools, so whether a charter is your thing or a traditional school is your thing, you have a lot of positive options out there to make. Looking back at some of those policies that happened during that gap, I hope we can be reflective of some of the things where we might have gone off the rails a little bit in creating a stable landscape of schools for kids, so that as we go forward we can pay attention to things like equity, and things like that.
