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Teacher force
expanded to
meet increased enrollment
With the largest increase in
enrollment in more than a decade, Brandywine School District has
hired 38 new teachers and specialists for this academic year.
Superintendent Mark Holodick told Delaforum that a difference in
qualifications to meet present needs required taking on new
people while only half of the 23 teachers laid off at the end of
the 2009-10 year were recalled. Chief financial officer David
Blowman told the school board on Sept. 27 that most of the
previously reported increase of nearly 300 in the number
of students was in grades four through eight. He said it
reflected fewer students going to charter schools and more
coming into the district under the school choice law.
Board member Ralph Ackerman
reported that the Delaware School Boards Association intends to
press the General Assembly to exclude school construction from
the state law which requires paying workers so-called
'prevailing' wages. That not only will lower the cost of such
projects but also lessen competition from out-of-state workers
attracted here by higher wages and "provide more jobs for
Delawareans," he said. It was announced at the meeting that
W.M.P.H., the Mount Pleasant High f.m. radio station, which went
off the air in June, is expected to be back in service by late
January or early February. "It's finally going to be a
student-centered radio station ... which is what it should have
been all along," Holodick said. |