Education reporter Julia Merola stops by the podcast studio to talk about the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity, and specifically its process to make a recommendation for reworking school district boundaries in Wilmington.
Julia wrote a Delaware Explained article about the Redding consortium’s work and its upcoming Dec. 16 vote to move forward with a redistricting plan.
Julia also discusses why the work of the consortium, which had been flying under the radar, has recently been receiving a lot more public focus – and with that, some public confusion.
The podcast is hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
You did write a Delaware Explained piece that lays out a lot of good information about the Redding Consortium.
The first few questions of this podcast are going to ask you to cover some of that, because this is a topic that has been getting more and more confusing in the public eye. The more we can lay out the straight facts, the better. So for people who haven’t read that article, what is the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity?
Basically it’s an organization that was tasked with reworking the school district boundaries in Wilmington. And they will be making a redistricting recommendation on Dec. 16.
That recommendation is just a recommendation. It will still have to go through areas like the General Assembly before taking effect.
It was established in 2019, to replace the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission.
So it didn’t just pop out of nowhere – the Wilmington Education Improvement Commission was turned into the Redding Consortium.
When it was changed to the Redding Consortium, was that done with a specific aim of considering redistricting, or is this consortium still really broadly involved in this question of monitoring the educational progress of students in Wilmington?
I would say it’s both. I looked at the charges of the consortium this morning, which basically just means what the General Assembly told them that they were supposed to do back in 2019.
The first bullet point on there is to look at the educational outcomes for Wilmington students. When you look a little further, it says redistricting or coming up with a redistricting plan. So I think that it is a combination of both.
And I will just note, when I went to the Redding meetings for the Christina School District and the Brandywine School District, one of the very first points that Matt Denn, who’s the co-chair of the consortium, one of the first points he brought up was the proficiency rates in a school that’s in the Christina School District but is in Wilmington, such as the Bayard School, compared to another elementary or middle school in Newark. The differences between those proficiency rates were pretty eye-opening, I would say.
You just mentioned one co-chair is former Attorney General, Matt Denn. Who is the other co-chair?
It is Senator Elizabeth “Tizzy” Lockman. She’s the second co-chair.
Sen. Lockman is a long-time educational advocate in the community.
So why was the Redding Consortium tasked with reworking school district boundaries in Wilmington?
I think that it’s been a long, ongoing conversation. In my Delaware Explained article, I talk about how this kind of goes all the way back to desegregation.
There’s been a lot of discussions about how to really improve educational opportunities for students in Wilmington. This is a continuation of that conversation, and another attempt at maybe finally finding the answer to that problem.
You do cover some of the history in your Delaware Explained article, but if people really want to dive into it, you actually wrote a whole article several months ago detailing the history of schools in Wilmington.
So what has the Redding Consortium’s process been? Stating that you’ve only been here at Spotlight for a year and a half and this process has been going on for longer than that.
I will say that the consortium, on its website, has plenty of past meeting materials that you can look at if you really want to look at what they were doing in 2022 before I was here.
Over the last few months especially, they have been really looking at a wide variety of potential options and slowly but surely whittling it down. We’re down to three options right now.
Back in the summer, we were looking at around nine. So they have really been doing a lot of work either with community members or in their subcommittees looking at all of the potential solutions and then narrowing it down to the three, and that brings us to the vote next week.
So let’s go to these three plans that will be up for a vote on Dec. 16. Can you just kind of briefly lay out what those three options are?
There’s one option that would essentially take the students that are in the city of Wilmington and divide them between the Brandywine and Red Clay school districts. That would take Christina out of the picture, especially because it’s a non-contiguous school district.
And then there is another option, which is called the Metropolitan Wilmington School District. That one essentially consolidates Brandywine, Red Clay and Wilmington into its own district. Not like the first one where you’re just taking Wilmington students and dividing it between the two. You’re taking the two districts and the city of Wilmington students and making it this new district.
The third one is called the Northern New Castle County Consolidated School District. Quite a mouthful. And that one basically takes all four districts that are serving Wilmington, which is Red Clay, Christina, Brandywine and Colonial, and makes it into one big school district.
On Dec. 16, the consortium will vote on a plan to move forward with. What comes from that vote? Does whatever plan they vote for start up next school year?
The easy answer to that is no.
Basically, after they hold the vote on Dec.16, that is just a recommendation. The consortium does not have the power to actually make this a mandate and have changes go into effect immediately or anything like that.
Essentially after that vote, they will be looking at the financial implications and things like that. They will go to the state Board of Education and present their final redistricting plan, which will be much more in depth than the plan that we’re seeing on the 16th.
From there, the state Board of Education can either say, “Nope, we don’t like this,” and reject it and send it back to Redding, or they can approve it. If they approve it, the plan will then go to the General Assembly, which would also have to approve it. If it’s approved there, then it would be signed by Gov. Matt Meyer.
Even if it’s signed into law right after the General Assembly ends in June, it still has an implementation process that would take roughly three to five years. So, in June it could be signed into law, but you really won’t be seeing an effect in the next school year.
So it’s at least a four to five step process taking three to five years before we see anything actually happen based on this vote.
Yes, exactly.
Now, I’m assuming that as they have been considering these options, the consortium has not just been considering anecdotal comments from the community, but have been looking at data as well. True or false? What data has the Redding Consortium really been looking at to help guide their decisions?
A few months ago, the American Institutes for Research did a report on social drivers in the educational landscape of Wilmington students.
It gives an eye-opening picture as to what families and students in the Wilmington area are concerned about, what they think will work for them, what doesn’t currently work for them, and different points like that.
You might also be familiar with their work taking a look at the public education funding system here in Delaware. They also did a very, very, in depth report on that.
The consortium is currently holding a series of town hall presentations at each of the involved local school districts. And you’ve been to a few of those. There was one on Dec. 4, for Christina School District. How full was that session?
In my opinion, it was pretty empty.
I was kind of surprised because I thought more parents would be there to talk about things like the commute for their students living in Wilmington and going to Newark High School, for example. But there weren’t too many people.
And then there was one on Dec. 8, for Brandywine School District. How full was that one?
That was extremely full. I was there standing shoulder to shoulder with people in the back of the room. For reference, I’m four foot eleven, so it was pretty tough for me to actually see what was going on.
In the beginning of the meeting, they had said that they had an overflow room in the cafeteria, which was also full. And they had also said that there were, I believe, 600 people on Zoom.
It was definitely one of the most crowded meetings I think I’ve ever seen in my life.
So what happened between Dec. 4, and Dec. 8? Why so much more attention at the Brandywine School District meeting?
In terms of the news cycle, nothing really happened between those two meetings. The Christina School District had posted the meeting on its website, which is what you would typically do.
I think Brandywine did a bit more outreach to parents than Christina probably did. I think their outreach was a little bit more successful, I would say.
In that very packed meeting, what perspective did you end up hearing? What voices were being heard?
It was a long public comment session. It was at least an hour. During that hour, you could really sense there being a divide among the crowd.
There was one parent who has kids in the Brandywine School District, and he had talked about how shuffling, and this is a quote from the meeting, “Shuffling around of schools is not going to help these children in the underprivileged neighborhoods.”
There were families in the crowd who took offense to that. I remember there being one mom who said that parents were using cute terms to be racist. So there was a pretty large divide, I would say, during that meeting.
Were there particular aspects of the redistricting that people had confusion about either in that meeting or just overall as you’ve been reporting?
I don’t know if this is necessarily a point of confusion, but I think that there are a lot of parents who didn’t necessarily know that this was going on.
Because of that, there are a lot of comments about, “How are you taking a vote in a week when you don’t really know what’s going on?”
You have to remember that six months ago there were nearly nine options on the table. And now over the past six months the consortium has worked down to three. I think that there is a lot of confusion about how this started and when this started.
Just the fact that they’ve been having these meetings for years now, but I don’t think any of them have ever been packed like the one at Brandywine School District was – it’s certainly something that seems, from my outsider perspective, that almost just popped on the radar of New Castle County in the last like week.
There are some voices in other counties that have been raising some concerns. One point of view that’s out there is a warning that, hey, this could also happen in Kent and Sussex County. Anything behind that argument or that concern?
Well, I will just say, again, Redding is only making a recommendation. They don’t have the power to say this is going into effect next week.
But also they’re only looking at the school districts that are serving Wilmington students. They are not looking at Kent and Sussex County. That is not what their job is.
I will say, anecdotally, I have heard from people – and this is just normal everyday people, not people who are in positions of power at all – that Delaware should only have three school districts.
When I first started here, I was kind of like, “Yeah, why doesn’t Delaware only have three school districts if the state is only a million people?”
I have heard those conversations, but not from people who are in positions of power. And again, Redding is only looking at the four school districts that serve Wilmington.
This discussion around the Redding Consortium is happening at the same time as a lot of other conversations about education. We have the state assembly’s Public Education Funding Commission, which is considering ways to make the state funding formula more equitable.
At the same time, we have all this drama around the property tax reassessments, which the whole point of that was trying to level set funding for education after 40 years without a reassessment.
So as you survey the education landscape, how do you see all these issues and all these commissions coalescing?
I think that there is a big concern among families about how much all of this is going to cost. Like you just said, there’s been a lot of drama, concern, whatever you want to call it, among families whose property taxes have really gone up after the reassessment.
At the same time, the PEFC, while they’re looking at a hybrid funding formula, there’s also the possibility of adding more money into that formula.
And at the same time with Redding, we don’t really know the financial implications of redistricting. We’ll be getting a little bit of information before the Dec. 16 vote, but those are good estimates, I would say. We won’t be getting that solid information until after the Reading Consortium has their vote on Dec. 16.
So I think that there’s just a lot of questions about, how much is this going to cost me as a taxpayer?
That bottom line issue is certainly understandable. I mean, we all have to pay our bills. But have there been people raising voices about how is this going to actually improve educational outcomes?
There was one parent during the Brandywine Redding meeting on Dec. 8 who said, and this is not an exact quote: We’re talking a lot about the cost of things, and I think we really need to focus more on student outcomes, and how this would actually impact students.
I think that there’s a bit of push and pull with that.
What have been some of the positive education outcomes on students that the consortium has been talking about?
One of the things that was discussed, and it’s not one of the main charges of the consortium, but they have been looking at things like afterschool care programs for families who might be working hours that you can’t necessarily watch your kid at home. They’ve been working to kind of help fill in that gap.
I would also say in general, something I’m currently working on is talking to families that are based in Wilmington and just trying to get a better understanding of how they think redistricting would or maybe wouldn’t help their families.
So that’s something I’m working on, and will most likely be in my next story.
What have been your challenges in reporting this story?
I did another Redding story over the summer, and I think one of the challenges for me was just getting to talk to families, particularly in the Christina School District, and just get a better understanding [of their challenges].
I can sit here and say, you know, “If I was a student in Wilmington, I probably wouldn’t want to go to a high school all the way in like Newark.”
But just really getting in touch with those families and sitting down and really hearing those concerns in depth has been a little bit hard. It’s something I am really looking forward to doing in the coming days.
Thank you for letting us into what the Redding Consortium is trying to figure out, and we look forward to hearing how this vote comes out.
Yes, follow along and thanks for having me.