City schools debate dates back to battle over desegregation
The debate over how best to educate Wilmington children goes back more than 40 years.
“Schools are an outgrowth of the societies they sit in,” said Angela Perry of 4th-Dimension Leaders, who facilitated the Redding Consortium retreat. “Schools by themselves aren’t the problem or the solution. There’s an ethos here that we have to address and Delaware could do that now. First State in the union, one of the last states to desegregate.”
Christina schools in Wilmington encompass the downtown area and surrounding neighborhoods. They have large populations of low-income students and have historically been some of the lowest performing in the state.
Trent Sharp, a principal consultant with American Institutes for Research, said the current racial composition of most Wilmington city schools largely reflects the majority-Black student population from the early 1970s.
Lawsuits filed by Louis Redding — Delaware’s first Black attorney and a lawyer for the NAACP legal defense — played a critical part in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. But Delaware schools didn’t desegregate until 1978, when a court order forced busing, affecting almost all students in Wilmington. Some young people were bused over an hour to school from their homes. In 1981, the four city school districts were formed.
Forced busing ended by 2000 and state lawmakers passed the Neighborhood Schools Act, requiring students to attend the public schools closest to their homes.
The 1978 order on bussing and the 1981 creation of the city school districts failed to uncouple the tight pairing of race, place and educational opportunity.
Sharp said students attending their assigned schools are disproportionately Black, low-income and those with special needs.
“When you begin to look at educational opportunity, you see the distribution of students scoring a one or two in math and language arts, just very clearly, kind of correlates with racial patterns across the city and district,” he said.