Why Should Delaware Care?
The Christina School District has been proposed to be removed from the city of Wilmington’s feeder pattern, raising questions about how the city became divided between four districts. A new era of reform could improve educational opportunities for city students or it could continue a difficult history.
Attention on education reform and investment in public education for Wilmington city students has perhaps never been higher than in the last five years, as a new collaborative combines leaders across three districts and a new proposal seeks to remove at least one district from the city limits.
That attention draws questions as to just how Wilmington’s more than 11,000 public school students became divided among four suburban districts.
The answer is complicated, but for many who lived through the era of desegregation of Delaware schools, the trauma from Wilmington’s court-ordered bussing of students out of the city and into traditionally white suburban schools still reverberates nearly 50 years later.
Students from the poor Black and Latino neighborhoods were pawns in the bussing system, said Maria Matos, who moved to the area in 1964 and is now the president and CEO of the Latin American Community Center in Hilltop.
“That’s all we were, we were bulldozed. You had the powers to be — the white suburban parents, white politicians — against the city folks, which mostly were poor blacks or Latinos, already living through intimidation of 200 years of discrimination, racism, police brutality,” Matos said. “After being disenfranchised for such a long time, how did you fight against the powers to be?”
Today’s changing reality
Today, Wilmington’s students are bussed into four school districts – Brandywine, Colonial, Christina and Red Clay – that span from the Pennsylvania border down to the C&D Canal.
But that may change in the coming years as the state’s General Assembly showed its formal support for the Redding Consortium’s plan for removing Christina – a district that doesn’t directly abut Wilmington – to be removed from the city’s feeder patterns. The consortium also called for removing Colonial from the city.
The city’s education landscape is also changing with the addition of Maurice Pritchett Sr. Academy, the first newly constructed school in the city in decades that replaces the old Bancroft Elementary School and opens this school year.
Some believe the complex history of Wilmington’s school system started in 1978 when the city began bussing students into the suburbs, but 1829 marked the start of public education in Delaware.
In the years leading up to the forced bussing, Wilmington was relatively autonomous, meaning that much of the legislation passed did not affect the city and its schools the way it would for other school districts.
Education was mostly private in the years before 1829, with students attending schools run by groups like the Quakers or the Methodist Episcopal Church; there were separate schools for white students and students of color. The Free-School Act of 1829 established free school funding and was the first real attempt to make education accessible for students in Delaware – but it did not apply to Black students.
Those enslaved in Delaware weren’t emancipated until 1865, and it wasn’t until emancipation that effort was put into educating the Black youth. Ten years later, Delaware began to establish state-funded schools for Black citizens. An annual tax of 30 cents on the dollar when assessing personal property was kept separately from the taxes that would have gone toward funding white schools.
Nothing was done to address Black students’ lack of access to higher education until 1891, and schools for Black students and salaries for teachers at those schools were inadequate as a result.
The “separate but equal” doctrine began in 1896 and legalized racial segregation in public areas like schools.
Separate and inadequate
The path toward modernizing education began in 1910 with the state Board of Education’s recommendation to reorganize Delaware’s education system to lessen the number of school districts and standardize curriculums, among other goals.
In 1917, Pierre S. du Pont, a philanthropist and then-president of the famed DuPont company, joined the board in asking the Rockefeller Foundation to survey state schools. The study found that Delaware spent $4.04 per year per citizen for education compared with the national average of $7.26.
Du Pont set up a trust fund in 1919 to administer a $2 million school construction fund and hired a group of Teachers College faculty and graduate students to inspect every school building in Delaware and later publish another report. While the report focused on the abysmal state of Delaware’s schools, it also took a closer look at schools at Black students.
Education reformers believed that school construction could only occur if there were state or private sources of funding made available because the separation of local taxation between white and Black citizens provided few financial resources. Du Pont decided to provide the necessary resources to rebuild the schools for Delaware’s Black students, leading to the construction of schools like Howard High School.
Du Pont’s funds allowed for drastically improved facilities, but these schools still were not adequate compared to the schools attended by white students.
Delaware established its public education funding system in 1940 — which is still used by the state 84 years later — with the state and federal governments providing about 70% of the funding while 30% is generated through district-level property taxes that residents vote on during referendums. Advocacy groups like the Delaware NAACP and Delawareans for Educational Opportunity have since argued that the state’s education system does not provide an adequate education to all students.
By 1950, the conversation around “separate but equal” schools changed significantly.
Redding’s fight
Louis Redding, a lawyer who grew up in Wilmington and graduated from Howard High School, filed the case Parker v. University of Delaware against the university in 1950 over its barring of Black students. He argued that Delaware State College, which was for Black students, wasn’t equal to the university.
Chancellor Collins Seitz Sr. visited both the university and the college and found that the college was “grossly inferior” and ordered the plaintiffs to be admitted to the University of Delaware.
Redding filed two more cases in 1951: Belton v. Gebhart, which dealt with high school education, and Bulah v. Gebhart, which focused on transportation. He used these cases to push for the integration of Black students, with a psychiatrist and other experts who testified that segregated education damaged the mental health Black students.
Chancellor Seitz again visited the schools in question and ordered the Black students to be immediately admitted into the white schools. An appeal of those rulings were combined into the historic U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
Redding also assisted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in hearing the Brown v. Board case in 1954, which struck down the “separate but equal” public school system that allowed for segregation. Wilmington formally ended its segregation of schools in 1956 after a local case, Evans v. Buchanan, forced Delaware to comply.
However, multiple initiatives like the Federal Home Loan Bank System, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal National Mortgage Association already set the precedence for the mortgage and housing markets, effectively segregating neighborhoods and school districts through redlining and white flight.
Tensions rose as community members noted a disregard for Black lives. On April 8, 1968, several hundreds of Wilmingtonians marched in remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination.
A two-day disturbance erupted after the April 8 march, beginning as the crowd dispersed. The Delaware National Guard was called, marking the start of Wilmington’s nine-month occupation — the longest military occupation of a city in the United States since the Civil War.
The period was fraught with tension between city and state leaders, and guardsmen and the city’s majority Black population who endured racist abuse and at least one guardsmen-related fatal shooting.
Although the guards left, their presence altered the city’s community. Throughout the ‘70s, the city experienced white flight and redlining, and much of the city’s urban housing was demolished.
1978: The forced busing of Wilmington’s students
In 1968, Delaware’s 49 school districts were consolidated into 26. However, the laws excluded the Wilmington School District — and some community members believed it was to keep Black children out of “white” suburban schools. A group of city parents sued shortly after the act was passed, claiming that the law led to segregated schools.
A federal court found the Educational Advancement Act to be unconstitutional in 1974, and New Castle County was ordered to desegregate its schools again.
In January 1978, Federal Judge Murray Schwartz issued a desegregation plan that affected almost all students in Wilmington and required the city’s students to be bussed into the suburbs for nine years school years, while white students from the suburbs were bused into the city for three school years.
Some students were forcibly bussed for more than an hour to school from their homes. Private school enrollment saw an increase at the same time.
Beatrice “Bebe” Coker, a community activist of 50 years, was part of a small opposition group that believed education “has everything to do with who’s teaching, who’s learning, how they’re teaching and how they’re learning.”
At the time, the group was asking for different resources that weren’t available for Black students, but it didn’t work, Coker said.
“Now there were some that saw it as an opportunity to really do what they thought was the right thing. You can’t take that away from people. But then there were others that thought, ‘Okay, Blacks need to be with us to learn,’” Coker said.
Delaware created four districts within New Castle County in 1981: Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial and Christina. The state’s goal was to assign a section of Wilmington to each district to enable equal access to high-quality teachers and resources for students.
However, not all community members are convinced that Wilmington’s leaders were trying to do the right thing by busing the city’s students.
While the city began building charter and target schools in response to the attempts to mix students, it was also depleting its resources and closing other schools, Matos said.
“They got rid of the schools,” Matos said. “It wasn’t about kids. It was about white suburban parents not wanting their boys and girls bused into the city. That was the main focus.”
Students who were bused were traumatized by what they endured throughout the mandated busing, Matos added.
“So here you have a bunch of poor kids going through mansions to get to an almost all-white school, and then you were treated like a low-class citizen once you get there, you’re distrusted by the teachers. You’re mistreated by administration. The white kids don’t want you. I mean, it’s all set up for failure from the very beginning,” Matos said.
‘Make it equitable’: The resegregation of Wilmington’s students
By 2000, the desegregation order was lifted and the Neighborhood Schools Act was passed. The act attempted to minimize transportation times for students by requiring districts to assign students to public schools closest to their homes. However, it did not account for housing segregation within New Castle County’s neighborhoods.
Some of Wilmington’s residents believe the state’s schools have been resegregated today.
Matos noted that two of Wilmington’s inner-city schools were sold to developers, and the city also got rid of schools like the Mary C.I. Williams School.
Some of Wilmington’s schools, like the Elbert-Palmer Elementary School, have completely closed down while others like the Warner Elementary School remain open to students. Other schools, like Howard High School of Technology or Cab Calloway School of the Arts — formerly Wilmington High School, which was known for its diversity — have transitioned to vocational or magnet schools.
In 2019, the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity – named after the famed civil rights lawyer – replaced the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission to monitor the educational progress of students in Wilmington.
And in 2022, Gov. John Carney launched the Wilmington Learning Collaborative, which brings Christina, Brandywine and Red Clay leaders to the table to help improve educational outcomes for city students.
In December 2023, the American Institutes for Research recommended Delaware utilize a weighted student funding formula. The formula would use student weights, especially for students who may not speak fluent English or come from low-income backgrounds, to distribute money to district and charter schools. Multiple states throughout the country use this type of formula.
Community members also have thoughts on what needs to be done to accurately improve the quality and accessibility of education for Wilmington students.
Coker would like for officials to look at where students are living and where they’re attending school, and then determine what would be the most viable option for students.
“We need to do it in an academically organized way, because it isn’t about color,” Coker said. “I would like for it to be about those areas where schools – a high school – might be needed.”
Matos believes there needs to be an elimination of the top-heaviness of each district, and that there needs to be a focus on what is equitable rather than equal.
“They’re doing all those wonderful things in schools where the majority are the white population. But why aren’t they doing those in schools where the majority is Black? Why aren’t they putting in the same resources?” Matos said. “Then they come up with this ‘Well, the property taxes are higher in areas where the schools are functioning well,’ then look how much money, or the unit count, or how the school gives out the money. And instead of making it equal, make it equitable.”
Correction: This story originally incorrectly reported that Pierre S. du Pont was a former governor of Delaware. He was not, though the similarly named Pierre S. “Pete” du Pont IV was some 60 years later. We regret the error.