Bryan Stevenson School delays opening

The Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence in Georgetown will delay its planned opening this school year.

Secretary of Education Mark Holodick has approved the school's request to change the opening to the 2024-25 school year.

The charter school was slated to open for sixth- and seventh-graders this fall. School leaders requested the change to allow more time to attract students.

Delaware law states a charter school must have 80% of its enrollment by April 1 to operate the following academic year. The school is 76 students short of its April 1 goal of 200 students, school leaders said in their request for the delay.

If the school is able to attract the needed students over the coming year, the new opening date will be September 2024.

The 124 students who had enrolled in the school for this fall can attend their home feeder schools for the 2023-24 academic year or apply to choice into another school with remaining capacity. Although the school choice application deadline was in January, the delayed opening is considered “good cause” under the law to allow the students to participate.

The school will be housed in the former Howard T. Ennis School on the Delaware Technical Community College campus. The board is leasing the school from Delaware Tech.

The tuition-free charter school is named after Bryan Stevenson, who was born in Milton in 1959 and graduated from Cape Henlopen High School.

He is a lawyer, professor at New York University School of Law, and founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He has assisted in cases that have saved dozens of prisoners from death row and was profiled in the hit movie “Just Mercy.”

Stevenson initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., which honors the names of each of more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the 12 states in the South from 1877 to 1950.