Why Should Delaware Care?
With the largest Hispanic population by percentage in the state, demand for bilingual education is high in Sussex County. At the same time, the majority of bilingual education options in Delaware are concentrated in New Castle County. A new ASPIRA charter school in Georgetown will aim to fill that gap with an English-Spanish bilingual elementary school, but the school faces uncertainty around its timeline to open.
When her children were born, Araceli Gil set out to speak exclusively in Spanish with them at home, hoping they could develop a foundation in her native language while being exposed to English in school.
But as you’re rushing to tie their shoes and get out the door to school, and they’re not understanding your instructions in Spanish, it gets difficult to keep that language intention, she said.
“Once they went into school, we lost them,” Gil, who lives with her family in Dagsboro, said. “It was like, English was what they wanted to speak, it was easier for them to comprehend then.”
For parents like Gil, who are bilingual and want their children also to be fluent in English and Spanish, a bilingual education is appealing. Gil, whose children are 5 and 7, said she hopes to enroll her kids at the new ASPIRA bilingual charter school in Georgetown, which currently is set to open in the fall of 2026.
Despite the growing excitement surrounding the school, the first of its kind in Sussex County, community members may be waiting longer than originally anticipated to enroll. ASPIRA is facing obstacles in securing a temporary space in Georgetown to use for the 2026-27 school year, while renovations are completed on the permanent school building.
While school officials await answers from temporary building possibilities, they are considering asking the state to revise the school’s charter to a fall 2027 opening.
“Facilities are always the biggest hurdle,” Margie Lopez-Waite, CEO of ASPIRA Delaware, told Spotlight Delaware.
Search for a space
Milford resident Dan Bond purchased the Isaac and Sons cold storage building in Georgetown in 2023, and agreed to use the space for the ASPIRA bilingual school in 2024.
Due to the timing of funding applications and a construction process that will take 18 months to complete, the cold storage building will not be ready to house the school until the fall of 2027, Bond said.
The Georgetown school’s charter, however, requires the school open with at least 200 students in kindergarten through 2nd grade in the fall of 2026.
In order to fill the gap before the cold storage facility is ready, Lopez-Waite said she has been working with Georgetown Mayor Bill West to find a temporary space for the 2026-27 school year. The timeline is tight, she said, because the school only has until the end of September to secure a temporary space, before the school choice enrollment process begins in early November.
Lopez-Waite said she and other ASPIRA leaders are in conversation with a couple of organizations in Georgetown about using their building to house eight to nine classrooms for the 2026-27 school year, but time is running out before her end of September deadline.
“I feel that we have to sort of draw that line in the sand that by the end of September, we need to know whether we got the green light on the temporary space,” Lopez-Waite said.
She declined to say where exactly in Georgetown the organization is considering for the temporary space.
West said he is on board with helping ASPIRA complete all of the necessary steps to get the school up and running next fall, including searching for a temporary building, and working through permitting processes.
If the school does not find a temporary location by the end of the month, school leaders will have to submit a charter modification to the state Department of Education to delay opening by a year, Lopez-Waite said.
Charter schools have some buffer between when they receive their charter and when they are required to open the school, Charter Schools Network Executive Director Kendall Massett told Spotlight Delaware in January.
Lopez-Waite added that ASPIRA Delaware ran into a similar challenge finding a space and having to push back its charter by a year with its original school location in Newark.
A sense of need
More than half of Georgetown’s population – 52.5% – is Hispanic, making up 11.2% of Sussex County more broadly, according to 2023 U.S. census data.
Despite the area’s notably high Latino population, the only bilingual charter schools in the state are located in New Castle County – the ASPIRA K-12 school and Academia Antonia Alonso in Newark.
Some public schools in Sussex County have Spanish or Chinese immersion program options, including the Indian River School District, which serves Georgetown. But Lopez-Waite said a fully bilingual school is different from having a couple of immersion classrooms in an otherwise monolingual school.
“The difference is really the learning environment where you truly have immersion happening because the whole [bilingual] school community is focused on immersion,” Lopez-Waite said.
Gil said there are long waitlists for parents to enroll their kids in immersion programs at public schools in Sussex County, so it will be valuable to have another option to meet the high demand for bilingual education in the area.
The ASPIRA team held community interest meetings for the school this past year, in conjunction with Georgetown-based Latino support organizations La Plaza and La Esperanza. The meetings generated a list of more families who would be interested in enrolling their children at ASPIRA than the school could hold at full capacity, Lopez-Waite said.
Interest in the school, she added, came from a mix of parents who are solely Spanish speakers, bilingual parents who want to encourage the same in their children, and parents who have no background with the Spanish language.
“It’s such a great opportunity for most kids to have that dual language experience and come out of there fully speaking those two languages,” Gil said.
The bilingual model
The ASPIRA K-12 school in Newark has some subjects taught fully in English, some fully in Spanish, and others alternating between the two languages, Lopez-Waite said.
She said the organization plans to replicate that same model in Georgetown, with English language arts and Spanish language arts in those respective languages, along with math in both languages and science and social studies in one one language or the other depending on the students’ ages.
Lopez-Waite said teachers are not required to be fully bilingual, but they must “be sensitive” to the school’s mission of making students fluent in both languages.
ASPIRA also plans to help some people who previously were licensed teachers in Spanish-speaking countries get their teaching accreditation in Delaware, so that they are able to teach at the Georgetown school, Lopez-Waite and Bond said.
The school will open with 200 students in kindergarten through second grade, and add a grade each year, eventually reaching a full enrollment of 400 students by 2030, Lopez-Waite said.
Gil said she and members of her community are palpably excited for the arrival of the new charter school – in either the fall of 2026 or 2027.
“It will open a lot of eyes, too, to understand and be more empathetic to our Latino and Hispanic communities,” Gil said.
‘We built this’
Given the large Latino population in the Georgetown area, Mary Dupont, director of La Plaza, suggested that Bond get Latino contractors in Sussex County involved with the project.
“I wanted our businesses to drive by that place or send their children there and say, ‘We built this,’” she said.
Dupont organized a training program with La Plaza and GGA, the Middletown-based construction company contracted to complete the building renovation, to help local Latino contractors learn more safety, financing and bidding strategies to place competitive bids on the project.
Dolores Lopez, an Ocean View-based contractor who does roofing, gutters and exterior contracting work, participated in La Plaza’s training program last winter.
Lopez said the sessions helped her learn valuable skills for commercial projects that she will take with her to future contracts, regardless of whether she receives a bid for the ASPIRA school.
“What I learned from this is how important insurance and coverage can be,” Lopez said. “It just shows your craftsmanship, and then you can get more jobs with these commercial businesses.”
Contractors placed bids on the project in June, and GGA is expected to select the contractors for the project by the end of the fall.
Regardless of whether the Latino contractors who participated in the training program are selected for the project, Dupont said she views the program as having been successful in helping Latino business owners gain more knowledge in the commercial construction sphere and make connections with one another.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
