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A new high school for Wilmington now part of state education debate

Delaware Public Media

Rep. Earl Jaques (D-Glasgow), the new head of the House Education Committee, continues to make waves, calling for a new, state-of-the-art public high school in Wilmington.

Jaques asked lawmakers on the Joint Bond Bill Committee to set aside an unknown amount of money for the proposal this past week.

“If you’re going to have neighborhood schools, you need to have complete neighborhood schools so that you don’t just have it partially like we have today," said Jaques. "If we’re going to do all this we’re going to try and make things better, then we need to make them better completely, not just partially better.”

Bond Bill co-chair Sen. Dave Sokola (D-Newark) noted that new school construction in the current districts serving Wilmington – Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, Red Clay and New Castle County Vo-Tech – all reside outside the city lines.

Sokola calls it, “a matter of fairness” to find a way to fund the project.

One problem is that no one at the state level has begun the formal analysis needed to plan building a school in the state’s largest city according to Education Secretary Mark Murphy.

Sen. Colin Bonini (R-Dover South) says he “thinks there’s a legitimate argument” for building the school, but that the proposal needs to be formally assessed before setting aside money.

Consensus for the proposal was there among committee members, including Sen. Brian Bushweller (D-Dover).

“I find it disturbing that the state’s largest city with over 70,000 residents actually doesn’t have a traditional public high school within its boundaries,” said Bushweller.

Despite that support, Bushweller says he has some reservations about immediately funding even a portion of the project.

“Even for somebody who supports the idea like I do, I think that may be premature to start setting aside money now,” said Bushweller.

Charter School of Wilmington and Howard High School of Technology are currently the only public high schools within city limits.

Wilmington High school was converted to Cab Calloway School of the Arts and Charter School of Wilmington in 1998, two years after the General Assembly passed legislation legalizing charter schools.

That followed decades of controversial desegregation efforts – including busing inner-city students to suburban schools – following the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Support for the issue crosses party lines, with Republican Rep. Mike Ramone (R-Middle Run Valley) saying he wants to see the idea expanded.

“I would like to see us put a K-12 education facility, state-of-the-art in the City of Wilmington right next to some sort of senior center or community center that we could then have before care and after care and the community working together,” said Ramone.

Ramone says it’ll help create more unity in a city marred by violence over the past few years.

“The people in the City of Wilmington need more support and help unifying and developing family structures and it’s not happening at home," Ramone said. "So if we bring the whole community center environment together with the educational environment, I think we can then give more support on both ends.”

Building that new high school is part of Jaques’s push to implement several of the Wilmington Education Advisory Group’s recommendations, including looking at redrawing school district lines to remove Christina and Colonial from the city.

The group also wants to put a moratorium on building new charter schools within the city, set aside more state funding for high-poverty schools and create a new education oversight body strictly for Wilmington.

Despite his optimism, Jaques says he knows a new school won’t be built immediately.

“We’ll continue to have to bus kids to high schools for a while because it’ll take a while to build a high school, but we need to get started putting money aside for this,” said Jaques.

Both budget committees wrapped up most of their early hearings this week, but much of the work of crafting the budget will be done later in the spring.

State lawmakers will have a better idea of how much money they have to work then as they resume final markup sessions in May.