Why Should Delaware Care?
In December, the Delaware’s education secretary announced that she was placing the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence under formal review due to enrollment concerns. It marked marking the second time in two years that the charter school had been placed under formal review. On Tuesday, state officials was recommended that the school’s charter be revoked.
Delaware education officials on Tuesday recommended that the state close a Georgetown charter school due to its persistent struggles with low enrollment.
If approved, the closure of the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence (BASSE) would be the first for a Delaware charter school in seven years and the first to be closed by state regulators in a decade. It would also leave Sussex County with just two charter schools, compared to six in Kent County and 15 in New Castle County.
In 2016, the state Board of Education revoked the charter of the Delaware STEM Academy. In recent years though, most shuttered charter schools have voluntarily closed due to enrollment or finance concerns, although they have often come under pressure from regulators.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently operated by their own board of directors. They are not eligible to receive taxpayer dollars for facilities and capital projects, but do receive state funding for each enrolled student.
The tuition-free schools feature specialized missions or academic curriculums that differ from traditional public schools, and that requires them to maintain certain enrollment levels and reporting duties to the state Department of Education, which issues their founding charters.
The closure recommendation from the Charter School Accountability Committee now goes before Delaware Education Secretary Cindy Marten, who will announce a final decision about whether to revoke BASSE’s charter of the on March 19.
If she does revoke the charter, the school – which in recent months has served about 120 sixth through ninth graders – would close by the end of this academic year.
On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Marten said the secretary will make her decision after considering “the full record, which will include public input collected at the upcoming public hearing,” on March 9.
Get Involved
The public hearing about the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence is scheduled for 5 p.m. on March 9 at the William A. Carter Partnership Center at DelTech in Georgetown.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, the school said it did not agree with Tuesday’s decision and is committed to remaining open.
But “we understand it was the decision (the committee) felt they needed to make with the information they had,” the school stated.
Named after the prominent civil rights attorney who was born in nearby Milton, the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence was founded in 2018.
The school’s inaugural academic year did not start until the fall of 2024, in part because it had struggled to attract enough students, according to a 2023 report from Delaware Public Media.
Among the founders of the school was Delaware lawmaker Rep. Alonna Berry (D-Milton). She declined to comment on Tuesday about the charter school committee’s recommendation. In an interview in 2021 with Delmarva Life, Berry said the school carried a service-learning mission, in which students would learn by going out into their communities.
She also noted then that the school had received a $1 million grant from the du Pont family’s Longwood Foundation to help finance the construction of their facility in Georgetown, west of U.S. Route 113.
Editor’s note: The Longwood Foundation has also funded Spotlight Delaware.
‘Enrollment has decreased’
During the tense, three-hour-long meeting on Tuesday, charter school accountability committee members expressed particular concern about the school’s ability to grow, or even maintain enrollment levels.
Speaking to school staff directly, committee member Brook Hughes noted that “every single snapshot that we’ve taken of your enrollment has decreased.”
The committee members also discussed a recent survey of existing students’ families that showed about half of them were not certain they would return to the school for the next academic year.
In response, school staff explained that they struggled to convince families to respond to the survey. They argued that an announcement from Marten in December that the school would be placed under a formal review caused some parents to feel uncertain about their kids’ future at the school.
The state describes the formal review process as a “lawful investigation of a charter school” that could include on-site visits, records inspections and interviews of parents, and staff.
The subsequent review involved public meetings that included Tuesday’s gathering, where frustration was expressed by both members of the committee by school staff who were in attendance.
Toward the end of the meeting, Charter Schools Network Executive Director Kendall Massett spoke openly about the visible frustration while noting that authorizing and regulating charter schools “is not easy.”
“It’s not supposed to be because we have children that we are responsible for as authorizers,” said Massett, who serves as a non-voting member of the Charter School Accountability Committee.