ALERT Collective Blog

In October 2020, the unjust educational funding formula used in Delaware schools appeared in the news as the Delaware NAACP, ACLU and other organizations announced that they had reached a settlement with the State of Delaware. This lawsuit was brought after various organizations spent 20 years lobbying the state legislature to overhaul the state’s 80-year-old funding system, which does not provide funding based on student needs.     Delaware’s history of unequal educational reform began with the ratification of the Delaware Constitution of 1897 , which codified the segregation of schools into law. Delaware was one of 17 states to have legally mandated the segregation of schools. The result was a separate educational system for African American children, and African Americans would spend the next 50 plus years struggling to address the issues of equality and separation in education. Beginning in the 1930’s the NAACP began a campaign to challenge school segregati...

  Food insecurity – defined by the USDA as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life” – has consequences greater than just hunger. When a person lacks a basic necessity such as food, they are often forced to make tough choices that negatively affect their living conditions, education, and health. In a 2014 study conducted by Feeding America, more than 65% of their households had to choose between food and utilities, transportation, or medical care. Nearly 80% of food-insecure people report stretching their food budget by purchasing cheap, unhealthy foods, leading to health issues such as obesity, gestational diabetes, anxiety, asthma, and anemia. Food insecurity is also linked to higher healthcare costs; a CDC study found that food-insecure adults spend an average of $1,834 more on annual healthcare than food-secure adults. Food insecurity typically accompanies other socio-economic stressors , such as low wages, poor housing conditions, depressio...

  Did you know that, for the last two years, it’s been legal to pay employees less than the state minimum wage? We’re not talking about tipped employees, either – though that is a separate issue that hasn’t been addressed since 1983 . In June 2018, Delaware’s Training Wage and Youth Wage were created as a bad-faith deal in the Delaware 149th General Assembly; an unsatisfactory compromise between the Democrats’ desire to continue increasing the state’s minimum wage based on cost-of-living increases to work toward a living wage, and the Republicans’ aim to protect businesses from increased costs of doing business. The initial minimum wage bill , introduced in January 2017, called for the Delaware minimum wage to increase by 50 cents per year from 2017-2020, then to be increased based on cost-of-living adjustments after 2020. When the bill was ultimately defeated in March 2018, a new bill was introduced a week later to simply increase the state minimum wage by 50 cents per hour ...

  There have been many articles and news segments comparing the lack of policing at the capitol riots of January 6th with the outsized show of force that Black Lives Matter protesters faced in the same city. It is clear that those that peacefully stood against white supremacy were brutally shut down , while those that committed insurrection in the name of white supremacy were free to return to their homes. Subsequently, many of the rioters were arrested and will, hopefully, face justice for their crimes. However, the discrepancy in response shows that white supremacist terrorists are treated better by the police than innocent black men and women. What is more troubling is how the media has always committed this same unfair treatment.  Time and again , newspaper headlines emphasize surprisingly positive qualities of violent white terrorists and mass shooters, while vilifying black victims of violence caused by the police . When presented with this pattern, one cannot help but...