Bank of America intends to increase its Delaware workforce by 500 jobs. The banking giant is also donating one of its Wilmington office buildings for use by existing or newly-created charter schools in the state. Bank of America officials and Governor Jack Markell (D) made the announcement Thursday in Wilmington.

Gov. Markell says the decision to add jobs in Delaware is an endorsement of the quality of the state’s workforce and Delaware’s commitment to the type of jobs the financial services industry supports.
Thére du Pont, president of the Longwood Foundation, saluted Bank of America for making “an impressive, thoughtful, impactful donation” of an office building at 12th and French Streets for use by charter schools. Longwood will establish a separate non-profit organization, to be called the Community Education Building, to oversee the facility.

Delaware’s law governing charter schools ranks in the middle of the pack in a report recently published by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The state’s ranking fell from 18th place in the group’s 2011 report to 22nd this year, even though the General Assembly approved legislation last year after financial and management problems surfaced at two charter schools. Delaware “was surpassed by states that made more substantial changes to their charter laws,” the report stated.

Every employer would want to have a Kendall Massett on the payroll.

“I love my job. I love my job. I love my job,” she says. “I love getting up in the morning. This is not work to me.”

Massett, a 42-year-old mother of two who lives in Holly Oak, is bringing her enthusiasm to the Delaware Charter Schools Network, a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 to promote and advocate for the state’s 22 public charter schools. She took over as the organization’s executive director in January.

Numbers alone do little to explain why nearly 1,500 students dropped out of school last year, and state reports may not accurately reflect the actual status of those students.

According to the Delaware Department of Education, 1,442 students dropped out of school, 71 fewer than the year before, continuing a three-year decline to 3.7 percent of First State students dropping out of high school.

Some of those “dropouts,” may not have left school completely, administrators said.

State Rep. Debra Heffernan wanted to address the dropout problem in state high schools. Raising the age for mandatory school attendance to 18 from 16 seemed like the way to go, so she drafted the legislation over the summer. The bill was introduced in Dover January 12 without much fanfare.

Less than two weeks later, Pres. Barack Obama made the State of the Union address and brought more attention to Heffernan’s bill than she ever expected.
While Rep. Heffernan has since suggested the bill be tabled, discussion about the the merits of such legislation and what it should look like continues.

Dianne Vickery has been working for Girls Inc. of Delaware and its predecessors for nearly 40 years. She remembers the days when girls would fill the organization’s Dennison Branch in Wilmington’s Browntown neighborhood, eager for more instruction in the 3 R’s, etiquette lessons and training in homemaking skills.

The Dennison Branch is still open, albeit with less focus on “readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic,” and not nearly as crowded as in years past. And Vickery, the program director for Girls Inc., is spending more time on the road.

Diamond Pinkston is 14 years old, a ninth-grade honor student—and a new mother.

On a recent morning, the New Castle teenager brought her six-week-old daughter to school. Diamond placed the baby on a table in the school office, sniffed her ruffled turquoise pantaloons and wrinkled her nose.

“Time for a change,” she said.

At Diamond’s school, the Delaware Adolescent Program, Inc., or DAPI, how to change a diaper is part of the curriculum, along with English, science, math and social studies. Founded in 1969, the private, nonprofit organization is the only statewide comprehensive school-based program in the nation for pregnant and parenting teens and their families.

The State Department of Education hasn’t announced any legislative priorities for this year yet, but the House and Senate Education Committees didn’t waste any time getting down to business as the 146th General Assembly opened its second session last week.

The legislature returned for business on Tuesday and the Education Committees held a joint session Wednesday afternoon, listening as Lillian Lowery, secretary of education, and some of her top advisors offered an update on current efforts to develop a new system to assess teacher performance under the state’s Reach to the Top plan.

Sooner or later, any extensive discussion of school finance reform in Delaware will get around to a subject that seems to be the third rail of state politics: reassessing real estate property values statewide.

With its multiple employee classifications and various categories for non-personnel spending, complex formulas for each, and numerous rules for waivers and exemptions layered on top, Delaware’s school finance laws may seem to be as befuddling as the federal tax code.

“It’s not easily understood in an age when we really want a lot of quick, easy transparency,” said Karen Field Rogers, associate secretary for finance reform and resource management at the state Department of Education.