Monday night the Christina Board of Education met to discuss the state’s Priority Schools Initiative. The deadline to submit plans to the Department of Education is January 9, so these last meetings are a time to consider many important factors, like cost and staffing.
During public comment The Christina Education Association said the proposed MOU was something they could live with.
But other commenters disagreed saying that the MOU represented state takeover.
Donato Carmine Rufo is the president of a local teacher’s union, the New Castle County Vocational Technical Education Association. During public comment, he compared the state department of education to “Eastern Europe in 1988.”
He called the DOE “a litigious, overbearing monster.”
Although many are still skeptical of the Priority Schools initiative schools in the district have been meeting since the beginning of the academic year to discuss how to meet the state’s standards.
The district Priority Schools administrator Jackie Lee outlined all the ways Christina schools have come together to draft plans that adhere to the DOE’s guidelines.
Stubbs and Bancroft - the two priority elementary schools - created plans that focused on bolstering reading and math, streamlining lesson planning and extending the school year by ten days.
Bayard Middle School’s plan includes adding a wellness center and extending the school day by 30 minutes.
Board Member Harrie Ellen Minnehan questioned where the money would come from to pay for the new programs in the plan. She said that after crunching the numbers the state’s promise of $6 million would not cover the cost.
She said the plan would be, “leaving Christina, somehow or other, finding some deep pockets where there’s at least $10,332,152 to pay for this.”
Board Member John Young mentioned that just adding an extra half hour to the school day for one elementary school would cost over $200,000. Board Member Fred Polaski said some of the programs mentioned in the plan are already somewhat in place, so it’s hard to calculate the plan’s total cost.
District Superintendent Freeman Williams said Christina would need to find a way to balance the fiscal needs of the three priority schools and Christina’s other schools.
He also reiterated that the three school principals already in place are - in his opinion - the right people for the job. The state has said only one of those three principals is eligible to stay on.
Update: The state Department Of Education has extended the Christina School District’s deadline to submit final plans, provided the drafts of the plans are "substantially approvable." The new deadline is January 21st.
