Wilmington Learning Collaborative gets green light to launch

After two years of building support and six months of meetings and negotiations among three school districts, the governor’s office and the State Department of Education, the Wilmington Learning Collaborative (WLC) is almost ready to begin its task of reimagining and restructuring public schools in Delaware’s largest city.

“Now the hard work begins,” Gov. John Carney said earlier this month after the school boards of the Christina, Brandywine and Red Clay districts approved the memorandum of understanding (MOU) that will serve as the WLC working agreement.

The next steps are filling out the WLC’s 12-member council – six seats are already assigned to three district superintendents and school board members who represent portions of the city – and hiring an executive director and staff to begin planning curriculum revisions and staffing/management changes that would take effect at the start of the 2023-24 school year.

Secretary of Education Mark Holodick said this week that he has primary responsibility for assembling the governing council and doing so “in a timely and very thoughtful manner.” He didn’t attach a date for his definition of “timely,” but he was expected to meet Friday (Oct. 28) with the six already designated members of the council to discuss procedures for filling the remaining seats: a parent or guardian from each of the three districts, to be chosen by their superintendent and board member; a former city educator to be chosen by Holodick; an appointee named by the Wilmington mayor and approved by the City Council; and a high school senior, to be chosen by other members of the governing council.

Adriana Leela Bohm, the Red Clay board member who will serve on the WLC council, said she hopes the full council can not only be named in November but that it can also write and post a job description for the collaborative’s executive director, so that hire could be made in December and start work early in 2023.

“It’s ambitious, but doable,” said Alethea Tucker, the Christina Board of Education’s Wilmington representative on the council.

The WLC is getting off to a start far later than originally envisioned by Carney, who had hoped that school boards would agree on its structure in the spring, so operations could begin around July 1. The delay was caused by prolonged haggling over what were dubbed non-educational “adult issues,” such as legal liability, finances and personnel responsibilities.

While the MOU ratification process took longer than anticipated, thus compressing the collaborative’s “planning year” by several months, Holodick believes this will make the collaborative even stronger. “[Brandywine, Christina and Red Clay] board members took this very seriously, scrutinized the MOU and engaged at a very high level…. This is how you get to an understanding. You have to listen to people.”

Although Bohm doesn’t anticipate smooth sailing as the collaborative begins its work, she praised Holodick and Jon Sheehan, Carney’s representative in the MOU negotiations, for accepting recommendations from district negotiators and city residents. “Working with them has been an absolute pleasure,” she said. “That gives me hope and optimism.”

Having broad community participation – parents, service organizations, nonprofits and others – will be crucial to the collaborative’s success, Tucker said. “Shared responsibilities bring about shared outcomes. That’s what makes a difference.”

What’s in the MOU

The 20-page MOU, which starts with a page summarizing problems that have plagued Wilmington schools for decades and a page listing approaches packaged as potential solutions, lays out a framework for restructuring that emphasizes school-based decision-making with strong input from teachers and community members.

At the top would be the 12-member governing council, which would oversee the executive director and a small administrative staff. That management team would be responsible for oversight of schools participating in the collaborative. The schools, however, would officially remain as parts of the districts in which they are now located and the districts would hold the collaborative accountable for its work. Also, the districts would retain responsibility for numerous functions at collaborative schools, including food service, maintenance, technology and transportation.

At the start, nine schools in Wilmington will participate in the collaborative: Harlan Elementary (Brandywine); Bayard, Bancroft, Pulaski and Stubbs Early Education Center (Christina); and Shortlidge, Warner, Joseph E. Johnson (formerly Highlands) and Lewis Dual Language (Red Clay). The Brandywine and Red Clay schools serve elementary grades. Bayard and Bancroft serve grades 1-8. Stubbs enrolls pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students and Pulaski is expected to open a similar program next fall.

Schools may be added to or removed from the collaborative later, but a process for doing so has not been determined.

Each school will have an educator leader team (ELT), comprised of teachers and support staff, that would work with the principal on key school-based decisions. Each school will also have a community council, comprised of parents, educators, community stakeholders and students, that would help develop school plans, strengthen family engagement and give advice and feedback on school plans and programs. Each school would develop its own plan for programming and improvement and submit it to the WLC council for approval.

School plans could include changes in curriculum and teaching methods from what is used in other district schools. In addition, there could be changes in school calendars and hours, additions in before- and after-school programming, as well as wraparound services to meet the mental and physical health needs of students and their families.

The needs assessment

One of the first challenges for the collaborative will be conducting what the MOU labels an “open and honest needs assessment.” Then, by March 31, the WLC council and participating districts will have to complete a written agreement describing plans for improving student outcomes.

“We know that there are some consistencies across urban schools, and challenges that are consistent across these schools, but not all schools are in the same place,” Holodick said.

The idea behind the needs assessment, he said, is to document what’s working – and what isn’t – in each school, covering areas like academics, social-emotional learning, climate, and extra-time programs.

“We’re looking for inside information from people within the system – the concerns and experiences of parents, teachers, and administrators,” Tucker said. “We want to break down silos. If we find something is working in a Red Clay school, for example, we will look at whether it’s a good fit for other schools as well.”

By calling for an “open and honest” assessment, Bohm said the MOU opens the door to discussing topics that some educators and politicians have tried to avoid, items like structural racism, segregation, the sharp differences in test scores between city and suburban schools, and “how racism and classism impact our schools.” Some of the conversations may prove uncomfortable, she said, especially for the superintendents on the WLC council. While Holodick pointed out that the three superintendents all have experience working in urban schools, Bohm said their primary constituency is suburban – a majority of their district residents and board members live in the suburbs.

Staffing concerns

One of the intriguing aspects of the “planning year” that is about to begin is that the educators doing the school-level planning aren’t necessarily assured of having positions at their current school when classes resume next fall.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, the Empowerment Zone initiative that Carney has often touted as a model for Wilmington, project leaders have said that some principals don’t work out well in new roles because they’re more accustomed to top-down management and that it sometimes takes several years to assemble a teaching staff that works well together.

Holodick said he considers educator uncertainty in Wilmington to be “at a very low level” because there has been significant teacher involvement in meetings as the MOU was being developed. “The overwhelming majority of staff recognize that this is a collaborative effort,” he said.

Recruitment and retention have long been a significant problem in Wilmington and in urban schools throughout the nation, Holodick said. A key to the collaborative’s success will be listening to what Wilmington teachers recommend as the best approaches for retaining existing staff and recruiting new teachers, he said.

Collateral issues

Some of the issues the collaborative will have to address are not associated with the elementary grade levels who will comprise the bulk of the enrollment at participating schools.

For example, there are few opportunities for city students, especially those in the Red Clay district, to attend traditional middle schools in the city. Only Bancroft and Bayard in Christina and P.S. du Pont in Brandywine offer grades 6-8.

According to the MOU, the collaborative and the districts are supposed to work together to inform city residents attending suburban middle schools of options for enrolling at schools in the city. While the MOU doesn’t say so specifically, this suggests an attempt to encourage more of those students to enroll at Bayard, Bancroft or P.S. du Pont, or, at the very least, helping them find schools closer to their homes than the ones they now attend.

The MOU’s language about high school students is more specific. It talks about using space at Howard High School in Wilmington, part of the New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District, and beginning conversations about creating more high school options in the city. Those conversations could rekindle discussions about building a new high school in Wilmington, something Tucker said is “long overdue.”

Another concern involves city children who are enrolled at schools in the suburbs, either through the choice program or, in Brandywine’s case, through attendance zones established many years ago. It is anticipated that children at schools in the collaborative will have access to new services – before and after school programming, summer programs, health and social services, for example – that would not be available to city students attending suburban schools. The MOU asks the collaborative to see how to provide these services to city children who attend schools in the suburbs.

Also, the first page of the MOU, which is devoted to listing major education issues in Wilmington, cites the lack of early education opportunities in the city, but the rest of the document does not mention pre-kindergarten programming. But some who have participated in planning for the collaborative are concerned that the Brandywine School District is planning a suburban location for a new early education center that would likely serve a good number of city residents – even though it would be more convenient for children of this age to receive care in the city, if more spaces could be created.

Managing expectations

While Holodick believes it is important that the collaborative start by racking up some “quick wins,” he said “we need a sustained, concerted effort among groups” to ensure the project’s long-term success.

Those groups, he said, include community- and faith-based organizations that could provide needed wraparound services like treating behavioral and physical health issues, counseling, mentoring and tutoring, and providing after-hours programming.

“We have to be ambitious, but we also have to be thoughtful and sensible,” Holodick said. “If we set goals that are not achievable, we are doomed.”

“The process will take time. There will be pushbacks from the districts and their administrators. It will not be smooth sailing at the start,” Bohm predicted.

While she anticipates “continued tension” as the collaborative begins its work, Bohm expects to see progress, but significant changes will take several years.

“By next year, you’re going to see some movement in a lot of city schools” as the curriculum is adjusted and new services are added, she said, “but you’re not going to see changes in test results for the first year or two.”

The collaborative “is a rare and unique opportunity to do something different,” Holodick said. “Everybody has to be willing and ready to roll up their sleeves.”

“It’s a shared responsibility,” Tucker said. “We are walking this journey together.”