School boards raise Wilmington Learning Collaborative concerns in joint meeting

Forcefully asserting that “the Wilmington Learning Collaborative is us,” Gov. John Carney urged board members from three school districts Tuesday night to put aside concerns over what some have labeled “adult issues” and vote to move ahead with his proposal for education reform in the city’s traditional public schools.

The meeting, a rare public gathering of multiple school boards, didn’t result in any consensus on resolving those “adult issues” – things like finance, legal liability and responsibility for personnel evaluations – that have threatened to derail a plan that Carney has been promoting for two years. But it may have brought members of the Brandywine, Christina and Red Clay school boards closer to agreement on the importance of reforming Wilmington schools.

“This isn’t going to be perfect. It’s going to be a continuously evaluated process.” Christina board member Frederick Polaski said near the end of the meeting. “I hear everybody saying the same thing but with a different way of saying it.”

Carney and his aides have spent thousands of hours knocking on doors, organizing meetings with stakeholders and community groups, studying initiatives attempted in other states, making multiple presentations to school boards, soliciting feedback and engaging in three months of negotiations over a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to implement a program that seeks to reverse decades of underachievement by students in public schools in Wilmington.

Carney had hoped for the school boards in the Christina, Brandywine and Red Clay districts to approve his plan in the spring, so the proposed collaborative’s governing council could be formed in July. But the draft MOU wasn’t ready in time to meet that schedule. The anticipated board votes were pushed into August and now, with the ongoing concerns, into September.

Two board members – Adriana Bohm of Red Clay and Christina President Keeley Powell – said Wednesday that the latest revision to the MOU, sent to school board members last week, comes closer to resolving some of those concerns but may need another round of tweaks before votes are taken.

Decisions on whether to join the collaborative are now expected on Sept. 13 for Christina, Sept. 19 for Brandywine and Sept. 21 for Red Clay.

If the MOU is approved, the governing council would be established in a month or so and would begin planning for a reform process that would be launched at the start of the 2023-24 school year.

As currently envisioned, the collaborative’s 12-person governing council, comprised of representatives from the three school districts and the Wilmington community, would oversee operations at Wilmington schools serving kindergarten through eighth grade in the Red Clay and Christina districts as well as Brandywine’s Harlan Elementary (K-5). Much of the decision-making on curriculum and essential services would be made by school-based teams, with input from community councils. While the governing council would steer and monitor the school-level reform initiatives, the schools would remain assigned to their current districts, which would be responsible for finances, salary payments, building and technology maintenance, student transportation and food service.

Powell, who took the lead in arranging the joint meeting, said Wednesday that she was “really happy” with the way it turned out. “We’re getting closer” to an agreement, she said.

The Christina board will have a vote on the collaborative on the agenda for its September 13 meeting. On Tuesday night, while some of its members offered what Powell termed “constructive criticism,” she said, “I didn’t hear anyone from Christina say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’”

Like Powell, Red Clay’s Bohm, who is in line to be her district’s representative on the WLC’s governing council, said she was “happily surprised” with how Tuesday’s meeting turned out. There was “more of a feeling of consensus” than she had anticipated, she said. “Even people who may not have agreed with my positions … what they were saying is they want to make changes, they want to see more details.”

As the meeting began, Carney urged school board members to “look for answers as opposed to things that could get in the way.”

On several occasions, Carney, once a quarterback at St. Mark’s High School, reverted to football terminology. “We’re on the 5-yard line,” he said, “and we’ve got to get into the end zone.”

Secretary of Education Mark Holodick, noting that there have been largely unsuccessful efforts to improve Wilmington schools since the mid-1970s, urged board members to separate “adult power issues” from “student outcome issues” because “if we try to strike a perfect balance, we’ll still be here in 2029.”

The goal, he said, should be “a plan that satisfies all of us enough that we’re willing to move forward for the sake of the students.”

Some of the meeting’s most impassioned remarks came from Bohm and Christina board member Donald Patton.

Bohm, referring to Carney’s earlier mention of the low scores of Wilmington students on the state’s academic assessments, called those statistics “disappointing [and] heartbreaking,” bus said “we can’t take another 10 years to figure things out.”

Then, in reference to Carney’s opening statement that “the Wilmington Learning Collaborative is us” and to the 18 of the 21 board members who live outside the city, she stated: “The people we are talking about are not at this table…. [School board members who represent portions of Wilmington] are hearing something different from our constituents than what you are hearing…. We need to get to our feet and make improvements…. If you want to move slower, put another plan on the table.”

In an interview Wednesday with Delaware Public Media, Bohm elaborated on her feelings about Carney’s statement.

When the governor spoke, she said, she counted 28 people sitting around the U-shaped tables, including board members, superintendents, lawyers and members of the governor’s staff. “Sixteen were white, 14 were white men. I thought to myself, ‘The Wilmington Learning Collaborative should not be us. It should be more people who live in the city.’” Most of the board members from the three districts are white and highly educated, she said. “We’re not the people who are the collaborative. We don’t have our kids in these schools.”

Patton, who grew up in Wilmington and formerly served as principal of Christina’s Bayard Middle School in the city, chided his peers on the school boards for not doing enough in the past to improve outcomes for city students. “We have the money. We have the opportunity to make a difference. Our results aren’t getting any better. We shouldn’t need the governor’s initiative of the Wilmington Learning Collaborative for us to understand the urgency,” he said. “Every single day, every single year, we’re losing kids. We have a responsibility to change these outcomes.”

Throughout the two-and-a-half-hour session, discussion bounced back and forth between student needs and those “adult-issues,” especially concerns about insurance liability should an occurrence at a collaborative school result in a lawsuit and a change in the latest version of the MOU that would let districts withdraw from the collaborative after one year. The previous version would have given districts a termination option if the collaborative failed to meet its goals for two consecutive years.

“All these adult things are important, but do we have to wait to make changes [in school programming]?” asked Monica Moriak, a Christina board member. “Let’s get started…. We are making it really complicated.”

Bohm said Wednesday that while she would like as many of the “adult issues” be resolved as possible before the MOU is approved, getting the collaborative started promptly is preferable to ongoing discussions that lead to further delays.

Naveed Baqir, another Christina board member, expressed a similar view toward the end of the meeting. “This is not perfect, but it is far superior to what we have had for decades,” he said.

“I have faith that when we give more responsibility to the people who are closest to the students that they will do the right thing,” he said. “If we fail, we will ruin the future of at least one generation.”