House District 1 Primary Conversations: Nnamdi Chukwoucha & Shané Darby

I mean, being in elected office, it’s never accomplished.

There’s always a new challenge and general politics is deciding who gets what, when, and where. And sadly, if we don’t have strong voices for the city of Wilmington, everyone in the legislature downstate Kent, Sussex, they believe that, and even parts of New Castle County believe that Wilmington gets too much already.

So we have to constantly fight for everything. So we truly need a strong voice that’s capable, that can truly legislate to be there in Dover. And without that, trust me, the city of Wilmington will lose. We definitely will lose. So we have to keep a strong voice in the House of Representatives.

I guess the easiest way to start is, of course, we used to have our own school district.

We lost our school district, and originally we went to a single district model, the New Castle County Consolidated District. Then within a year or so, it was transformed into what this current system that we have, this four-district model. And it’s been about 48 years, and it’s been a complete, utter failure.

That changed in 2000, when there was a state representative who didn’t want his child bused into believe it was Sarah Powell School at the time. So he changed the law in 2000 with the Neighborhood Schools Act, which said that every student should go to the schools that’s closest to them. Many advocated against it including city council at that time, the mayor — everybody said that it was not the best thing to do.

State legislators passed it anyway.

And here we are 26 years later with exactly what people warned of: a city full of high-need, high-poverty schools that are over-concentrated with African American students. Most of our tenured educators are in suburban schools. And we’ve basically created a system of failure.

So when Sen. Lockman and I came into office prior to Redding there, when I was on city council, we created the Wilmington Education Strategic Think Tank (WESTT), and there were a couple other groups. And so we came into the legislature looking to address this issue of the Neighborhood Schools Act.

So Redding has started there, saying we don’t want four districts anymore. So we started that work. Sadly, we ran into COVID before our first plan was due to be submitted, and so it delayed us. And we did a lot of work dealing with the inside in terms of teacher recruitment and retention, and ensuring that we had qualified teachers inside of our schools.

But the most important thing, we created a plan in which we were addressing how can we get rid of this four-district model. And it was all the way up until last year. We had an interim plan which we had three options, six options, and then we narrowed it down to three. And then last year in December, we voted as a consortium that we wanted to move back to the New Castle County Consolidated School District.

So that vote in December gave us basically a year to come up with a plan. So of course we’re eight months into that, and we’re working with a consultant, AIR, who also did the funding reform work with our state to come up to create our plan for implementation about how we can go back to a New Castle County Consolidated School District.

Teachers are paid differently. There’s a different standard of success in each of our four districts, and it varies in each district. We wanna go back to having just one clear standard of success for all of New Castle County students, Wilmington included.

So that’s what Redding is about, and it’s a big fight. We know it’s not one that can be taken lightly, because right now many districts think that their schools are doing OK. I think our best public high school is at 50-something percent proficiency rates, but many districts think they’re OK.

But they’re really not, and we believe the education, I mean, truly statewide, but definitely in New Castle County, can be better, and we think a consolidated approach is the approach to take.

Well and it depends on where you stand. The former representative, Earl Jacques, who led the education committee when I first joined the General Assembly, he staged a task force, and that task force was to look at consolidation. And they came back with a result after a year of meetings saying basically Delaware doesn’t need to consolidate school districts, because many of the small school districts will be absorbed and those school districts really encompass the, their communities. That, like, they make up their communities, and if we lose those school districts, those communities will be absorbed.

Even in this four district model we have basically a competing system within Red Clay, Brandywine, Colonial, Christina. You have suburban schools competing against the city schools. And it’s basically unfair because the city always loses. So we have to change it. Of course, they don’t want it to change, but it has to change for us because we have some schools with single-digit proficiency rates.

We have teachers who start at the beginning of the school year, and they’re gone before November. Every year before Thanksgiving they’re gone. Every year. And then every year there’s this high turnover in our schools. We really have to have a system that is one of equity and fairness and treats every school the same.

Currently, right now, we don’t have that. And I know that suburban legislators outside of the city of Wilmington don’t think this is their fight. They don’t because their schools by the way they view it are doing fine. They think it’s fine at 50%. They think it’s fine at 30% or 35%.

Yeah, that’s better than what we have in the city at eight or nine or 19 or 20. Yes, it’s better, but we as a state can do better. And I think if we begin to accept the standards where we are now, then we’re failing our children.

Absolutely I will. And I truly believe that we had this conversation during the argument, and sadly, I don’t think any of my comments were ever printed in the articles that were presented. But the thing to me was that this closure, we used to have these community work release programs up and down our state.

We had one in Kent, in Sussex. In Dover they had Morris. The previous governor had already started shutting these programs down because of a different model that they were implementing within DOC to provide more services and more programs for job learning and opportunities for work release, and also skill development inside of our prisons.

So that model was already changing. So individuals weren’t being sent to this program like they were. Then once they closed Morris, I think maybe eight or 10 years ago now, Plummer was already on the list to be closed. It was already on the list. They had already reduced the number of people who were going there.

So the population has changed. You don’t have that many people through the courts being sent there. So it can hold 200 people, but we only had 80 people there. Out of those 80, 20 of them were going to work, and the majority were working at the Food Lion and the ShopRite down at the Riverfront.

Between the two supermarkets, there were 20 people working. So that means 60 people were sitting inside that building every day, and we had 68 staff members, so fewer than the one-to-one ratio. And many people didn’t know that even inside of that building, they weren’t even doing simple things like resume development.

There was no skill development, no training happening inside of the building. So the men were actually, it was a disservice to our men rather than being helpful. Right now, the outside of the Smyrna Prison, there’s a work release program where they’re in training programs for HVAC, they’re in training programs for car wrapping, there’s butchering and all these other skill developments that they didn’t have access to here until in Wilmington.

I do. I think the intent behind it was for situations like this, where there was tension more in particular in the local level, but how it could separate it and truly give our Department of Justice that opportunity to be involved, and I fully look forward to the investigation.

So I know I look forward to this investigation. I mean, it’s an area, I mean, some people read names in the newspaper, and you hear it so much you think you know the person, but I really know the young man. I know the young man. I know his family. When I was a youth director over at Kingswood, he was a young man that would come to Kingswood Community Center with his cousins, Nasir and Asia, so I know him.

And just like my family, this grief is something you never let go of. You never let go of. It’s unfair. It’s unfortunate when we lose young men in any kind of way, in any kind of way. So I really have my heart in the right place and believe that justice will be served, and that was the intention of creating this office.

I don’t see any directly right now as a result of the shooting, but in terms of LEOBOR, I think that we, the Black Caucus in particular, when we had our African American Task Force, we had a whole Police Accountability Task Force that met for over a year. They came up with recommendations.

There was a separate task force that dealt specifically with LEOBOR. I know there was a compromise, basically, a solution that was worked out in terms of the legislative approach.

So again, as I said on every topic we mention, you never get it right. There’s always the opportunity for improvement, so I believe there is definitely ways in which we probably can look at this topic and things that happened.

But I think then the investigation itself will tell us if there were shortcomings and things that we need to address in terms of officer conduct, and I believe it’s just on us.

I really believe that we as a community, the way in which we raise our voice, the way in which we state our sentiments, and the way in which we look at to our elected officials and also our law enforcement and how they protect our community and engage in our community is how we create the change that we wanna see.

I think that the most sternest difference between she and I is the ability to legislate and to truly legislate from a community-based perspective. And those similarities you mention, even there are a lot of glaring similarities between there, because my time on city council was spent legislating and truly trying to understand what it meant to represent my city.

And when I felt I did that and I understood that, what it meant to represent my city, then I said, “I can help my city more at the state level.” So I understood city council. I don’t think right now [she has] any understanding of legislation. I think the difference between she and I is that I’m a legislator.

Her city council bills haven’t passed, and you wanna know why? Not that there aren’t some ideas that have some merit, but it’s about legislating. It’s really about legislating. It’s about understanding both sides of the argument, not just going in. There’s a difference between advocating and legislating. I think she’s a good advocate because she’s loud, but that doesn’t make you an effective legislator.

So you haven’t passed anything of substance in two years, and I think that’s the main difference: knowing what it takes to legislate; knowing what it takes to sit down in a room with those who you disagree with. You look at her water bill issue. It’s like she only looks at it from one perspective, and I get it.

We’re all standing up for the constituents we represent. But you can’t have pretty much an unfunded mandate where you’re putting the city in harm’s way.

It has to be a balance. You don’t understand, it’s just not fiscally responsible. So a lot of her legislation to me, or her so-called legislation, I think is half-baked. I think it’s not grounded in policy. They’re these very simplistic solutions to very complex problems, and that’s not how you legislate.

As a state legislator representing the City of Wilmington, that is an argument in itself because believe me, everybody’s against the city of Wilmington. But I have to be able to effectively work with individuals, suburban, rural, and outside of our city.

So we have to fight everything. You have to be able to legislate. So if you can’t pass bills in that body, what gives you the sense that you would even be anywhere near effective? I don’t believe she would be. So that’s why I’m fighting so hard to remain our state legislator because I believe I’m an effective voice as a social worker, a licensed master social worker with nearly 40 years experience.

I understand what we’re doing in our community. From my first day working in the Walnut Street YMCA at 13 years old to today, I understand our community’s needs and I fight for it every day. I love this city like no other place in the world.

I had no strategy my first time. I literally decided to run in July, got my name on the ballot, had to pull a team together, and do something, right? And I know that I beat him at the polls, and then when the absentee ballot numbers came in, that’s when I lost by 90 votes. I didn’t even think about absentee ballots.

So I know I will never raise as much money as Nnamdi and the PACs and everything that support Nnamdi in the work that he does. So I know I had to raise money early. I knew that I had to get my team early. I knew that I had to start earlier than him because of the resources and money that I don’t have in the same way as an established incumbent and someone who’s part of the Delaware way and the system that exists.

Let’s talk about policing or housing or tenants’ rights to council. I don’t know. There’s so many things I can think of that I would have done way differently than him. So we know rent stabilization he took a public stance with HB455 with rent stabilization in 2024, where he did not support it.

I support rent stabilization. As a city council person, I presented legislation. Tenants’ right to council, he opposed it, which was SB101, Tenants’ Right to Council in 2022 and HB181 in 2023, and those are things that I would support is tenants’ right to council. I also support unions and local hire and those things.

I’m also really for LEOBOR reform. So LEOBOR reform happened when he was a state rep, and it was real reform in the original legislation that was introduced, and a lot of the Black caucus members, which includes Nnamdi Chukwuocha, watered down the bill to the point where we now have a police accountability board with no subpoena power.

No real accountability can happen to police even with accountability boards, even though they were set up, right? So what he’s doing is introducing things but watering them down to not really have power to say it has been done, but it really doesn’t have the power. So those are some of the things I know that I would do differently.

And then he wants to call himself an education guru, right? He’s known for education, but when you look at the track record over the last eight years in office, there’s still too many kids who can’t read or do math. So I wanna look at education in a very different way than when he’s been looking at it in regards to making sure we get our kids’ reading and math scores up in the city of Wilmington.

Fewer than half can read on grade level, and only about one-third can do math, and he has been our state rep leader. He has been a mouth, a centerpiece for education. He was elected in 2018, and since then, student achievement has not improved for Wilmington families.

I think a lot of people’s like, “For your age, you have a lot of experience in different types of backgrounds.” So I think that we talked about me being in the military. I’m still in the military.

When I joined, I was a fueler. I fueled helicopters. I was able to go to different parts of the country and travel, and then I became a paralegal. So for the latter half of my military career, I am a paralegal. What a lot of people think about the military is, like, discipline, being able to work together with other folks to get things done.

Those are the type of things that I’m dealing with every day when I am at the military, right? Those really analytical skills that you need, the research skills that I have from being a paralegal, being able to understand law and legal, those things I’m able to do and able to bring to my experience as a legislator because one thing that I’m very big on is do I have the research and do I have the data to support what I am saying?

I was a child behavioral therapist. I worked specifically with children in Wilmington. I worked at Wilmington Job Corps Center, where I was able to work with 16 to 24-year-olds, specifically from the city of Wilmington, the place where I was born and raised. My family lives here. I’m interacting with kids who live here.

I am able to understand exactly what is happening in the community on the ground, in the most vulnerable populations and community, because of my own personal connections of being here and being from that community, and then also being able to serve in those capacities and different occupations. I’m able to see these kids in a very different light, right?

Because I come from these neighborhoods, and I understand. And then I think my education gave me the historical, it gave me the systemic, and it gave me the research and data and words that I can use that I know they know is happening, but they don’t know how to explain it in these scholarly words. I can do both.

I can maneuver in both communities, right? So that gives me a little bit more power, privilege, or resources to then advocate for where I came from. So I think, like, my experience gave me that, and I wanna use it for that. That’s how I want my experiences to be used.

Honestly, I think with me going to Dover, I can’t start off with rent stabilization, right? Those are the things I would love to start off with, rent stabilization, inclusionary zoning, a housing trust. I have to ease my way into and getting to know people down there. And one thing that has shaped me and, like my experience and background, is that I do a lot of advocacy around maternal healthcare.

So I think naturally I’m gonna go to that first. I have done a lot of, I guess, lobbying around maternal healthcare, so a lot of my relationship with Dover, with state legislators have been around maternal healthcare. And I don’t get a lot of push back unless it’s like abortion or something. But I honestly don’t get a lot of push back around that issue, and there’s a lot more work and things Delaware can do to improve the disparity rates that exist for Black families in the state of Delaware around maternal healthcare.

So I’m really interested in maybe easing my way maybe the first year and focusing on maternal healthcare. I’m really interested in incarceration, which is something I can’t focus on in a city council. It’s really looking at like the DOC. I’m looking at probation. I’m having those conversations with families who are impacted and coming up with legislation.

But I’m gonna hit them with the hard ones. They’re gonna get the legislation for housing trust, for rent stabilization. It is gonna come, but I also want to warm people up to me.

It didn’t heighten it for me, like, at all. I have been calling for police reform at every single moment when there weren’t any police shootings happening at the moment. I have been calling for it, right? And I have been pushing for it. So this is heightened for other people. It’s not for me.

I have been calling for reform. This recent incident hasn’t changed anything for me. It hasn’t shifted anything for me, and I know exactly when I become a state representative, I am interested in working with legislators on real LEOBOR reform, giving police accountability real subpoena power so that they’re able to really make decisions and change our police departments, right?

But I can’t say specifically what, but I know LEOBOR is definitely something I wanna look at with my colleagues to say, how do we keep it where there’s strong accountability measures in here and the public is protected? So I’m definitely going to be doing that.

Yeah, I believe in the meme. I believe exactly in the bigger conversation about policing and the history of this country and where it came from. I stand 10 toes on it. I’ll repost it today. I believe in the meme. I believe in the history and the facts of how policing started, its connection to white supremacy, its connection to the KKK, its connections.

I’ll say it every day. So that’s why it was reposted.

I don’t know what to tell them. I’m not biased. I am a historian. I state facts, and if facts bother you, that’s not much I can do for you on that issue. So I think it’s not a me problem, it’s a them problem. They need to learn history of this country, what happened. And it’s not all police.

There’s police officers that I speak to who are like, “Thank you for what you said at the press conference. Thank you for the work that you’re doing.” And those are a lot of Black police officers who are saying that to me. And so it’s not all police officers. It’s not all of them. It is the FOP and their small white supremacist group that they have.

It is not all police officers. Some of them believe exactly what I’m saying, and they understand and know the history of this country and the systemic things and what it has been connected to. So no, I am never apologizing for it. I am gonna stand 10 toes down. I will repost it every day. That is the history of the police.

That is the facts, and if they don’t like it, that is their problem. It has nothing to do with anything else about police officers, and if they think it’s biased, that is a them problem, not a me problem.

Yeah. Consolidation has to happen. But I think we need a Wilmington school district. If it’s one or two or three within the Wilmington area, I don’t know. Like, I’m open to the conversation on the arguments against one, two, or three. But even though consolidation and creating a Wilmington school district is so important, I haven’t heard the second piece of the conversation that is important for me, the culture of schools.

Like, we have to talk about how teachers are trained, how much teachers are paid, how are teachers teaching. We have to talk about behavior. How are we handling that in school? We can’t just say we’re gonna consolidate, put all these kids in one school, and then hope that the reading and math scores get better.

What services are in the schools? What’s the connection to the out-of-school programs? That conversation I’m not hearing. I’m just hearing consolidation, which is nice. I think we need a Wilmington school district. Our kids are too divided up in one little city. But there’s a bigger conversation that’s not being had about, okay, what else?

How do we change? For me, I call it the culture because all we’re doing is moving the culture currently, which is low reading, low math, high behavioral issues. All we’re doing is moving it into one district or two districts, whatever they decide on doing. So I am all for consolidation, but the other conversation has not been at the forefront for me.

I have relationships with people on both sides already from maternal healthcare. No shade to city council, but some of the people I’ve interacted with on the state level are actually like real legislators. Like, they’re really willing to have conversations and they’re willing to figure out things way differently. The culture is different.

I’m sorry, they don’t read on city council. Somebody on the Zoom once asked why was I saying, “What is the executive branch?” Like, I can’t.

I just feel like the culture is different down there in regards to negotiating. I have way more relationships down there from my maternal healthcare work, from Republicans to Democrats down there.

So I feel like I have a very different working relationship with a lot of the people who are on the state level due to my advocacy around maternal healthcare. So I think that helps me a lot.

I’m shocked you didn’t ask me about it, but we know that there is an ad from a political action committee that supports a lot of the state reps and current incumbents, including Nnamdi Chukwuocha, who has came out to talk about me owing thousands of dollars in taxes on a vacant lot. So I know you heard of that, right?

Yes, I’m shocked you didn’t bring it up. So we know that there are social media ads on streaming ads, they’re sending out mailers, like, every week and sending out text messages about it. So I do wanna talk about that. So the vacant lot that my incumbent or the PAC that supports my incumbent Nnamdi Chukwuocha, is talking about is actually a community garden that is located on Concord Ave in Washington.

I had bought it in 2019 with a friend of mine who I trusted at the time. And when I end up not becoming friends with that person anymore, COVID hit, and then I realized something was off with the paperwork that I had. When I went to a local attorney to help get it fixed, he was like, “There are still taxes on this from the county.”

And I was like, “Well, I wasn’t really a part of, like, the closing and all the other stuff that happened.” So I owed a few thousand dollars to the county and the city. And during that time, it was COVID. I didn’t have a job. And if I had to pick between feeding my kids and paying taxes on a garden, any day I’m feeding my kids.

I wanna tell them thank you because it is hard for me to ask for assistance or help, and it has been a space, a healing space for most because we do yoga, healing retreats there. It has been a space for the community, and I have never asked for a donation. And when people found out that the garden had past due taxes that hasn’t been paid, people began donating.

I raised over a thousand dollars from the community to put towards the taxes. As someone who just doesn’t ask for help a lot, I would have never publicly disclosed that.

I’m a regular working single mom of three trying to provide my kids with opportunities, paying my bills. I’m struggling. I almost had electricity cut off this year because the electricity went up so high over the winter. I am a regular working, single parent living in Wilmington.

The majority of people I am coming to at the doors, people I never met before, they’re saying, “I saw your commercials,” and I am more relatable. They understand what financial hardship is, how to fall behind on something.

I’m not hiding it, right? Yep, the majority of people who are at the doors are like, “I’m supporting you just because of that.” Right? That is what I’m hearing at the doors, that I am relatable.

I am a single mom of three, and I’m trying the best I can with what I got, and the majority of people from the city of Wilmington understand that.