Why Should Delaware Care?
The allocation and spending of millions of dollars awarded to Delaware through a settlement with drug manufacturers has been rife with scandal. With the program now revamped, many localities are spending their share of the funds on police departments and isolated drug recovery resources. But Seaford’s more comprehensive approach has leaders feeling optimistic and could serve as a model for other municipalities.
The city of Seaford, the post-industrial, former DuPont nylon-capital in western Sussex County, has consistently struggled with gun violence and drug misuse incidents.
Community leaders say the city’s rural, post-industrial nature makes it difficult for kids to find productive ways to use their time outside of school. This, in turn, begins the cycle of using drugs and engaging with gun violence at a young age.
After having dealt first-hand with these challenges in his community for nearly three decades, Seaford Police Chief Marshall Craft saw an opportunity for change: funds from Delaware’s Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission (POSDC).
“There’s a saying out there for the definition of insanity: ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always gotten,’” Craft, who has served as police chief since 2019, said. “This [project] is a way for us to find some more permanent solutions to a problem.”
The POSDC is a state-run group that distributes millions in funds from legal settlements with drug manufacturers to municipalities and other local organizations around the state.
Following a year and a half of planning, Craft has coalesced a handful of local organizations from the drug recovery, community health, youth outreach and homelessness spaces to direct more than $1 million in opioid dollars toward a vision of change in Seaford.
That vision, Craft said, includes standing up a new team of drug recovery outreach specialists, updating a well-trafficked city park to be safer and more appealing to kids and encouraging collaboration between law enforcement and other community organizations.
Building a community hub
Seaford, a city of 8,400 people, has seen three fatal shootings in the past 18 months — two of which involved victims under the age of 25. It also falls at the bottom of the list of median income and school district outcome rankings in the state.
“Young people say, ‘You want us to do these positive things, but you take away our basketball courts. There’s no youth programming for us,’” said Jalyn Powell, a youth-focused community activist and founder of nonprofit organization OUTLOUD DE.
Nutter Park is one of the few open spaces in Seaford where kids gather to play on the sports courts and use the playground equipment.
It also, however, was the site of a high profile homicide in the spring of 2025, and is where people often gather to do drug exchanges, Craft said.
In an effort to change the role the park occupies in the community and create a greater sense of safety, project leaders are directing $90,000 from the city’s local government POSDC allocation — which the city will receive for at least the next decade — to update its basketball courts and add lighting and cameras to the area.
The project is based on the concept of crime prevention through environmental design, or improving lighting and aesthetics in a community to reduce crime. Other communities in Delaware, including the neighboring town of Laurel, have also used the model.
The city just kicked off construction in August, and Craft said he expects the work on the courts to be finished this fall.
Meanwhile Powell, who works in local schools and the Chandler Heights apartment complex which neighbors the park, is joining the initiative to turn Nutter Park into what city leaders are calling a “Prevention Hub.”
For Powell, this means expanding youth dinners, camps and other prevention programming in the East Seaford area, where the park and apartments are located.
Powell and her group, OUTLOUD DE, have been doing prevention programming in several schools around the state for the better part of a year. During that time, Powell said she consistently has gotten feedback that kids want more “structured spaces,” like sports courts and parks.
As the self-described “boots on the ground” part of the initiative, Powell said her focus is providing kids with “positive alternatives and youth programming” about the risks of substance use and taking care of their mental health that they are unlikely to learn at school or at home.
“There’s a lot of stigma in the community, as it relates to help seeking, healing and health as a whole,” she said.
Seaford High School sophomore Laela Taylor-Brown, who has been participating in the youth program for the past year, said she’s learned how to better “cope with my mental health,” instead of turning to drinking or drugs, as she did before.
Taylor-Brown said she found the program so useful that she is now serving as a peer advisor, leading sessions with other kids in the community about stresses in their life and drug use prevention.
“Doing OUTLOUD helped me realize I have a bigger village than I thought,” she said. “I have a family now.”
Despite Powell and the police department’s initiative in Nutter Park just beginning.
Craft said he is already awash with more ideas of how to infuse prevention and a positive law enforcement presence into the park.
These ideas, which Craft said are his passion projects after work hours now that his kids are out of the house, include a police athletic league, a Nutter Park-themed coloring book and musical instrument playground equipment for the less athletically inclined kids.
Resources and recovery
While Powell and the police department work to reach youth through Nutter Park, Seaford also has a plan to address adults’ needs through a new team of case managers helping to connect individuals with drug use, mental health and homelessness challenges to services.
This work is being administered by a new organization called the Seaford Community Opioid and Substance Use Disorder Response Initiative, or SCORI, with three employees doing daily outreach to individuals in Seaford.
SCORI is a collaboration between the Community Collaboration of Delaware, an organization that provides recovery services primarily in New Castle County, the Seaford Police Department and the University of Delaware Center for Drug and Health Studies to direct nearly half a million dollars toward drug use recovery in the community.
Some of the funds and resources are also being funneled through the Delaware Rural Health Coalition — formerly the Sussex County Health Coalition — which works to address individuals’ barriers to receiving healthcare in rural areas like Seaford.
Samantha Parker, a Seaford native who has been in drug recovery herself for fourteen years, is SCORI’s program manager.
Parker said she and the other two outreach coordinators, who are also in recovery, have spent the two months since the program launched going into woods encampments and other hotspot locations around the city to introduce themselves and begin connecting people with the appropriate resources.
“Going out there every day, I want to be the person I wish I had when I was out there,” Julie Montuori, one of SCORI’s other peer outreach specialists, said.
Parker and Montuori described the broader collaboration as valuable because it allows them to efficiently communicate with Seaford Police to work with the court system and get individuals’ court orders dropped. This can streamline people’s ability to go straight into drug recovery treatment, instead of getting bogged down with minor legal charges.
SCORI also has its office in Redemption City, a homeless shelter and day center in Seaford, which the pair said helps them get individuals in contact with homelessness or housing resources.
Though the outreach team just began work in August, the data collected thus far by the University of Delaware shows the new approach is effective.
As of Sept. 12, the team had served 55 clients, 13% of whom agreed to go to a drug treatment program. Emalie Rell, a scientist at the UD Center for Health and Drug Studies said that percentage was a “phenomenally high” number.
While Rell said it’s too early to draw anything conclusive from the data, she said the numbers indicate that the majority of individuals being served by SCORI have a combination of substance abuse, mental health and housing needs, which makes the collaboration between organizations more valuable.
Long term outlook
Craft has a palpable excitement for the Nutter Park and SCORI projects, and seemingly endless ideas for future initiatives to add.
He used artificial intelligence to create a series of “pep songs” about the projects, which he played at a late-August Nutter Park ribbon cutting, that featured lyrics such as “Seaford strong: no drugs, no violence. That’s our stand, healthy choices across the land.”
In spite of his and other community leaders’ positive momentum with the initiative, they acknowledged that it largely remains to be seen what, if any, impact it will have on the crime and drug use numbers in Seaford.
Nonetheless, Craft pointed to consistently dropping crime numbers from 2023 through 2025 as evidence that Seaford is headed in the right direction. Aggravated assault charges dropped by 56% over the two year period, while drug arrests dropped by 43% and theft by 28% over the same time frame.
“It’s improving quality of life, reducing crime, reducing crashes, improving pedestrian safety and community awareness, all in there,” Craft said.
Other state leaders are also taking note of the model and way of using opioid dollars.
Brad Owens, executive director of the POSDC, said he has not seen any other local government take “such a coordinated way” of combining recovery support, homelessness services and the police department in its application of opioid settlement money.
Owens said Seaford, like all participating municipalities, needs to do monthly and quarterly reports of how it is spending its allocation, and what the data is showing about changes to overdose rates, 911 calls and gun shot incidents as a result of the programming.
Still, he said there is excitement from other localities in Delaware, like the city of Wilmington, about implementing a program modeled by Seaford’s.
“Everybody is watching this,” Owens added. “We will use it to inform how we respond to other local governments in the future.”
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/.
