Why Should Delaware Care?
The Christina School District is among the largest in Delaware, and its school board has been the most acrimonious. Last year, the board experienced a power shift with the addition of new members. That trend may continue as the board looks to appoint a new member in the coming weeks.
The Christina School District Board of Education has announced that two candidates will vie for a nomination to the board’s vacant, Wilmington-based seat that previously was held by Shannon Troncoso.
The candidates – Celita Cherry, a self-empowerment coach, and Joseph Lewis, a former teacher at the Delaware School for the Deaf – will sit for interviews with the school board during a public meeting on Feb. 5 at Maurice Pritchett Sr. Academy.
The forum will be run in partnership with First State Educate, a nonprofit that focuses, in part, on the recruitment and training of school board members. First State Educate will accept pre-submitted questions from community members to ask during the meeting.
The Christina school board’s current members will consider the candidates’ responses and community input before ultimately appointing a new member during their Feb. 10 public meeting. That appointed member will serve until the next board of education election in the spring.
The school board vacancy is the second to arise in recent months at the Christina School District, which has faced a tumultuous two years that included Troncoso’s resignation in December.
The particular Wilmington district that has the vacancy is unique in the district because it sits as an non-contiguous island in the center of Wilmington, separate from the rest of the Christina School District that mostly centers around Newark.
The district also sits at the center of a debate over whether the multiple school districts that serve Delaware’s largest city – including Christina – should dissolve into one unified district should serve the larger metro area.
An advocate and a former teacher
The two candidates seeking the nomination – Cherry and Lewis – both recently submitted their formal applications to the school board, which Spotlight Delaware later obtained.
In hers, Cherry describes herself as a mother of a daughter who attends the Bayard School within the Christina School District, and as president of Mothers Advocating for School Kids, an advocacy organization.
Cherry said she decided to apply for the vacant seat because she believed many Wilmington families felt too intimidated to attend school board meetings.
She said her experience of listening to different parents’ perspectives would benefit the board because “they’ll be able to have an actual voice that’s been in it, that is in it, that lives it every day to kind of help them shape policy.”
Lewis said he feels it is important that the board has a voice for students with disabilities and gifted students.
He also said his experience working as a teacher at the Delaware School for the Deaf helped him gain a perspective about things the district can do to better support students who are deaf or hard of hearing.
“It’s important to have someone who has that actual teaching experience and can kind of brainstorm and go through the critical thinking and making those decisions, based not just on my knowledge, but also my experiences,” Lewis said.
A tumultuous district
Whichever candidate wins the appointment to the board, they’ll be entering a district that has faced a string of controversies.
Most recently, in December, Troncoso cited transparency concerns and discriminatory conduct, among other areas, as reasons for her resignation.
“The chaos and contention surrounding Christina’s board are not new — they are historical,” Troncoso wrote in a press release at the time. “The environment itself makes it incredibly difficult for any board member, past or present, to create meaningful change. Without transparency and shared accountability, the work becomes performative rather than productive.”
Troncoso’s resignation came just three days before the board was set to fill another vacancy – one that opened because a previous board member, Naveed Baqir, had been living outside of the country in Pakistan.
Ultimately, only one candidate ended up seeking and securing that seat – the president of Delaware’s union of teachers and other educators, Stephanie Ingram.
Nakishia Bailey, an earlier candidate for the seat, had previously dropped out of contention, stating she was “unsettled by a recent board resignation and comments,” in a reference to Troncoso’s situation.
