With the 153rd General Assembly opening its session on Jan. 14 and a new governor taking office seven days later, key education issues are certain to rank high on lawmakers’ agendas. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that decisive actions will be taken this year.
During his campaign Governor-elect Matt Meyer (D) issued a 26-page plan to reform and improve education in the First State, starting with a pledge to increase school funding while replacing an archaic finance system with one more responsive to the needs of the current generation of students.
But Meyer cannot do it alone. He will need the support of the General Assembly to enact significant changes, and he must give strong consideration to efforts already underway by commissions established by the legislature.
Realistically, 2025 is shaping up as a year of intense discussion on the education front, with decisions having significant long-term impact likely deferred into 2026. That’s especially true for two of the most controversial topics – funding reform and redistricting to end the Christina School District’s role in educating students living in Wilmington.
Other items ripe for discussion this year include the oversight of dysfunctional school boards and districts, the long-term impact of charter schools and choice programs and the intertwined issues of underused schools and district consolidation. In addition, Meyer’s plans include expanding pre-kindergarten education, increasing teachers’ pay and improving academic performance by empowering principals and teachers and addressing school climate and disruption concerns.
Here is a look at the state of play on these subjects.
Education Financing
The current finance reform debate has its roots in a lawsuit filed in 2018 by groups that alleged that the state’s funding system, created in the 1940s and tweaked repeatedly since then, failed to provide adequately for high-needs students – those from low-income families, English learners and some special education students. The ensuing settlement led to a statewide real estate reassessment, now nearing completion, and a report, completed in December 2023 by American Institute for Research (AIR), that recommended spending between $600 million and $1.1 billion more annually using an allocation format that would direct more money toward schools with larger enrollments of high-need students.
Last year the General Assembly created a Public Education Funding Commission (PEFC) to determine whether and how to implement the AIR report’s recommendations. The 31-member panel promptly hit a snag as members couldn’t decide whether to create a new funding system or tweak the existing one, and they concluded they needed more information before being able to proceed.
“We have a bastardized system that doesn’t work how it’s supposed to work,” says state Sen. Laura Sturgeon (D-Brandywine Hundred), chair of the PEFC and the Senate Education Committee.
Although the PEFC will meet monthly this year, Sturgeon says it is not likely to have final recommendations ready by its original October 2025 deadline. Early in the legislative session, she will introduce legislation to revise the deadlines, so preliminary recommendations would be due in October and final recommendations by July 2026.
Complicating the PEFC timeline is the status of the statewide property reassessment, completed last year in Kent County but ongoing in New Castle and Sussex. Officials want to review final property valuations for all three counties before deciding how school property taxes might be changed under a new funding system.
Some members of the commission are questioning the direction the group is taking. Creating a new funding system – “flipping the table upside down,” as state Sen. Eric Buckson (R-Dover), a retired teacher and Senate Education Committee member, puts it, “doesn’t make sense.” He says the state should be looking at “what we’re spending money on that’s not working.”
State Sen. Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman (D-Wilmington), vice chair of the Senate Education Committee, disagrees. She says the state has for too long allocated funds through a formula that not only abets inequity but also doesn’t deliver results for students. Looking at funding reform initiatives in other states offers “so much evidence that more money produces better results,” she says.
While Meyer is urging reform along the lines of the AIR report recommendations, there is only so much he can do. He is responsible for only two appointees on the commission – the state secretary of education and the director of the Office of Management and Budget – but he can use the power of his office to prod the commission. Meyer will likely have a larger role when the commission makes its final recommendations because he will have to sell the public on the merits of whatever additional funding a new plan requires.
“There is frustration over how long this has taken,” says Paul Herdman, president and CEO of Rodel, a nonprofit that focuses on education reform. “Meyer will want to move faster.’
Redistricting in Wilmington
The Redding Consortium for Educational Equity, established by the General Assembly in 2019, took a significant step forward last May on its primary mandate – developing a plan that would reduce the number of school districts responsible for educating children who live in Wilmington. Consortium members decided then that the Christina School District would be removed from the equation and that there should be no more than two districts serving city students.
That was “a big step,” said Lockman, who is the consortium’s co-chair, but there’s lots more to decide. “No more than two” suggests taking either the Colonial, Brandywine or Red Clay district out of the mix, but it could also mean putting all city students under the oversight of one of those districts, or the creation of a city-only district (as existed before 1978) or as part of a northern New Castle County district (similar to 1978-1981).
The consortium’s predecessor, the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission, won the support of the State Board of Education for a 2016 proposal that would have shifted the city portion of the Christina district into Red Clay and added weighted funding for high-needs students in Wilmington and two downstate districts. The General Assembly endorsed the concept but didn’t fund it in the state budget and the plan was never implemented.
The consortium hopes to have a plan to deliver to the General Assembly by the end of this year, Lockman said. To help create the plan the consortium has contracted with American Institute for Research, the same group that conducted the school finance study, to produce a “landscape analysis,” which Lockman describes as “a look at the lived conditions of the kids we’re talking about: what their lives are like, what their families are like, their needs and what are being met and not met.” Knowing those details, she said, will help produce a plan that goes far beyond “changing district lines and the names on buildings.”
“For a new governor to come up with a new solution after years of debate would be counterproductive."Paul Herdman, President and CEO of Rodel.
Meyer’s education plan doesn’t address the Christina in Wilmington issue. Herdman believes Meyer will let the consortium stay in the driver’s seat. “For a new governor to come up with a new solution after years of debate would be counterproductive,” he said.
The timelines for the consortium delivering its redistricting proposal and PEFC making its funding recommendations are nearly parallel, making it likely that education issues will dominate legislative activity in 2026.
Dysfunctional school districts
The Christina School District, especially its board of education, has become the poster child for dysfunctional management in Delaware. In the past year, the school board has suspended and fired its superintendent, faced questions over whether one of its members actually lives in the district (or even in the United States), repeatedly violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act, has seen its meetings degenerate into shouting matches and is now having its meetings monitored by an observer from the state Department of Justice.
The concern here is what the state can or should do if a school district runs off the rails. Delaware traditionally treats the phrase “local control of the schools” with respect akin to the Ten Commandments, but the state provides 60 percent or more of the funding for most school districts so it has an interest in that money being managed wisely.
“The state needs the ability to intervene when there are ongoing challenges,” Rodel’s Herdman says.
Rep. Kim Williams (D-Newport), chair of the House Education Committee, says a group of legislators who represent portions of the Christina district are preparing a package of bills to address some of the issues that have cropped up in Christina.
Sturgeon and Buckson agree that there should be some mechanism for state oversight but they believe that districts should have the opportunity to solve their own problems before the state intervenes. Lockman notes that similar conversations occurred in 2014, when former Gov. Jack Markell labeled ed six in Wilmington that had low academic performance as “priority schools” and threatened to remove them from district control.
There is no clear consensus on how any intervention might be implemented. “We have to think about what it means for all 19 districts, for all 23 charter schools, to have the state education agency control the local education agency,” Lockman says.
Charters and choice
While some longtime observers of Delaware schools say desegregation in northern New Castle County from 1978 to 1995 disrupted the state’s education landscape, others note that post-desegregation changes – charter schools, school choice and the Neighborhood Schools Act – have now been in place for 25 years or more.
Charters and choice, Lockman suggests, have a greater impact on the state of Delaware education today than the remnants of desegregation from a generation ago.
“A lot of folks like choice and charters,” Williams says, but both she and Lockman acknowledge there are some equity issues at play. The lack of free bus transportation to schools outside the home district, for example, means that “people with capital are better able to access choice” than those with fewer resources, Lockman says.
“I’m leaning into more choice – if we can put more guardrails in place,” she adds.
Sturgeon, a retired high school teacher, says she applauds charter schools that serve high-needs students but questions whether all charters are truly open to all students. For example, some charters give enrollment preference to applicants who live within a specified distance from the school.
“Some have managed to pull their students from a select group and then bask in the glory of their test scores, without mentioning that their enrollment has few students with IEPs [individualized programs for special needs students] or from low-income families,” she says.
All three lawmakers anticipate further discussion of the roles of choice and charters either during the legislative session or as the PEFC and the Redding Consortium draw up their recommendations.
Capacity and consolidation
School capacity and school and/or district consolidation are intertwined issues. They’re not on anyone’s legislative to-do list now, but the topics pop up in some form almost every year, and the convergence of PEFC and Redding Consortium developments makes that likely in 2025 as well.
Veterans of school finance debates inevitably refer back to 2008 reports from Leadership for Education and Achievement in Delaware (LEAD) Committee. Its school efficiency study identified a potential for $86 million in savings ($126 million in today’s dollars) largely through improved cooperation among districts, shared services and possible consolidation of smaller school districts.
Sturgeon and Williams, the two Education Committee chairs, both say there’s a need for more serious conversations on collaborations and making more efficient use of school buildings. Resources tend to be better used in schools with larger enrollments, Williams says. Larger schools often have a better culture than smaller ones, Sturgeon adds.
Currently, discussion of the inevitable removal of the Christina district from Wilmington opens consideration of whether the Christina should keep open three high schools – Newark, Christiana and Glasgow – when they no longer enroll students from Wilmington.
The Redding Consortium’s recommendations later this year could well place Christina’s Wilmington high school students in Red Clay schools, where the district is grappling with its own capacity problems. Enrollments at the once prestigious A.I. du Pont High School have been tumbling for a variety of reasons, including the district’s creation of two magnet middle and high schools and its authorization of three charter schools plus the private school preferences of its residents.
An influx of students from Wilmington could help solve Red Clay’s low-capacity issues but the potential for more empty seats at Christina’s three high schools could trigger debate about closures there.
“It’s a complicated issue… such a can of worms, but if you look at the dollars and cents it makes no sense to keep schools open if they are at half capacity."Laura Sturgeon, State Senator and Senate Education Committee Chair.
“It’s a complicated issue… such a can of worms, but if you look at the dollars and cents it makes no sense to keep schools open if they are at half capacity,” Sturgeon says.
“We have to look at capacity and enrollment. There may be opportunities [for consolidation and efficiency] but districts are reluctant to give up buildings and people have strong connections to individual schools,” Herdman says.
Expanding pre-kindergarten and childcare
Meyer is promising “universal access” to pre-kindergarten programs statewide by the end of his first term. The state funds preschool education only for children with disabilities; some school districts offer programs for all pre-K children, others limit theirs to children with special needs or from low-income families.
He also wants to address a shortage of “affordable, high-quality childcare and early childhood education” statewide, especially in Kent and Sussex counties.
“These are expensive per-child investments,” his plan states. He intends to work with foundations and nonprofit organizations to set up pilot programs and then ramp up the models that appear most effective.
Increasing teacher pay
Meyer’s education plan includes numerous promises to combat the state’s growing shortage of classroom teachers. They include pushing to increase teacher salaries so they top pay levels in neighboring states, paying “high-performing teachers” in needed specialties and schools $100,000 a year and seeking “significant increases in compensation” for paraprofessionals. His plan also mentions improving training and professional development and setting up loan-forgiveness programs for classroom teachers.
The state’s Public Education Compensation Committee has already recommended boosting the starting salary for teachers to $60,000 in 2026. Meyer will need the support of the General Assembly to achieve that goal and the loftier objectives in his plan.
Empowering principals and teachers
Meyer wants to “promote school-based management,” which “starts with empowering principals over centralized control from Dover or school district central offices” and includes giving teachers “more control over what they teach in their own classrooms.”
Meyer’s plan does not specify how he would achieve those objectives. Buckson, the Republican senator, says the answer is deregulation. “Get away from paper chases and the box-checking mentality. Mandates have been set too far away from the classroom,” he said. “Give them the workspace so they’re free to do what they have to do.”
While charter schools and those in the Wilmington Learning Collaborative aim to increase building-level empowerment, reform advocates say traditional schools are hamstrung by the current unit funding system, which generally dictates the number of teachers and the types of specialists that can be assigned to a school. Also, legislators have been known to introduce bills specifying topics that should be included in the curriculum.
The success of Meyer’s empowerment objectives may turn on his ability to persuade the General Assembly to enact the broad funding reforms he seeks while tamping down their desires to inject new items into the curriculum.
School climate and disruptions
Meyer’s plan includes a variety of pledges to reduce student disruptions and improve school climate. He talks of providing “supportive and nurturing environments to students facing challenges” and proposes transforming schools into “community hubs” that bring together partnering organizations to offer services to children, parents and community members during after-school and weekend hours. He would like to expand the Communities in Schools program, overseen by the Children and Families First agency, that now serves about 3,000 children in the four northern New Castle County districts into a statewide operation.
The General Assembly’s School Behavior and School Climate Task Force issued a report in November that made more than 50 recommendations on the issue. Recommendations included improved data collection, strengthened support programs, increased parental and community engagement, additional state funding, professional development for staff, and safety and behavioral improvements on school buses.
How will Meyer fare?
Herdman, the Rodel leader, expects Meyer to be more aggressive than Gov. John Carney, who centered his education agenda on creating the Wilmington Learning Collaborative and distanced himself from the finance reform suggestions in the AIR report. Meyer, Herdman says, “can go in and exert some executive leadership.”
Buckson expects Meyer to be assertive. “With any new governor, you want to come in and make your name,” he says.
Both Sturgeon and Williams said they want to know Meyer better before predicting how he will move forward.
Lockman recognizes the strength of Meyer’s advocacy. “The executive has to speak like an executive, and I appreciate that,” she says. “In the next two years, if we prioritize right, we can do many of the things we’ve talked about for so long.”
