A student from the Charter School of Wilmington described the sense of community at his school, and the concern that this committee might break up that community that is very important to the school.
I didn’t expect the Charter School of Wilmington issues to come up so fast in the whole Wilmington Education Improvement Commission/redistricting initiative, but I’m glad the elephant in the room was addressed in the first Charter and District Collaboration Committee meeting. The minutes from the September 23rd meeting, seen below, show many of the concerns surrounding the whole charter/traditional conversation from both sides of the aisle.
The one part that was brought up was the whole nature of a “consortium” for the Wilmington charters which was brought up in the original WEAC report (or book if you have it, there are a few thousand of these floating around Delaware). A commenter made the following statement:
The recommendation in the WEAC report is on collaboration in the form of a consortium. It is important to focus time around that, and decide if a brand new consortium is necessary or if you should work with the existing Charter School Network and Innovative Schools. We need to embrace the existing options and use the organizations we have, and determine what target we are aiming at.
Yeah, I don’t know if I can recommend Innovative Schools as a role model these days. They have their hands full with the schools they are operating in. And we all know what is going on with Delaware Met. To have the Delaware Charter Schools Network running the show is also a recipe for disaster. They have not shown a true willingness to work with traditional school districts and this has caused a lot of angst with the issues. Especially when it comes to equity among the two and legislation to even the playing field.
There are lots of other interesting and conversation-starting bits in here.
The Season Of Myths 
“[The Delaware Charter School Network has] not shown a true willingness to work with traditional school districts.” Assuming for the sake of argument that that’s true, have the traditional school districts shown a true willingness to work with the charters? Doesn’t working together need to involve both parties?
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Linda, you are getting into a whole chicken & egg argument. I believe the districts have a valid beef w/charters based on the whole funding issue. If the state funded charters the way they do vo-techs, by line items, I think you could see more collaboration, but until something along those lines changes it probably won’t happen with either side. Except for the Rodel/Vision kiss-ass crew.
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I wonder why?
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Charter “success” has nothing to offer but cherry-picking, that’s all it is. The WEIC plan bakes charters into the proposed solution. But charters are not part of the solution – charters are part of the problem.
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