Why Should Delaware Care?
With a large Hispanic population and lack of existing bilingual education options, demand for an English-Spanish school in Sussex County is high. Due to difficulties finding a temporary school building and the federal government shutdown putting funding sources for construction on the permanent school building in limbo, the ASPIRA Georgetown school has been forced to delay its opening a year.
The new Georgetown ASPIRA bilingual charter school will delay its opening until the fall of 2027, a year later than originally planned, as school leaders battle location- and finance-based setbacks.
The delay, announced at a community meeting in Georgetown on Monday night, sparked disappointment from residents, who were excited about having a bilingual education program in the area next fall.
“We hit roadblocks,” ASPIRA Delaware CEO Margie Lopez-Waite said at the meeting. “But we’re good, and we’re going to move forward.”
A combination of the federal government shutdown preventing ASPIRA from receiving the necessary funds to begin construction on its permanent school location and difficulty finding a temporary building to house the school in the interim caused school leaders to delay the opening, they told Spotlight Delaware.
The bilingual elementary school ultimately will be located inside the Isaac and Sons cold storage building on Depot Street in Georgetown. Renovations to that building, however, will take about 18 months to complete. Work cannot begin until the federal government reopens and the school can secure construction funding through the New Market Tax Credit program, building owner Dan Bond said.
Lopez-Waite announced the decision to delay the opening to a group of about 20 Georgetown community members, including town government officials and teachers at other schools in the area.
Lopez-Waite said she wanted to make the announcement about the delay in opening now, so families have time to adjust their plans for the upcoming school year during Delaware’s school choice window, which began on Nov. 3 and runs through Jan. 14, 2026.
Community members were sympathetic to the adjusted opening date, but had questions for school leaders about the possibility of additional construction delays and how they plan to attract teachers to work at the school.
Why is ASPIRA Georgetown delaying its opening?
ASPIRA Georgetown will submit a charter modification application to the state Department of Education by the end of the month, Lopez-Waite said. Because the postponed school opening is considered just a “minor” modification, the school will not have to go through the formal process of submitting a new charter application, she said.
This fall, Lopez-Waite had been looking at temporary building options in Georgetown for the 2026-27 school year, including spaces at Delaware Technical Community College’s Georgetown campus and the Indian River School District, but none of those came to fruition.
At the same time, Bond, who owns the permanent school building and is in charge of securing funding for construction on the space, was dealing with federal funding uncertainty, he said.
Bond applied for a number of tax credits, which would account for about $7 million of the $16 million required to finance the construction project.
The federal government, however, shut down just a couple days before the federal Office of Management and Budget was scheduled to send out awards for community development entities, which fund the tax credits, Bond said.
Exacerbating the situation, he said, the Trump administration laid off all the staff that manages the tax credit program, so it is unclear whether the program will be able to resume once the government reopens.
A U.S. District Court in Northern California ruled in mid-October that the administration’s layoffs of federal employees were illegal.
Bond added that he obtained a $500,000 preconstruction loan from NeighborGood partners last week to begin demolition work on the building, but he doesn’t want to do the demolition too far ahead of when they will be able to begin construction.
While the timeline for receiving the construction tax credits remains uncertain, Bond and Lopez-Waite said they are hopeful they will be able to get far enough in the construction process to open the first floor of the school with 200 students in kindergarten through third grade in the fall of 2027. They intend to then have the rest of the building open the following fall.
The original plan was to open the school for kindergarteners through second graders, but Lopez-Waite said it was important to not leave out the third graders who would have been able to enroll if they had opened in the fall of 2026.
Lopez-Waite said at the meeting that if the government shutdown does not end by Nov. 30, she and Bond will shift to other funding possibilities instead of the tax credits that rely on the federal government.
“I’m an optimist,” Bond said. “We’ll find a way to make it work.”
Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, said about half the charter schools she’s worked with in the state have delayed their charter a year for one reason or another – oftentimes due to low enrollment numbers or difficulty finding a building for the school.
She added that ASPIRA was “thoughtful” for letting the community know about the change early in the school choice window, so that parents have plenty of time to make arrangements for next school year.
ASPIRA Delaware experienced a similar challenge in finding a space and having to push its charter back by a year with its original school location in Newark, Lopez-Waite said.
She said school leaders learned a lot from the process of constructing and opening the Newark location in 2011, so they are well-prepared to weather construction difficulties and other possible setbacks that may arise this time around.
The community need
The Georgetown school will be an expansion of ASPIRA Delaware’s bilingual school in Newark, intended to serve the high demand for a bilingual English-Spanish education option in Sussex County.
More than half of Georgetown’s population is Hispanic, and 11.2% of Sussex County more broadly, according to 2023 U.S. Census data.
ASPIRA decided to open a school in Georgetown because of the large Spanish-speaking population in the area, Lopez-Waite said. The only existing bilingual charter schools in Delaware are located in New Castle County – the ASPIRA K-12 school and Academia Antonia Alonso in Newark.
Some public schools in Sussex County have a Spanish immersion program option, including the Indian River School District, which serves Georgetown, but there is no fully bilingual school.
Sergio Morales, a Georgetown-based general contractor who is going to work on the flooring for the school, said he would like his children to attend ASPIRA Georgetown for the opportunity it would provide them to stay connected with their Guatemalan roots.
“It reminds us of our place,” said Morales, who is also the president of the Delaware Alliance of Latino Entrepreneurs. “The more language they know the better.”
Georgetown Mayor Bill West said he will continue to be full steam ahead helping the school get the necessary permitting and anything else they need to complete construction quickly.
“It’s desperately needed,” West said after the meeting. “It’s going to give the children a chance to learn a lot better.”
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/.
