Why Should Delaware Care?
While more than half of children attending the state’s schools are students of color, only 19% of educators are teachers of color. Despite the state’s efforts to better retain teachers of color, educators have noticed a lack of representation for students throughout the state.
With hundreds of job openings at schools statewide, districts straining to keep teachers in their schools year to year and a workforce that increasingly doesn’t represent the students they teach, educators of color are turning to each other for support.
They are creating new affinity groups across the state to help them deal with increasingly difficult classroom workloads, retain some of their most promising teachers and advocate for the support of the district’s staff and students.
Those efforts come as teachers of color are leaving the field at higher rates than their white counterparts.
The state saw a 3.5% dip in same-school retention rates for teachers of color in 2020, after having an 53.32% average same-school retention rate for teachers of color in 2019. Delaware then saw an average same-school retention rate of 54.06% for teachers of color in 2022, before it dropped back down again to just over 51.2% in 2023.
This problem isn’t unique to Delaware though. More than half of students in the United States identify as people of color, compared to just slightly more than 20% of public school teachers.
However, facilitators of affinity groups in the Red Clay Consolidated and Colonial school districts believe their affinity groups can help address the retention issue.
The isolation feeling
At the Red Clay Consolidated School District, Alena Chisolm and Irene Hairston have seen firsthand how affinity groups can provide support for the district’s teachers. Their district’s affinity group — which the education advocacy organization Rodel helped catalyze — meets four to five times a year.
The group releases a survey on teachers’ needs that’s based on previous data collected by the state. Much of their discussions are built off their survey data points, and the discussions are then split into participants and leaders. The group can also take their feedback to the district leadership anonymously.
Chisolm believes the COVID pandemic compounded a lot of issues that already existed in terms of teacher retention, like most teachers leaving before five years in the industry.
Throughout her career, Chisolm has worked in different “dynamic” and diverse schools where 90% of teachers and students were people of color. She noticed high teacher turnover in those environments though, as it can often feel like “you’re kind of in isolation, like you against the world.”
Without realizing she was starting an affinity group, Chisolm invited her coworkers to a social hour. As they continued to meet, Chisholm noticed the teacher retention rate rising.
“We just needed a safe space to talk about everything and anything,” Chisolm said. “People support each other a lot more. People felt good about coming to work because they felt like we can get through the day; we can support each other.”
Fewer than one in five teachers in Delaware schools are people of color, which can impact their reach to children of color. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
The demographic mismatch
Delaware State Education Association’s National Education Association (NEA) Director Gloria Ho understands the disconnect between teacher and student demographics.
The state has taken on different initiatives throughout the years to help address the lack of teacher diversity. One of the purposes of HB 430 was to stress diversity, equity and inclusion while recruiting, supporting and retaining candidates. The state has also made strong efforts to invest in high-retention pathways to teaching through initiatives like residency models.
But along with educator pay and safe working conditions, there has to be respect for educators to have better retention, Ho explained. People need to feel like they’re valued and heard.
“With minority educators, you also have that added layer of being in a space where most of your colleagues and administrators don’t look like you, and so we have to be really intentional about making efforts to figure out how to attract minority educators, and not only that, but to keep the ones that we do have,” said Ho, who is also the chair of DSEA’s Ethnic Minority Affairs Committee (EMAC).
Studies have shown that while having educators of color in the classroom can help combat negative stereotypes, Black students assigned to at least one Black teacher in grades K-3 are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to enroll in college than their same-school, same-race peers who did not have at least one Black teacher.
While all DSEA members are invited to participate in the EMAC community, the organization works to develop and maintain EMAC chapters in local unions throughout the state. The state’s chapter meets once a month to discuss issues that are relevant to minority educators and leaders with EMAC members offering input and perspectives from the communities they represent.
‘I see the changes coming’
Denise Williams’ EMAC journey began in the Milford School District, when she first got the chapter up and running, before moving onto the state level and helping the organization become a standing committee. Today, she is the EMAC chair of the Red Clay Consolidated School District.
One common concern for EMAC members is having minority representation throughout the district and the buildings, including representation for other minority groups like transgender people, Denise said. In 2022, Red Clay’s same-school retention rate for teachers of color was 64.2%, compared to 59.3% in 2023.
“In many cases, you’ll see the minorities heavy in the inner city schools, or Title I schools, and when you go to certain schools, you may see one or two. So that’s one thing we’re fighting, is for equal representation for our children, so they see themselves in the building,” Denise said of the district that covers downtown Wilmington to the Hockessin suburbs.
While her time spent making a difference through EMACs hasn’t always been easy, Denise has seen changes made within the district. She’s noticed the human resources department making their presence known at job fairs at colleges and universities in an effort to recruit more people of color.
While the changes are motivating, Denise believes she needs to “stay with this and continue the fight.”
“I see the changes coming, and I feel as though, if I start slacking, those changes aren’t going to happen,” she said. “If we start pulling back the force we’re putting out there, then they’re going to say, ‘Oh, the need’s not there anymore. We don’t need to do anything else,’ and that’s not what we want to happen.”
Affinity groups can provide safe spaces for colleagues to discuss their jobs and how race impacts them. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Creating safe spaces
After the Colonial School District began pushing for equity work in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Charla Williams and Devon Stockton met on the Colonial School District’s professional development team. Today, they are the lead trainers for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and non-BIPOC affinity groups.
The affinity group for educators of color is more of a healing space while the space for non-BIPOC educators, or the ally space, is for unpacking things they didn’t know or unpacking experiences in a safe space, Charla said.
Stockton, who is also a school therapist, said she leans on those therapy skills when facilitating ally spaces because people can become fragile when talking about race.
“Sometimes splitting people into affinity spaces lends to a safe feeling where people will open up a little bit more, be more vulnerable, than they will in a mixed space – especially if we’re talking about race,” Stockton said. “And then that provides me and the people who lead the ally spaces to do some education work in those spaces as well.”
The ally spaces typically end with Stockton telling participants to reach out to their colleagues who are educators of color “and let them know, ‘I see you, I hear you, what can I do? What do you need from me?’”
Affinity groups provide burnout relief
Studies have shown that kindergarten through 12th grade educators experience the highest burnout levels, and this sentiment is not lost on Delaware’s workforce.
During a professional development event, Chisolm was told to write down all the decisions she made in one day and determine how many were made in a split second.
She could not identify one decision that was made in a split second because she is constantly thinking about the different needs of her students that have to be met.
“I’m thinking about so many things, like, ‘Did [my students] eat? Are they hungry? Are they this? Are they that? Do I have something for the kid who can’t speak English?’” she said. “When you’re operating at your highest mental capacity all day long, because you have to service so many needs, you’re mentally exhausted and you’re physically exhausted.”
Teachers have to use every single minute of their work day, and often feel pressure to perform, Hairston added.
“I work on weekends. I get papers done. I have piles. If I let those piles go, then I have larger piles. If I let those grades go, then I have two weeks’ worth of grades. If you have 400 or 500 students, you miss two assignments, that’s almost 1,000 things they’re grading,” she said.
Both expressed that the affinity groups provide a space to feel support from other educators of color who are also experiencing a similar level of burnout. Hairston added that many leave the affinity group feeling more energized to continue giving their energy to their students.
Charla believes the reason why support spaces like these are gaining traction is because people see value in talking about mental health, and that for districts to maintain retention of teachers of color they need to have affinity group spaces.
“Teachers all over get burnt out, but especially Black and brown teachers, we get burned out a lot. We take on some of the hardest caseloads because we can deal with them, because we can relate to them,” Charla said.
DSEA works to build supports
While educators in districts like the Red Clay Consolidated and Colonial districts believe in affinity group spaces, other organizations are also working to address the issues surrounding retention.
DSEA, the state’s teacher union, also works to identify opportunities to strengthen and build supports and resources, said Jon Neubauer, the organization’s director of education policy. Much of that work is through the DSEA’s professional and leadership development programs, especially during districts’ professional development days.
“We work closely with the districts to bring in different kinds of trainings that that we can offer,” Neubauer said. “We’ve come in and done some trainings around shared decision making, keys to personal success, conflict management, dealing with difficult people, self care through wellness and some trainings around poverty awareness, just better understanding where our students come from.”
DSEA is also doing additional work through a grant they’ve received from NEA which has provided professional learning for the organization’s staff and members on topics like educator resilience and self-care.
The organization also received an education support professional (ESP) grant from NEA. The three-year grant allows DSEA to work with education support professionals to develop a Delaware ESP Bill of Rights, with the goal of increasing visibility rights and respect for that group, Neubauer added.
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