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Rep. Jaques calls for public high school in Wilmington

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 Monday.

“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,” he said.

“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.

“It’s a matter of fairness to those parents and taxpayers that we find a way to do this,” Sokola said.

Nobody at the state level has begun the formal analysis needed to plan building a school according to Education Secretary Mark Murphy.

Jaques used thenew Dover High School as a model, which opened this past fall and cost the state $69.5 million.  The overall price tag was nearly $114 million.

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.

“We want to spend $60, $70 million and we don’t have a certificate of need and nobody has looked at whether that’s the right answer?”

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 bussing inner-city students to suburban schools – following the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

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 .

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 educational oversight body strictly for Wilmington.

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