DELREC works with students at every grade level in every county in the state of Delaware. We seek to increase knowledge of the law for all K-12 students and to remove barriers to entry into the legal profession. As such, we talk with a lot of public school teachers and a lot of students about their experiences in our schools. This article implores every professional to learn more about education in our state and provides suggestions for how to get involved. Education is an urgent concern and it falls upon all of us to do more for our students.

–Betsy Renzo, Esq., Executive Director, Delaware Law Related Education Center

In the early 2000s, Delaware’s public schools ranked roughly 23rd in the nation, or roughly around the national average.[1] Now our schools are near the bottom.[2] Many questions arise when we look at our current standing: Why did the pandemic impact Delaware more than other states? What is happening? And most importantly, what can we do to help? Three things will become clear in this article: 1) our highest-needs students are struggling the most; 2) they deserve our time and attention; and 3) we need to act now. Education is not, and cannot be, the sole responsibility of our teachers. Public education is our responsibility, all of our responsibility, and we can all do better.

Why did the Pandemic hit Delaware so hard?

Delaware, like many states, has a long history of law and policy changes attempting to provide a full and fair education for all.[3] Some initiatives were more successful than others, but for most of our public school students, scores started to decline after 2013. For our lower-income schools, what might have been a steady decline became more apparent during the pandemic.[4] We now know that learning loss was greatest amongst those with the most need.[5] This includes our English language learners, special education students, and students experiencing poverty and/or trauma.  Moreover, Delaware “has a higher relative concentration of low-income and multilingual learners compared to our neighboring states.”[6] This might explain why our overall scores on the national level appear comparatively low.

The good news is that our legislature and a few amazing groups in our state, such as the Vision Coalition,[7] Rodel Foundation,[8] Community Education Building,[9] the Wilmington Center for Educational Equity and Policy,[10] and the Redding Consortium,[11] are working on this.  The primary focus has been to restructure our funding formula so that the money allocated to a school depends on the type of learner, not on the number of learners.[12]

 

What is Happening?

I want you to imagine that you are an English teacher. Today, you are trying to teach students how to write a topic sentence for a research paper in 9th grade. You write an example on the board.. You have 25 students in your class.

  • You start by asking the class to take out a sheet of paper and a pencil. Only two students have pencils and none have paper.
  • Three students were late to school today and come in about 15 minutes after you begin teaching. To get them caught up, 3 more students give them their attention and notebooks to copy down what they missed.
  • You have 1 student who, when he is triggered, sits in a ball under their desk and shuts out the world. English is a trigger.
  • You have 3 English Language Learners, and no one to translate. They put their heads down and sleep because they cannot understand your lesson and google translate can’t keep up.
  • You have 5 students with specific IEPs (Individualized Education Plans). One requires that the lessons be repeated twice, one requires that lessons be typed out in advance so they can read along on their phone or chromebook, one requires that they be given guided notes, with lines under each explaining the reasoning, and two require that you outline the process separately on the board so they can follow along.
  • About 50% of your students have multiple ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). On this day, 3 students come to class upset. One lays down on the desk to sleep. One takes out their phone and plays music, placing their headphones on and putting their feet on the desk. The other cannot stop calling out in class. Eventually, after 20 minutes of class, someone tells them to “shut up,” and this causes the whole class to erupt in chatter and argumentation. You call your Dean of Students to come and help this student calm themselves down, but the Dean is busy with a rumor that someone may have brought a gun to school. You allow the student to step outside for 5 minutes to breathe.
  • One student is in the back of the class with their phone out, despite your rule that phones need to be in bookbags. You notice they are zooming in on something and writing things down. When you walk over and take the phone to look, it’s someone else’s chemistry test that they have a screenshot of, and the same chemistry test that they are filling in on their desk. You send them to the assistant principal for cheating and they are sent back 5 minutes later.
  • Then, the student you sent out earlier picks a fight with someone in the hallway. All of your students are now at the door watching. By the time you get them back into their seats, the bell rings for lunch.

You do this 6 times a day, spend the afternoon doing extra tutoring, then the evening grading tests, prepping your IEPs, prepping your lessons, and providing food for a student you know doesn’t have any. You try to have compassion for your students and hold them accountable, but this is impossible without support. You work 11 months of the year because your students lose a lot of their learning over the summer and their parents have to work. Your salary is $66,745.[13]

If you’re exhausted reading this, and thinking that driving for Amazon might be a lot less stressful, you wouldn’t be alone. I have seen every single one of the above happen in a classroom, many times all at once.

Our teachers are first responders, mental health practitioners, and conflict resolution facilitators, none of which they were trained to do. Schools are short on nurses, counselors, and behavioral specialists, and are increasingly getting blamed by parents and the public alike for failing to educate. Rather than placing blame on our schools, we all need to take responsibility for educating our youth.

Education is our responsibility, and not just because it’s the right thing to do; because we need critical thinkers for a thriving democracy; because “a rising tide lifts all boats;” because our economy, our bottom line, will increase when everyone is included in our workforce. And lastly, because we can. We are a small state with a lot of resources and there is no reason we shouldn’t be number one in education. So let’s do it already.

What Can You Do To Help?

Spend Time with Students and Teachers

“If no one has told you this today, success is not about your grades right now. It’s not about the mistakes you’ve made. If you decide right now that you want to be successful, you can do it and we can help. You just have to show up and try, on repeat.”

DELREC tells this to all of our students when we go to classrooms. We visit classrooms up and down the state delivering law-related education to K-12 learners. We find that the biggest difference between a thriving classroom and one that feels challenging is the students’ sense of self-worth. If they feel like school will get them somewhere, that they will go to college and/or be successful, then school is suddenly relevant. If they want to learn math because they want to be an electrician, school is relevant. If they don’t believe that school is relevant, then what is the point of trying? Too many of our students have already decided by the age of 11 that they have little self-worth. They stop trying because they don’t see the point. We need to change this, and the message needs to come from as many places as possible. Of course, it’s not as easy as this one message, but that’s even more reason for people in powerful positions to show them otherwise. We need to set the bar high, encourage students to keep showing up, and hold them accountable. They deserve at least this from the adults in their lives.

One thing DELREC has been doing this year is conducting workshops with lawyers and judges that meet our state law-related civics standards. Not only does this take the burden off of our teachers for that class period, not only does this teach students critical and transferable skills, but most importantly, it provides access where there may not have been any before. In every classroom we enter, we ask students “who knows a lawyer to whom they can ask questions about their career?” Frequently there are no hands that go up, at most four or five. We tell them that now, they have us. We open the door, and invite them to come in. We’d love for you to join us.

 

Talk to your Legislators

Our legislators are busy and have many competing demands. They must know that lawyers and businesses support public education. We have over 2 million businesses incorporated in Delaware.[14] They will thrive when our education system is thriving. Our economy, our health care, and the safety of our communities are all tied to education. You cannot care about these issues and not advocate for better education for tomorrow’s leaders.

Advocate for Teachers, Schools and Students

There are 142,495 students enrolled in Delaware’s public schools[15] with nearly 9,000 teachers.

Delaware is a small state with many resources. We can improve our education system. We can do better, and we must.

A Final Note

I am not the state’s expert on education, but I’ve worked in a lot of schools and connected with a lot of students, as a teacher, program leader, and parent. DELREC’s mission is to deliver law-related education to K-12 students so that they may thrive in a society based on the rule of law. My current capacity as Executive Director of the Delaware Law Related Education Center (DELREC) is to increase knowledge and opportunity for all of Delaware’s students. More than that, my personal vision is to empower our students to write their own laws and use their voices in our Democracy. I am motivated to do better for our students, and I implore you to feel and act the same.

–Betsy Renzo, Esq is Executive Director of the Delaware Law Related Education Center. She holds her J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law and her M.A.  in Education Policy from Stanford University.

[1] Nations Report Card – reporting on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores. State Profiles. 2022. (In 2022, Delaware 4th graders ranked 49th in math and 46th in reading amongst the 50 states in our nation) https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=2&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3

[2] Id.

[3] A brief history on Delaware education over the past 30 years, dating back to 1995, includes busing Wilmington students to four suburban school districts, the Charter School Act of 1995, the School Choice Act of 1996, Neighborhood Schools Act of 2000, a rise to 23rd in the nation in the early 2000s, the award of $100 Million in Race to the Top Federal funding in 2010, and then in 2020, a sharp decline in performance, exacerbated most in our state’s Title I schools, by the global pandemic (see chart below). The ACLU also filed and won a lawsuit in 2018 deeming our school funding formula inequitable for our state’s most underserved students.

[4] 2024 Kids Count Data Book. State Trends in Child Wellbeing. P.4. https://assets.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf-2024kidscountdatabook-2024.pdf

[5] 2024 Kids Count Data Book.

[6] Zammith, Julia. Rodel Foundation. Study Recommends Major Updates to School Funding System: A Look at the AIR Report. January 30, 2024. https://rodelde.org/look-at-the-air-report/; Additionally, roughly 44% of Delaware students have experienced at least one ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience), such as parental imprisonment, family economic hardship, or abuse. 2024 Kids Count Data Book, p.8.

[7] https://visioncoalitionde.org/

[8] https://rodelde.org/ataglance/

[9] https://cebde.org/

[10] https://wilmingtoncenterforeducationequity.com/

[11] https://www.solutionsfordelawareschools.com/

[12] Delaware’s funding formula is one of only a handful in the United States that still uses unit-funding rather than per-pupil funding. This means that the schools where there is a high percentage of English Language Learners, students with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and low-income students receive the same number of teachers as those with low percentages of these learners. A per-pupil formula, conversely, would look at individual student needs, and allocate funding to meet those needs. Our school leaders are currently left with less than 10% of control over their own school’s budget, which restricts their ability to meet their individual students’ needs. The ACLU’s 2018 case required that changes to the formula be considered, and technically, they have been.# Delaware commissioned the American Institutes for Research (“AIR”) to do an independent assessment of Delaware’s school funding formula. Legislation last year appointed a new Funding Commission, which will make its recommendations for the 2027 Governor’s budget. On the table is weighted student funding for certain high-needs learners and more flexibility for school leaders. In short, the money will follow the student, which will allocate more money to schools with higher needs students. An added bonus, there’s agreement that no School District will receive less than they currently receive. In short, the money will follow the student, which will allocate more money to schools with higher needs students. There is also agreement that no School District will receive less than they currently receive.

[13] The average in National Teacher pay for 2023. National Education Association: Rankings and Estimates- Education Pay Data 2023. https://www.nea.org/resource-library/educator-pay-and-student-spending-how-does-your-state-rank/teacher-2023

[14] Delaware Division of Corporations.  Annual Report Statistics. 2024.  https://corp.delaware.gov/stats/

[15] Delaware Department of Education. Student Enrollment and Unit Allotment Report for School Year 2024-2025. https://education.delaware.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024-25-unit-count.pdf