A third charter school for Sussex County will open for the fall of 2023: the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence.
Delaware Secretary of Education Mark Holodick announced his approval of the charter application at Monday’s meeting of the State Board of Education, and the board assented to his decision.
For at least its first year, the combination middle and high school will be housed in the Howard Ennis School building on the Georgetown campus of Delaware Technical Community College. The Indian River School District, which currently leases the building from Delaware Tech, is building a new Ennis School to open later this year north of Millsboro.
The school expects to draw students from throughout Sussex County and is currently looking for a site that could serve as its permanent location.
The Stevenson School, which uses the acronym BASSE, is named for the Milton native and civil rights activist Bryan Allen Stevenson, whose Equal Justice Initiative has won the exoneration of death row prisoners and whose book “Just Mercy” became the subject of a film starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx. Besides lending his name to the project, Stevenson serves on the school’s advisory board.
“After five years of planning, we’re really excited,” said Chantalle Ashford, a co-founder and chair of the school’s board of directors.
The school is scheduled to open in the fall of 2023, starting with sixth and seventh grades and adding a grade a year until it serves the 6-12 spectrum in its sixth year. Organizers project an enrollment of 250 students – 125 per grade – in the first year, increasing to 750 when all grade levels are served.
A major task in the next few months, Ashford says, will be building awareness of the school before the annual school choice window opens on Nov. 7.
The Stevenson School will place an emphasis on service learning, getting students out into the community to apply what they are learning in the classroom. The school will have a rigorous academic curriculum, with the International Baccalaureate (IB) program available to students at all grade levels. It also expects to partner with area colleges and universities to offer dual-learning classes, enabling students to earn college and high school credits simultaneously, Ashford says.
The school has much of its administrative team in place and will be hiring about a dozen teachers for its initial year. To start, it will need at least two teachers for science, social studies, math and language arts, plus special education, art and physical education/health, she says.
Once Indian River vacates the Ennis building, Stevenson will have to do some refurbishing and remodeling, Ashford says. Since the building has been used as a school, the work won’t be major. Some changes will be needed in what had been elementary classrooms to accommodate Stevenson’s older students. “We have to make sure the furniture is the right size,” she says.
Also, signage will be changed to reflect Stevenson’s branding.
In addition to Stevenson, there are two other charter schools in Sussex, the Sussex Academy, a middle and high school in Georgetown, and Sussex Montessori, a K-6 program in Seaford. Stevenson will be Delaware’s 24th charter school. There are 15 charters in New Castle County and six in Kent County.
