Report: Delaware Schools Resegregating

Once among the nation’s most integrated, Delaware schools are rapidly resegregating, according to a report issued Friday by the UCLA Civil Rights Project.

 

“Delaware still is in a much better position than its neighbor across the Delaware River, Pennsylvania, and its neighbor to the south, Maryland, but it is clearly moving in the wrong direction and taking no action to prevent the crystallization of a new pattern of segregation,” wrote Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project and one of the report’s five authors.

The report notes that 15 percent of Wilmington schools are now “intensely segregated,” meaning more than 90 percent of students in those schools are minorities. There were no such schools in 1989-90, six years before the state lifted its court-mandated desegregation plan.

School segregation has been a hot topic in Delaware of late. Earlier this month, the ACLU filed a complaint alleging that the state’s charter schools have contributed to resegregation.