A Plan to Transform Delaware's Public Schools

1. Ensuring Equitable Funding

The top priority of the next governor must be addressing the massive inequities in our public schools by securing an additional $600 million to $1 billion annually. I am fully committed to enacting the recommendations of the Assessment of Delaware Public School Funding (AIR report) to ensure that students experiencing poverty, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities have equitable access to resources. This could be accomplished by retaining the unit-count base funding-level per student (since the AIR report shows that every single district is under-resourced) and establishing an additional statewide allocation or Foundation formula that is distributed transparently, predictably, and equitably to meet student needs. 

2. Meeting the Needs of All Students

• Invest in Community Schools with Wrap-around Services: Invest in community schools with wrap-around services, including healthcare and trauma-informed mental health services at all levels (expanding upon HB 100), before/after school programming, extracurricular activities, and parental/guardian participation. Expanding comprehensive wrap-around services in Wilmington schools will be particularly important, as the Redding Consortium prepares to recommend new district boundaries and the Wilmington Learning Collaborative recommends additional support for students and potentially new or reimagined schools in Wilmington.

• End Student Hunger: Provide universal school breakfast and lunch so every child is ready to learn (HB 125). We know that students who are fed perform better in the classroom and experience fewer behavioral challenges, which improves the working environment for teachers and the learning environment for all students.

• Enact Universal Pre-K: Provide universal pre-K for all 3 & 4-year-olds to meet every child’s physical, social, mental, and emotional developmental needs, so all students are prepared for kindergarten. If Florida, Georgia, and Iowa can provide universal pre-k, there’s no reason why only 7% of Delaware children are in pre-k today. This will help improve the socioemotional development and skill building of all students, so they are ready to learn in kindergarten and beyond. 

• Ensure Safe, Healthy Schools: Ensure all public schools have safe drinking water (no lead pipes, water testing for PFAS, nitrates, arsenic, etc.), clean air (no mold, asbestos, or particulate matter), and modern equipment for science and technology. Reduce facility and transportation operating costs and improve school health by displacing dirtier sources of energy through the adoption of energy efficiency measures, electrification, and solar power.

3. Improve Learning Environments for All Students by Improving Working Conditions for All Educators

• Restore Educator Autonomy: Empower educators to manage their own classrooms and trust their professional judgement to make the best instructional decisions for our kids and respond to the needs of their students. Respect educator autonomy by reducing the mandates, stopping the incessant micromanagement, and valuing their pedagogical and content expertise. Include and empower educator voices in all policymaking discussions.

• Increase Educator Compensation: Continue increasing compensation for all educators by accelerating implementation of the PECC recommendations and then ensure compensation remains competitive with neighboring states and respects all educators as professionals. Help ensure educators can afford to live in the communities where they serve by providing more assistance with rent, down-payments, or mortgages (and producing more affordable housing o). Guarantee that all promises made to active and retired educators for compensation, benefits, and pensions are kept.

• Ensure Appropriate Class Size and Adequate Duty-Free Planning Time: Improve learning conditions for students and working conditions for educators by reducing class size or adding co-teachers or paraprofessionals in classes with significant proportions of students with individual education programs or students requiring additional support. Ensure educators have more planning time to prepare lessons, grade assignments, and communicate with parents free of other duties. This requires solving the teacher shortage crises through improved compensation, improved working conditions, and removal of barriers that support professionals who want to serve as classroom teachers and specialists.

• Fully Decouple Test Scores from Educator Evaluation: The research is clear that standardized tests are not an effective measure of educator performance. While some improvements were made between DPAS-II and DTGSS, many examples are already emerging that DTGSS is not being implemented as intended with too many administrators not collaborating with educators to establish goals and instead defaulting to evaluations based upon test scores. Test scores should be fully decoupled from teacher evaluations to stop discouraging educators from serving in under-resourced schools and instead allow them to focus on high-quality instruction.

• Prohibit Discrimination: Protect all educators and students from any form of discrimination and ensure that schools prohibit discrimination based upon race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or economic status.

• Protect Labor Rights: Relentlessly defend the right to organize and to collective bargaining. Ensure that any educator affected by the potential redrawing of district boundaries – as likely to be recommended by the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity – is given the autonomy to decide where they want to work and the guarantee that any hard-earned contractual benefits and protections are not affected by any transition.