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UD, Christina School District partner to improve literacy, behavior at Stubbs

Delaware Public Media

Hoping to improve the quality of education in urban schools, University of Delaware is teaming up with Christina School District’s Stubbs Elementary to develop a system to better manage behavioral and educational challenges.

UD’s Ralph Ferretti, the director of the School of Education, said over the next five years of working with Stubbs, he hopes the partnership will find new ways to offer students and teachers the support needed at the high poverty school.

“We want to make it a place where great teachers want to go to work,” Ferretti said.

Some teachers avoid inner-city schools and gravitate toward suburban ones, Ferretti said. He believes placing UD students in classrooms at Stubbs will prepare them for the challenges of teaching in an urban setting.

“Working with suburban children – you know, relatively affluent upper middle class kids who are basically all alike in a fundamental way – is not the same as working with urban kids, maybe kids from a diverse profile…our teaching candidates need to be better prepared to do that,” Ferretti said.

The partnership will also focus on literacy instruction, educational technology and methods to reinforce positive behavior.

UD, district officials and the Stubbs staff will seek to identify what services are needed and how to improve the services already in place. Ferretti said he hopes to expand the partnership to other schools in the district and elsewhere in the state.

Both parties say there was no cost involved in the partnership, but they could seek out grants in the future.