Lieutenant Governor's Blog

I was given the honor of speaking at today’s memorial to the state’s fallen law enforcement officers, across Legislative Mall from the state’s law enforcement memorial monument.  Here are the remarks I shared with the fallen officers’ families and with hundreds of officers from departments throughout the state.

We gather today to pay tribute to the men and women who lost their lives protecting the people of our state.  It is vital that we do so, not only to pay just homage to their memory, but also to remind ourselves of the dangers of police work and the need to appreciate and protect those who take up the mantle every day.

We gather today for only the third time within view of a physical monument to the state’s fallen law enforcement officers.  A new name has been hewn into its stone face since we last gathered, that of Joseph Szczerba, and each time that stone is cut our hearts are torn as well.  Each name represents a life snuffed out too soon, parents who without warning have lost children, spouses and siblings who have abruptly lost partners, children who have lost moms and dads.  Over the last three and a half years, at this event and others like it, I have seen some of these young people grow up in front of  me.  That is one of the most sobering parts of these events, knowing that they lost the guidance and love of a parent and that their brave parents were denied the joy here on earth of seeing their kids grow into such fine young people.  Some have become police officers themselves.  But we know that their parents are watching proudly from above.

The monument is important, but the bravery of our fallen speaks more loudly than any physical structure or speech I could give.  So it is important that we come here every year and share their stories – tell how they willingly placed themselves in harm’s way because they loved their neighbors and wanted to protect them.  And it is important that people understand that their heroism does not derive from the details of how they lost their lives, their heroism was displayed every day when they put on their uniforms and stepped into the breach. 

We thank the family members who are here – it cannot be easy, having such painful memories reopened, but your loved ones were heroes and we are grateful that you would come here to help us pay proper tribute to them.

The unsettling part of designing memorials like the one across the plaza is that they must leave room for more names.  Because we know that although we pray to be wrong, there will likely come a day when we will need to add another name to that memorial.  That is the nature of the work.  The best way we can pay tribute to those who lost their lives is to ensure that we do everything we can to keep safe the men and women who continue to protect our state.  Just as we pledge to keep alive the honored memories of those whose lives were lost, we also pledge to their colleagues that we will be equally vigilant in trying to keep you safe as you protect us and our families.  That is what your fallen colleagues would want, and that is what we will do.

Time will not allow me to pay proper tribute today to Reverend Maurice J. Moyer, who died this morning at the age of 93.  But I am going to give it a shot, because everyone needs to know about this man; a moral and spiritual anchor in our state for decades.

I didn’t know that Reverend Moyer was an icon when I met him twenty years ago.  It was 1991 and I was in my first year out of law school, looking for churches willing to be homes for the travelling legal aid clinic that I was setting up.  And when I asked around about which churches would be supportive, his church – Community Presbyterian Church in New Castle – came up over and over.  Reverend Moyer and I met, and I began visiting the church every two weeks to represent some of his congregation members who couldn’t afford private attorneys.  It was only after I had been visiting for months that one of the congregants clued me in that the gentle pastor I chatted with every two weeks was also one of the fiery leaders of Delaware’s civil rights movement.   Since then, I have been determined to make sure Delawareans know what he did for our state.  Since being elected to public office, whenever I had the privilege of speaking to a group of people when Reverend Moyer was present – whether it was a group of ten or a group of hundreds – I acknowledged his presence and reminded people of the role he played in this state’s progress toward racial equality.

Although it would likely be quicker to list the civil rights issues Reverend Moyer wasn’t involved in, here are just a few of the issues that come to mind when I think of him.  Soon after he came to Delaware, as a young congregation leader, he became a visible leader of the state’s civil rights movement  — first informally and then formally when he became head of the Wilmington NAACP.  He helped break down barriers one at a time, sometimes by negotiation and, when necessary, through peaceful confrontation.  Drinking fountains, movie theaters, lunch counters, restaurants, buses, housing; Reverend Moyer methodically led protests up and down the state to integrate all of them.  And through a combination of cooperation, moral suasion, and, where necessary, steely resolve, he led the state toward racial and moral justice.   He told me more than once that there was still work to do on both fronts, but we are a heck of lot further than we were, and Reverend Moyer was on the front lines time after time.

Reverend Moyer was already in his 70s when I met him, so his marching days were largely behind him.  But he didn’t need to march to be heard, nor did he need to shout – in fact, in the twenty years that I knew him, I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice.  He didn’t have to.   His reputation was such that when he got up to speak, the room would inevitably fall silent.  And what he said was heeded with the respect that was due someone who had been on the front lines time after time when doing so meant putting his own physical safety in real jeopardy.

I was honored to call Reverend Moyer my friend, and grateful to have had his gentle but firm guidance for two decades.  Delaware is a much poorer place without him, and we owe it to him to rededicate ourselves personally to the cause of equal opportunity to which he dedicated his life.

If you’ve clicked here for a self-serving blog post about all the awesome things I am doing, prepare for disappointment. I’m sure I’ll be back to that soon. But today I want to highlight some people who don’t get near enough recognition for their work for children in our state.

My first set of unsung heroes: the hospitals in our state who just finished a project to bring the pediatric emergency care in every one of our state’s emergency rooms up to a high professional standard.  We are one of only three states in America to have done this, and it was an entirely voluntary effort  – the hospitals did it because they wanted to provide better emergency care for kids.  Delaware already had one of the premiere pediatric hospitals in the country in A.I. Dupont, but now all of our hospital emergency rooms have upgraded – from purchasing new equipment tailored to fit children of all sizes, to training for family-centered emergency room care focused specifically on children.  This is no feel-good exercise; we know from prior studies that adhering to these standards reduces mortality.  In other words, some kids who would otherwise have died are going to live because our hospitals made this effort.

Unsung heroes, part two: Dick Sanford and the staff and volunteers of Operation Warm.  Operation Warm is an organization that Dick started when, if I read between the lines of his biography, he got tired of doing well as a businessman and decided to dedicate his life to providing winter coats to children living in poverty.  Luckily for us in Delaware, he has decided to focus much of his organization’s efforts here, with the goal of providing a winter coat to every single elementary school child living in poverty.  At an official kick-off event Wednesday night, Operation Warm showed off the dozens of enthusiastic University of Delaware students it has recruited as volunteers.  It was great to see so many students giving their time to a cause like this rather than doing what I assume college students spend their nights doing.  (I was not invited to any parties in college, so most of what I know about the college scene is derived from the later seasons of Beverly Hills 90210).  But none of it would be happening without Operation Warm’s single-minded focus on taking care of our state’s most at-risk kids.  Thanks to Dick and his team.  We are looking forward to working with you.

Last but not least: some exceptional kindergarten teachers.  Last week, I visited Lilly Pope’s kindergarten classroom at North Dover Elementary School.  I met Lilly a few years ago when she was just starting as a teacher, following successful careers in insurance and the entertainment industry, where she represented, among other people, the rapper Positive K (by the way, that is the first time I have uttered his name since the glory days of The Skills Dat Pay Da Bills album).  The school was excited to get Lilly in 2008, and they must be even more thrilled now – her kids were exceptional.  We did the usual “elected official reading to kindergarten kids” routine, but then Lilly turned the tables on me and had some of her kids read to me.  They read amazingly well.  And for the record, I sat in my square on the floor and remembered to raise my hand when I wanted to be recognized.

I also visited Hanby Elementary School, and by chance wandered into a room where five kindergarten teachers were getting trained on a new software program.  The software was designed to help their students read at home and integrate their parents into the learning process.  The software was impressive, but far more impressive was the palpable excitement of the teachers.   They couldn’t wait to start using it with their kids, and were exchanging ideas about how to best customize it for individual learning.  It was thrilling to see teachers so excited about their craft.  I saw a lot of impressive things at Hanby that day, including principal Veronica Wilkie vaulting across a classroom with James Worthy-esque speed and precision to help a kid with a sudden onset of the feared stomach bug.  But the memory I will carry with me was that group of teachers, immersed in new ways to help our kids learn.  I know that there are teachers up and down the state who are just as dedicated to their kids, and they deserve more credit than they get.

Every day, we are making this state a better a place for kids.  These unsung heroes are a big part of that effort, and they deserve recognition and thanks.

Two major questions haunt our country this Friday: what will Madonna wear for the Super Bowl halftime show, and when will we see the second half of Matt’s list of thoughts about January (when the blog went dark)?   The answer to the first question: we don’t know but it would have been grossly inappropriate even 25 years ago.  The answer to the second question is “right now.”

6.  Important Work Being Done on Bullying Prevention.  As I tour middle and high schools in Delaware, I hear more and more about bullying.  We are working on several different projects to try to address this problem, one of which is an effort with Attorney General Biden to step up the reporting that schools do of bullying.  When bullying occurs in a Delaware school, the school is required to notify the parent of the victim and the parent of the student who did the bullying.  That is an extremely important part of the law – if we want parents to help discipline their children, we have to let them know when they are acting inappropriately.  Yet, a lot of these required reports aren’t happening.  The Attorney General and I spent part of January working on legislation to address this problem, we will be unveiling it soon.

7.   The Denn Boys Turned Seven Years Old.  Mrs. Denn, who normally handles every last detail of … well… everything, was very sick and under doctor’s orders to stay in bed on the day of the boys’ birthday party.  So I got to host 16 of their friends, jacked up on pizza and cake, at a place with moonbounces and video games (but not a giant singing rat).  Fortunately, my mom stepped in to ride shotgun and several kind parents — probably unsettled by the sight of me in charge — stuck around for the festivities, so I had plenty of back-up.   I am placing my wife in quarantine for a few weeks before the 8^th birthday.

8.  Delaware to Offer Low Cost Health Insurance for Kids.  We still have thousands of kids in Delaware without health insurance.  Most of them are the children of working parents – our Medicaid and CHIP programs provide either free or very low cost health insurance for the children of families up to 200% of the poverty level.  So we have a tragic situation where kids of the parents who are working hard, bringing home a paycheck, and struggling with bills are falling through the cracks.  Some relief is coming this summer.  As a result of legislation that I wrote with Senator Blevins and Representative Schooley, one condition of the recently-approved Blue Cross merger is that the company will be required to offer and subsidize a low-cost health insurance program for the children of families whose parents earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid or CHIP.  The premiums will start at less than $100 per month for families just over the eligibility cut-offs, and will go up based on income.   Thanks to Senator Blevins and Representative Schooley for their help in making this happen, it is our hope that thousands of Delaware kids will get basic health insurance as a result.

9.  Treme is Good.  Treme is the HBO series about post-Katrina New Orleans from David Simon, the creator of The Wire (the best tv show of all time).  When Treme came out, it got a lukewarm reception from many critics.  I didn’t see the first season, because HBO is not in the Denn household budget.  But the good people at the New Castle County libraries just got the whole first season on DVD, I watched the first three episodes in January, and it is terrific.  It’s not The Wire, but it wasn’t meant to be The Wire.   Highly recommended.

10.  Tom Baker’s World History Class at Appoquinimink High School.  I dropped in on Mr. Baker’s AP History class earlier this week, and was absolutely dazzled by how ambitious, articulate, and thoughtful his 11^th and 12^th graders were.  If a Lieutenant Governor had come to visit my 11^th grade history class in California, he would have primarily heard complaints from students about wanting to be able to go off campus to buy snacks.  (He also might have been rolled for his lunch money in the hallway – 1983 was a rough year at Berkeley High School.)  But Mr. Baker’s Appoquinimink students wanted to know how we could allow high school students to take more AP classes, how they could have better opportunities to prepare for the SATs, and whether there were ways for them to graduate early if they doubled down on classes in 10^th and 11^th grade.  I had met one of Mr. Baker’s students, Mankaprr Conteh, a few months earlier.  A first generation American, she was part of a delegation of Appo students who attended a Special Olympics conference where I spoke.  And it turns out that the Special Olympics project is just part of her portfolio. Mankaprr has also started a charity, and in the meantime has been busy stockpiling AP credits and receiving acceptance letters from colleges around the country.  I wish everyone in Delaware had an opportunity to spend time with these young people. They are a great example of what can happen when motivated students get great support from adults.  A fantastic way to finish off the month.

Thanks to those of you who noticed that my blog has been absent for several weeks.  I won’t bore you with the reasons, but we have a lot of catching up to do.  So with apologies to Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, here is part one of my list of ten things that need to be noted from the past month.  (I have split the list in two because, as one of my friends put it, a little Denn goes a long way.)

1. The General Assembly Returned This Month.  And one of the State Senate’s first actions was to pass legislation renewing the state’s early teacher hiring program for another two years.  This program arose from a task force that Senator David Sokola and I chaired, addressing the fact that uncertainty in our school funding process was forcing Delaware schools to make contract offers to new teachers later than any other state in the region.  Delaware was losing a lot of good teachers as a result.  The new funding process that we proposed had its trial run last spring and summer, and the initial reports are very positive – a lot of districts are hiring earlier, and many of them are giving part of the credit to the new funding formula. 
2. How About Those Philadelphia 76ers?  Look, I didn’t say these would be in order of importance.  But this gritty, tightly-knit Sixers team is starting to remind me a little of the 1993 Phillies.  (Approximately 20 of my friends are now copying this paragraph to send to me in taunting e-mails two months from now).
3. The Governor’s Budget.  The Governor unveiled his proposed budget last week, and most of the headlines focused on the fact that it contained no new taxes.  That is true, and that is a good thing.  But less attention was paid to the fact that this is an extraordinarily forward-looking budget with respect to children.  From the largest new expense item, a $27 million infusion of state funds to maintain teachers and programs in our public schools; to the smallest one, a $200,000 investment to protect toddlers from having to sit on waiting lists for speech therapy, the budget invests in kids at a time when there are many demands on state dollars.  New funding to expand our investment in quality early childhood education, funds to enhance prevention and investigation of child abuse, funds to maintain teacher/student ratios in the face of expanding student enrollment, funds to expand college scholarships and provide job opportunities to students with disabilities and housing for children aging out of foster care.  These investments were possible without new taxes because the administration has been carefully and methodically trimming the size of the executive branch payroll over the past three years.  I am proud to work with a Governor who makes kids a priority.
4. Etta James Passed Away Earlier This Month At Age 73.  Scores of testimonials have been written about her, and I am not going to improve on those.  But for those who know her primarily through the ubiquitous “At Last,” let me make three off-the-beaten-path recommendations.  First, her cover of Dorothy Lee Coates’ gospel classic “Strange Man.”  Second, the searing “One Night” from her 1988 album Deep in the Night.  And third, her classic rendition of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.” 
5. A Great Visit to John G. Leach School.  I visit schools in Delaware almost every week.  Earlier this month, I visited John G. Leach School, which serves New Castle County children aged 3 to 21 who face physical and intellectual disabilities and serious health issues.  I had heard good things about Leach from advocates for Delawareans with disabilities who I work with regularly, and the school lived up to its reputation.  I also had the good fortune to meet the school’s enthusiastic PTA president Lori Verlinghieri, who was stopping by the school when I arrived.  Many of the students at Leach are facing enormous challenges, and helping them fulfill their potential is difficult work.  The teachers and staff I met are very committed to these kids, and do their jobs with imagination, skill, and love.   I’ll be back in the spring for graduation.

I got a message from the Governor’s office last night telling me that Delaware was going to be announced today as one of the nation’s nine Race to the Top early childhood grant recipients. As I listened to the message, I flashed back to two moments from 2009.

The first was in September of 2009, the first time that I had been Lieutenant Governor at the beginning of a school year. I was visiting an elementary school in the second week of school, and I spent about half an hour in a kindergarten room. It was heartbreaking. The students were divided into five or six different groups around the room. A few of them were reading. Some of them were doing alphabet and word drills. And about a third of them couldn’t make any letter sounds, and more significantly, couldn’t sit attentively for more than a few minutes at a time. It was the second week of school of their entire lives, and they were already far, far behind.

The second moment was in December of 2009. The Governor was meeting with a group of six or seven people to put together the budget he was going to propose to the legislature in January, 2010. And, of course, the well was completely dry – the discussions were all about what to cut and what we could save from cutting, not about what to add. But as we sat around the table, the Governor said that if the day ever came when he was Governor when we could spend new money, the first thing he would want to invest in would be early childhood education.

Last spring, the Governor kept that promise. When the state discovered that its money situation had brightened just a little, the Governor’s advisors told him that there was enough money to invest in one new thing in the state’s operating budget. Just one. He had dozens of great ideas in front of him – I think every one of his cabinet secretaries made proposals for how to spend the money, and they were all good. But it took him just a few seconds decide that he wanted to use the money to make a historic investment in early childhood education. When virtually every other state in America was freezing or cutting early childhood funds, he dramatically increased them. And he focused the money very precisely on two things: improving the working conditions of the people who help these kids, and giving our programs a powerful financial incentive to improve quality.

Today, the federal government gave us another jump start by awarding the state almost $50 million to enhance our early childhood efforts. And we went to Hilltop Lutheran Day Care Center, a mile or so from the Governor’s office, to announce it. Hilltop is one of the early childhood centers that will benefit from our new efforts: a center that is already enrolled in our quality improvement program, and is on the cusp of receiving a significant financial boost from the state when it meets its next set of quality benchmarks. About forty incredibly well behaved Hilltop kids listened as the Governor outlined our plans for the money.

As the Governor was talking today, I was watching those kids, mostly four and five year olds. (I realize that one of the expectations of the Lieutenant Governor is that he will always gaze adoringly at the Governor while the Governor is speaking, but I made an exception today.) And I thought to myself what an extraordinary opportunity we had to change their lives. I tell my two boys all the time that if they work hard, treat other kids kindly, and avoid being knuckleheads, they can do great things. That is true for them in part because they got a terrific head start on kindergarten. Every kid in this state deserves that opportunity. Although we still have a long way to go, today’s events were another giant step forward in making this state where every kid can go as far as his talent and determination will take him, no matter where he may have started in life.

This should not have been a good Thanksgiving for Bernadette Winston.  She isn’t even living in her own home  – she had a major fire in her house in July, and she has been living in temporary lodging since then.  But because of an extraordinary act of grace and love that she undertook this year, this Thanksgiving will be a memorable one for Bernadette and her family.

Some time after Bernadette’s two kids were grown and out of the house, she heard about how many children in Delaware were in foster care and decided to become a foster parent.  Bernadette took children in from tough circumstances, and cared for them until they could be placed or reunited with their families.

Sisters Tanae, age 8, and Natae, age 9, came to Bernadette’s home with little warning.  I won’t tell you how they ended up in the foster care system, but suffice it to say that Tanae recently told Bernadette, “I don’t ever want to worry about police coming to my door any more.”   Bernadette cared for Tanae and Natae – as she did for the other foster children she had nurtured – until they found permanent homes.  And then the time came for the girls to go to live with the North Carolina parents who had decided to adopt them.

This is not an After School Special – Bernadette didn’t change her mind at the last minute and say she couldn’t live without the girls.  Tanae and Natae went to North Carolina.  But a short time later, Bernadette began getting calls from the new parents in North Carolina.  Things were not going well, and the girls were not adapting.  In fact, they weren’t speaking to anyone other than each other.  The North Carolina family decided they couldn’t deal with the situation, and they wanted to send the girls back to Delaware.

Bernadette was asked if she could take Tanae and Natae back into her home while the state explored other options to place them.  Had Bernadette done so, that would have been more than enough – foster care is set up to be temporary.  But Bernadette could not bear the thought of Tanae and Natae being shunted into yet another home, and having their lives uprooted yet again.  “Children are not pieces of furniture,” Bernadette told me. “You can’t be shuffling them in and out of people’s houses all the time.”  So Bernadette decided that Tanae and Natae would become her daughters: she applied to adopt them, and the adoption will become final in a couple of weeks.

I met Bernadette and her new daughters at an amazing National Adoption Week event in Dover this past Saturday.  The event is a daylong conference that the state’s adoption agencies put on every year for new adoptive parents and the kids that they are adopting out of foster care.  To walk around the room and see these kids – whose lives have literally been transformed by the love and commitment of their new adoptive parents – was as uplifting an experience as I’ve had in a long time. 

Bernadette was there with her whole family – her mom, her grown daughter, and her two new daughters Tanae and Natae.  And you don’t have to be a social scientist or psychologist to see how devoted these girls are to Bernadette.  They were stuck to her like glue, knowing that she is their real mom and the only mom they are ever going to have.  “That word ‘forever’ is so powerful to a child,” Bernadette told me.  Giving these girls a sense of security, stability, and love – at a stage in Bernadette’s life when, frankly, she had earned the right to relax a little – is an act of selflessness that should inspire all of us to do better.

My son Adam’s first grade teacher invited parents to class last week to hear the kids read essays they had written about their heroes.  There were a couple of dozen essays read, and in about two thirds of them, the heroes were either mom or dad.  And there was a striking consistency in the reasons the kids gave for thinking their parents were heroes: “he keeps me safe,” “she always looks out for me,” “I am never afraid when my dad is around.”   Until recently, Tanae, Natae, and the dozens of other kids I met last Saturday could not have written an essay like that.  Now they can.  On this Thanksgiving, let’s give thanks to the adoptive parents who have created permanent, loving homes for kids who were in our state’s foster care system.   And if you are interested in exploring the possibility of becoming a foster parent yourself, you can find out more at http://kids.delaware.gov.

Salome Thomas-EL, the principal at Thomas Edison Charter School, and Betsy Fleetwood, the principal at McCullough Middle School, are very different people.  Principal EL is a larger than life personality at Edison, where students recited his inspirational verses and the numbers of books they had read when he and I visited their classes last Thursday.  Disney Studios has optioned his life story.  Mrs. Fleetwood has been a principal for just over four years, and we visited eight different classes during my trip to McCullough last week with little interruption to any student or teacher.  Disney has not, as far as I know, optioned her life story.  Yet for all their differences, both of them have led renaissances at their schools and demonstrated how determined principals can help rally students, teachers, and staff to achieve great things.

I have probably been to 75 schools and hundreds of classrooms as Lieutenant Governor.  I have never been in classrooms with the level of enthusiastic but disciplined energy that I saw in the classrooms at Thomas Edison Charter School on Thursday morning.  Every kid was leaning forward in his or her chair listening to the teacher, hands were insistently waving in the air to answer teachers’ questions.  I see this in some classrooms at some schools; I saw it in every classroom at Edison. 

The results speak for themselves: at a school where 96% of the students are classified as low-income, where 96% of the students are African-American, where the federal government rated the school as failing to meet Adequate Yearly Progress after the 2009/2010 school year, everything has changed.  Last school year, the school’s test scores soared, it exceeded the federal AYP standard, and it was one of five schools (along with McCullough) to be recognized with a $150,000 Academic Achievement Award.

 I asked everyone I could grab at the school – students, teachers, staff – what had changed, and they all gave me the same answer: Principal EL.  They said that he brought rules, order, fairness, discipline, high expectations and boundless enthusiasm to the school when he arrived in May of 2010.  He is clearly adored by everyone at the school; he knows what every child and every class is doing.  And he has created an incredible sense of common purpose and high expectations.  All of this in little more than one academic year. 

We stopped in an eighth grade classroom during my visit, and Principal EL went around the room and asked the kids – each of them African-American, almost all of them from low-income homes – where they were thinking of going to high school.  And each of them rattled off the names of some of the top public and private high schools in the state, most of which had been at the school during a recent ‘high school night’ to recruit Edison students. 

Mrs. Fleetwood, the principal at McCullough Middle School in New Castle, has a different style than Principal EL, but she has clearly had an enormous impact of her own at McCullough.  A proud product of the Colonial School District’s public schools herself, Mrs. Fleetwood said that the changes at McCullough have come through methodically building stability and teamwork among the staff there, along with the same sense of pride and high expectations that I saw at Edison.   Mrs. Fleetwood and Principal EL are working, of course, in different environments given that McCullough is not a charter school.  Mrs. Fleetwood is doing her job while simultaneously implementing a wide range of new state programs, including detailed teacher evaluations, that occupy a great deal of her time.  And in charter schools, students’ parents are motivated at least to the extent that they invested the time and effort to enroll their children there.   At McCullough, Mrs. Fleetwood is responsible for educating students with both motivated and unmotivated parents. 

In spite of those challenges, McCullough is marching ahead.  The classrooms we visited were quiet, the students were diligent, the teachers were focused and serious, and most tellingly, McCullough’s student test scores have been increasing.  McCullough is one of a very small number of middle schools in the state that moved from below AYP to meeting AYP during the last school year – the national trend has been in the opposite direction, as the AYP standards have gotten tougher.  And like Edison, McCullough has brought everyone along for the ride: reading scores for special education students are catching up to others, as are math scores for African-American and Hispanic students. 

Of all the things Betsy Fleetwood said to me during my visit, a story she told me as we were wrapping up stuck with me the longest.  She said that when she got the job as principal of McCullough, one of her colleagues congratulated her but also said that it was a shame that she was going to have to start her career as a principal in charge of “that school.”   With fire in her eyes and an edge in her voice that I had not heard all day, Mrs. Fleetwood said, “We will not be ‘that school.’”  And she repeated it.  “We will not be ‘that school.’”  Well, they’re not.  With the commitment the kids see from Mrs. Fleetwood and her team of teachers, McCullough is moving in the right direction.

On my way out of Edison, Principal EL ducked into his office and grabbed me a copy of his latest book (yes, he has more than one) called “The Immortality of Influence.”  I read most of it over the weekend.  In it, he relays the advice his role model from childhood gave to him: We never know how much time we have on this earth, so we should use each day to inspire and lift up others who need help.  That is what Salome Thomas-EL and Betsy Fleetwood are doing every day.

Two Fridays ago, I sat on stage at the graduation ceremony for the new class of Delaware State Police Academy graduates.  I studied their faces while the Delaware State Police Pipes and Drums played “Amazing Grace” in honor of New Castle County Police Lieutenant Joe Szczerba, who had been killed in the line of duty just hours before the ceremony.

It was neither the first nor the last time I would hear “Amazing Grace” this month.  The confluence in time of so many events involving our men and women who put their lives on the line – September 11^th, our annual state firefighters conference, the state police graduation, the safe return of four Delaware National Guardsmen from Afghanistan, Lieutenant Szczerba’s death and memorial service –was coincidence.  But the common ground among these men and women is not.  They are cut from a different mold.

These men and women have chosen work when, as Kathy Sczerba poignantly noted, every day they kiss their spouse goodbye could be their last.  Sometimes, there is no special warning.  Joe Szczerba’s last day seemed just like any other.  Delaware City firefighter Michelle Newton Smith was killed in 2008 while she was tending to an accident victim on the side of the road.  Sussex County paramedic Stephanie Callaway six months earlier while she was treating a patient in the back of an ambulance that crashed.  Others live almost every day in active combat zones.  Dane Dougherty, a Delaware Army National Guardsman, told me last week, when he returned from his year-long tour of duty, that his air reconnaissance missions over Afghanistan had not placed him in harm’s way – and then his commanding officer reminded him that they were living at Bagram Air Base, which was shelled several times a week.

Either way, their families bear the burden of knowing their loved ones live dangerous lives.  And when the worst happens, the burden is almost unknowable to the rest of us.  Earlier this month, I spent some of the days leading up to the tenth anniversary of September 11^th talking to the families of some Delaware soldiers who had died overseas in the conflicts that followed that day.  Their families are strong, but they are still hurting.  Rose Kennedy was right when she said that time does not, in fact, heal all wounds.

There is a real kinship in our state among those who risk their lives to protect the public.  Lieutenant Szczerba was mourned by both the firefighters and the National Guard.  As I climbed dozens of flights of steps with the Wilmington Manor Fire Department on September 11^th – a tribute to the New York firefighters who charged up the steps of the World Trade Towers – I noticed that they were wearing helmets dedicated to Delaware City’s Michelle Newton Smith.  I saw Michelle’s mother a few days later, and I told her about the tribute to her daughter – she hadn’t known about it and she was touched, but she wasn’t surprised.  

It was at that 9/11 stair climb that I finally, after ten years, fully appreciated the bravery of the New York firefighters who died that day.  Obviously I knew they had run into burning skyscrapers, which was unimaginable enough.  But what I didn’t fully comprehend, and Aetna Fire Company member Steve Austin brought home with his eloquent remarks at the beginning of the stair climb, was the absolute certainty in those firefighters’ minds even as they entered the buildings that some of them would die that day.  Steve’s remarks inspired me to read David Halberstam’s Firehouse, which tells the story of one truck that lost all but one firefighter on 9/11.  In the book, Halberstam describes a scene at the firehouse weeks later when fellow firefighters first see some news footage of their fallen colleagues as they are entering the World Trade Center:

“It is easy to identify the men.  They are loaded up with gear, and their expressions are unusually stoic.  Their  brothers from 40/35 find it almost unbearable to watch the clip, because they can imagine what the men already know about their chances of surviving, and yet they are going forward, with no panic or fear on their faces.  They are, in the fire-fighting lexicon, calm, and they are doing the right thing.  It is a haunting moment….”

Fortunately, our Delaware first responders and military members rarely face the types of moments that New York’s firefighters faced on the morning of September 11^th.  But each and every day they live lives that are profoundly different from most of ours, because each day they willingly assume the risk of being hurt or killed.  And they do it because they believe in serving the public.

Thanks to modern technology, the dangers of first responder work and military service are placed before young people in our state more vividly than ever.  Yet, they continue to step forward to serve.  This year, Connor Thompson, whose father, Jarrett, died in the line of duty in Iraq in 1993 when Connor was six, signed up for the ROTC program at Caesar Rodney High School.  His mom, Kelly, believes that Connor will defend the country just like his father did. 

And as for those young men and women receiving their badges at the police academy graduation, they are undeterred.  When I hear “Amazing Grace” in the future, I will think of their faces as they were greeted on their first day as police officers with the violent death of one of their colleagues: grim, resolute, and proud.  These men and women are a different breed, and we owe them our respect and gratitude.