A few weeks ago, I was meeting with some people who did not agree with me about marriage equality.  They gave me their reasons for being against it, I explained why I was for it.  I’m not going to bore you with that part of the discussion, the fact that you are here tonight suggests that you don’t need to be convinced.   But during our talk, one of the people I was meeting with said “of course we don’t support discrimination based on sexual orientation, no one supports that.”   And I said “hold on.”

Because I chaired the Delaware State Senate debate in 2009 when we finally passed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.  And the reason it wasn’t passed before 2009 wasn’t for lack of trying.  It took eight years to pass that bill.  As late as 2008, just five years ago, we couldn’t even convince a majority of our state legislators that denying a job or insurance to gay and lesbian Delawareans was wrong.  And now five years later, people ask how anyone could have ever thought differently.

Everything has changed.  And I want to use the little time I have to talk about why, and what it means for marriage equality.  I think things changed in large part for one basic reason.  More and more gay and lesbian Delawareans began to proudly tell people that they were gay and lesbian Delawareans.  They told their families.  They told their friends.  They told their co workers and their bosses.  And suddenly we weren’t talking about abstractions any more.  We were talking about real people, people who we knew and respected and loved.

No one should understate how difficult, and in many cases courageous, it was for gay and lesbian Delawareans to tell others who they were.  They risked their jobs, in many cases they feared risking the love of their families, because they were proud of who they were and did not want to hide it.  The story of equal rights for gay and lesbian Delawareans may not have a singular hero or moment; it is the culmination of thousands of moments of individual will and determination.  It is a story with a legion of heroes, some of whom are in this room tonight.  And make no mistake, it was young people who led the way.

So now here we are.  And in spite of all the changes, in spite of the cascade of elected officials changing their positions on marriage equality, we are not quite there yet.  We’ll get there, and five years from now people will wonder once again how it could have been an issue, but we’re not quite there.  I believe strongly that we will cross the finish line the same way we got so close – by humanizing the issue.  I’m a lawyer, I’m all about logical arguments, but in the end we will win because you talk to legislators about yourselves, your friends, your families, and tell them politely but passionately what this means in human terms with names and faces.

Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who often wrote about her partner of 40 years Molly Malone Cook, famously said “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  In the next few weeks, you have the opportunity to change your state for the better, and write a chapter of your young life that you will look back on proudly.  Seize the moment, help us make this a better state.

On Sunday, I attended a memorial service for my friend and former boss Bruce Stargatt, who died last week at the age of 82.  He was a founding partner of one of Delaware’s most prestigious law firms, and by all accounts, he lived a grand and tremendously fulfilling life.  He received every award a Delaware lawyer can receive, and far more importantly, was revered by his family and colleagues.  It was a sad service, because he will be missed, but it is hard to imagine someone living a more full or joyful life than Bruce did.

Just 24 hours prior, I attended a very different memorial service.  Along with about a dozen mothers whose children had been killed by gun violence, I attended the opening of a memorial to their children on a small triangle of grass in Southbridge.  There were no calls to action or policy prescriptions at this service; it was for families to remember their loved ones.  Emotions were very raw – one mother who got up to speak found that she could not, and two teenagers remembered their brother who was slain only a few feet from where we stood.

Even during the memorial, there were poignant reminders of how violence has affected our largest city.  Pastor Christopher Curry, who spoke at the memorial, was exhausted from having been up most of the night with one of his best friends whose son was slain just a day before.  During our silent march to the memorial site, we had to walk straight through a street fair celebrating Southbridge children who had graduated from high school – the street fair participants fell silent out of respect for the grieving mothers.  And just hours after we all left the memorial, another person was shot in Wilmington just over a mile away from where we had stood.

Each of the young people we remembered on Saturday deserved the opportunity to strive for a life as full as Bruce Stargatt’s.  Few of us, including myself, will ever accomplish what Bruce did – he was a supremely talented and driven man, who came from a modest background and earned everything he had.  But these young people deserved a chance to find where their talents would take them, and they and their families deserved the decades of love and companionship that were robbed of.  For each young person slain, there are many others whose opportunity to live a rich, rewarding life has been diminished in some way by violence.

All of us, whether we live in these neighborhoods or not, have a responsibility to try to make them safer.  Some are stepping up.  A few weeks ago I walked down Fourth Street and Market Street in Wilmington in the early evening, talking to residents who were sitting outside their houses.  On one corner, just blocks from where a shooting had recently occurred, five men stood talking to one another.  They all lived in the neighborhood, they had all grown up in the neighborhood; three of them had families in the neighborhood.  They told me that between them and the owner of a convenience store across the street, they considered this corner to be their responsibility, and there had not been any trouble there.  They are doing their part and then some; we all need to do ours.  Bruce Stargatt devoted his time and reputation to heading the Delaware Bar Foundation, which funds free legal assistance that is often critical to families in distress.  We all have a role to play.  

This is not a column to lay out my twenty-point plan for ending violence in the City of Wilmington.   There are plenty of those floating around, some of them thoughtful and some less so, along with plenty of unproductive finger-pointing.  Some of us have been working on this issue for much of the past three years, and at some later time I am happy to catalogue where we’ve made progress and how I think we can do better.  My purpose here is to ask the 90% of the state’s population that lives outside Wilmington to be committed to intelligently and forcefully addressing this problem.  Not just in the short term – though bringing stability to the streets is a critical short term goal – but over the long haul.   

Even in this troubling time in the city one finds hope.  When I was on Fourth Street I ran across three young kids playing on an empty lot by themselves.  I was concerned when I saw them – they looked scarcely older than my seven year old boys, playing alone as darkness fell just blocks from where a man had recently been shot to death.  I asked them where they lived and where they went to school.  I knew their school, and I knew their principal – it is one of our top-performing Title 1 schools in the state, where disadvantaged students’ test scores have skyrocketed and kids who once struggled academically now play chess and talk about graduating from college.  So I know that even though these kids are facing an uphill battle, living in a tough neighborhood without the supervision they deserve, they are spending their school days in an environment where they are nurtured and challenged.  Our willingness to fulfill our moral responsibility to these kids, and thousands of others like them in our state, will have a profound impact on the safety of our community.  And it will determine what kind of people we are.

Several months ago, Jim Gallagher of American Legion Post #28 contacted me.   Jim and I don’t talk politics, but I have reason to believe that our beliefs are about as similar as the musical stylings of Mozart and Alice Cooper.  However, when Jim calls me about veterans, I listen.  Jim told me about a van that the Legion Post uses to drive veterans from Sussex County up to the VA Hospital in Elsmere.   Post 28 is one of the largest American Legion posts in the world, and it transports 800 veterans a year up to the hospital at no charge.  Jim said that Post 28 was having trouble paying for the transportation costs associated with running the van, and asked if the Post could get a small amount of help from the state.

I made some inquiries, and the response I got back was, “If we do it for them, we’ll have to do it for everyone.”  I replied, “No, we won’t.”  Because veterans are different.  They risked their lives for us, and many of them are travelling to the VA Hospital to be treated for ailments that are directly related to their military service.  Finally, Representative Earl Jaques – a former National Guardsman and chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee – agreed to help, and we were able to get a small allocation for Post 28’s van in the state budget.  Not a lot, but enough to keep the van running, which is certainly the least we can do for these veterans.

I also visited the Home of the Brave several weeks ago.  Home of the Brave is Delaware’s only residence for homeless male veterans (they are currently working on  similar residence for females).  At the end of the visit, I asked board chair Linda Boone what we could do to help.  She didn’t think twice before answering, “Help our guys with their dental care.”  Apparently, because of some boundary lines that were drawn by someone who doesn’t live in Delaware, Home of the Brave residents were required to receive the dental care to which they were entitled in Maryland rather than Delaware.   For several Home of the Brave residents, that meant they would rarely – if ever – get the dental care they needed.  Linda and I went through all the right channels – and, by the way, Linda Boone is a fierce advocate for her residents.   Everyone seemed to agree with us.  But we weren’t getting concrete commitments.

So two Fridays ago, I found myself on a conference call with several other Lieutenant Governors and Scott Gould, the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.   The topic of the call was federal programs to help returning veterans find jobs, which is a strong interest of mine.  As the call was winding down, Deputy Secretary Gould said, “Is there anything else anyone would like to discuss while I’m here?”  And I thought to myself, “What the heck.”  I gave him a 60 second rundown of the problem, and said, “Is there someone I can talk to about this?”  To his credit, he said, “That person is me.”  And true to his word, after an e-mail exchange the following Monday, things started to happen quickly and I got a note from him this past Saturday saying the problem would soon be fixed.  I don’t know if it was Deputy Secretary Gould’s intervention or Linda Boone’s relentless efforts that made the difference, and it really doesn’t matter – what matters is that together, we were able to ensure that men who served our country can receive the medical care to which they are entitled.

There are plenty of people in our state who dedicate a lot more time than I do to helping veterans.  But we can all do something – whether it’s giving a returning veteran a shot at a job, helping one of our many groups that work with soldiers and veterans, or teaching our children to show proper respect to men and women who have served.  We will never fully repay our debt to these soldiers, but we need to pay it down whenever we can.

6:00 a.m.: Adam and Zach wake up, and suggest that because I will not be home on Saturday night to help convince Mrs. Denn to let them watch X-Men cartoons, I should let them watch as many as possible before she wakes up to compensate.  Because I appreciate their strategic thinking, and because it will afford me an opportunity to nap on the couch, I agree.

8:30 a.m.: A trip to the gym, and an opportunity to start reading George Pelecanos’ new novel “The Cut” while running on the treadmill.  George Pelecanos is one of the creative geniuses behind the HBO series The Wire, if you liked The Wire you will also love his books.  

11:00 a.m.: The boys and I do the family’s weekly grocery shopping.   And for the fifth consecutive week, one of the boys – I will not identify which one, since I fear that they will one day read these blogs and I wish to have them care for me when I am elderly and infirm – announces when we are halfway done that he has to use the supermarket bathroom. 

Noon:  I go over the list of House bills that are ready to be considered in the Senate.  It is important for me to have some idea which bills are likely to be contentious for two reasons.  First, in case I have to vote to break a tie.  And second, because the contentious bills are also the ones where procedural issues that I have to rule on are most likely to be raised.

6:00 p.m.: The Senate convenes for its last session of the year.  I decide to throw the Senators a little bit of a curveball: instead of asking one of the Senators for our opening prayer, which I have done every other session day for four years, I assign the prayer to myself for the first time:

Eternal One, on this last day of the legislative session, we thank you for blessing us with the extraordinary privilege of serving in this chamber.  We thank you also for our state employees, many of whom have devoted their professional lives to public service. 

For at least two of our members, today is their last day of service in this building.  We thank you for the service of Senator Liane Sorenson, whose final months in this chamber were spent passing legislation that will change the lives of a generation of Delaware children.  And we thank you for the service of Senator George Howard Bunting, who time after time has risked his own political future to cast votes of conscience.  His legacy of independence and courage is an example for all of us.

Tonight, and in the future for those of us fortunate enough to return, we ask your guidance in helping to lead this state we love.  And for our part, we will strive to follow your edict that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with you.

8:00 p.m.: The Senate passes the last of its “money bills” (the three bills that collectively make up the state’s budget).  President Pro Tem Anthony DeLuca gets up and announces that because the Senate has been so efficient, he expects it to adjourn by around 12:30 a.m. – just 30 minutes after it is required to start a “special session” because of some eccentricity in the Delaware Constitution that should have been fixed long ago.  The Senate erupts in raucous applause, and Senator Colin Bonini – the Republican Senator whose controversial vote for Senator DeLuca helped Senator DeLuca retain the President Pro Tem position – exclaims, “I voted for that man!  I voted for that man!”

8:30 p.m.:  I discover that across the hall, Speaker of the House Bob Gilligan has surprised everyone by announcing his retirement.  I have often said that Governor Markell was the perfect person to become Governor in the economic turmoil that the state faced in January of 2009, and the same is true of Speaker Gilligan who became Speaker that same month.  With forty years of experience in the legislature, almost all of it in leadership positions, Bob Gilligan brought to the Speakership a depth of knowledge and moral authority that he had carefully accrued over decades of service.   As a young legislator he had seen the chaotic way that Delaware state government dealt with its last economic crisis in the 1970s, and he was determined that we would do it the right way this time.  And we did.  He will be missed, but he can be proud of having helped see our state through some very tough times.

10:00 p.m.: The Senate recesses.  I ask Senator Blevins, the Senate Majority Leader, if this is going to be a short recess or if I have time to go get food, and she tells me that the Senate is almost done with its work and won’t be ready to reassemble until around 11:15.  So I wander out into Legislative Hall to see if I can find anything to eat other than pizza (the answer: yes, cupcakes are also available), and to bid farewell to my friend Jennifer Ranji.  Jennifer spent much of the last four years as the Governor’s education advisor; given the amount of time and focus we have had on schools, it has been a round-the-clock job, which she has performed incredibly well.  But today is her last day on the job.  I am not sure what her future plans are, but Delaware kids are better off today because of her service.

11:15 p.m.:  The Senate reconvenes, and stoically marches through the rest of its legislative business.   Because there is less drama than in the past three years, and because two of the Senate’s most respected members are retiring, there is a higher than average level of camaraderie in the chamber.  It is never good to be legislating in the middle of the night, but if you have to do so, this is about as tranquil as it gets.

12:30 a.m.:  The Senate adjourns, people say their goodbyes, and I walk upstairs to the Governor’s office to say goodnight.  In past years I have declined the invitation to participate in the Governor’s end-of-session press conference at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., because my driving skills deteriorate significantly after midnight and I have an hour-long ride home.   But because of the Speaker’s retirement I decide to hang out for this one.

2:15 a.m.:  I hop in my car, turn on ESPN’s Bill Simmons podcast reviewing the NBA draft, and head north.  And as in past years, I still can’t make any sense out of the Sixers draft picks.

This was a shocker, because Terry Schooley loves being a state legislator.  There are some elected officials who act as if the privilege of holding office is some kind of anvil that they must carry around their necks.  Not Terry Schooley.  When she speaks about her legislative work on behalf of kids it is with a palpable joy and enthusiasm.  The problem is, she loves her family even more, and most of her family members – including her kids and grandkids – live a long way away from here.   So those of us who are focused on kids will miss her unmatched combination of passion, credibility, and knowledge.  But we have enough confidence in her instincts that we know she is doing the right thing, and we also know that the kids of this state are far better off than they were eight years ago because of the work Terry has done in Dover.

So that’s the bad news.  The good news is, yesterday was a terrific day in the Delaware General Assembly for kids.  Three important bills affecting kids moved forward.

First, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that Senator Dave Sokola, Attorney General Biden, and a certain State Representative named Terry Schooley wrote with me to help the state address the issue of cyberbullying in our schools.  The bill came up about two hours after half of the House of Representatives rose from their seats to pay homage to Terry.  So my understanding is that the debate went something like this:

REPRESENTATIVE SCHOOLEY:  Mr. Speaker, this is an important bill for kids and I think the House should pass it.  Roll call please.

Seriously, the bill will put a process in place that will allow us to have a much stricter, much more coherent cyberbullying policy in place when kids return to school in the fall, and allow schools to enforce that policy knowing that the state will stand behind them if they are challenged.  It’s not the whole solution – education and parental involvement are also critical components, and we’re working on those as well.  But it’s an important part of the equation.

The House also passed a bill yesterday that Representative Quinn Johnson and I wrote to help the parents of students with special needs advocate for their kids.  In a nutshell, the bill requires school districts that deny necessary services to kids with special needs and later are overturned by an appeal panel to reimburse the parents for the expenses incurred in advocating for their kids – things like paying medical experts for their time.  The way the system is set up now, parents are simply overwhelmed – when the parents have a disagreement with a school about what is being done for their child with special needs, the school uses public tax dollars to hire expensive attorneys and employs its own teachers and therapists as expert witnesses against the parents.  The parents, many of whom do not have a lot of money, are left to fend for themselves.  In many cases, the result is that the parents simply aren’t able to seek what they know is necessary for their kids.  This bill, if passed by the Senate, will allow lower and middle income families to pursue appeals for their kids, knowing that if they are successful they will be made whole financially.  It doesn’t guarantee anything to anyone, but it ensures that the process will be fair.

Finally, the Senate passed legislation yesterday which would require private insurers in Delaware to cover therapy for children with autism up to a capped amount every year.  Although I have publicly supported the bill for some time, I can’t take credit for this one: it was written by Senator Liane Sorenson, and it was passed primarily because of herculean efforts by the parents of kids with autism working through Autism Delaware.  This fight is not over, there are still some insurance companies that I am confident will try to derail the bill.  But we are 50% of the way home, and I will be attending the House committee hearing next week when the bill is heard.

We are working on a lot of other good things for kids with our General Assembly right now, some of which I don’t want to jinx by writing about them too soon.  But for yesterday, at least, my sorrow at seeing Terry Schooley say her goodbyes was tempered by the progress we made in making this state a better place for kids.

Let me be the second person to congratulate you on becoming citizens of the United States of America.   It is an honor to welcome you to our country – mine and yours.

If I look a little tired to you this morning, it’s because I was up late watching the deciding Game 6 of the NBA Western Conference Finals.  Basketball is considered one of the quintessentially American sports, but it was invented by a Canadian named James Naismith who, like all of you, became an American citizen later in his life.   Thirty years ago, when I first became an NBA fan watching Indiana’s Larry Bird and Michigan’s Magic Johnson face off, the only question about an NBA player’s origins was which American city could claim him.  Last night was different.  The San Antonio Spurs’ two best players were French born Tony Parker and Argentinian Manu Ginobli.  The Spurs’ top rookie is Tiago Splitter of Brazil.  The Spurs were the overwhelming favorites, but they were beaten last night by the Oklahoma City Thunder, whose starting five includes Thabo Sefalosha of Switzerland and Serge Ibaka from The Congo.   And these players’ countries of origin are not just of idle interest: several of them play with a style that is directly associated with how basketball is played in their native countries.

The great play in the game last night was a microcosm of what makes the United States of America in 2012 great.  Because we welcome men and women from other lands, we enjoy the most diversity of any country on the face of the earth.  While some countries view diversity as a burden, we view it as one of our greatest strengths.   And it goes far beyond sports: in the sciences, in medicine, in the arts, across the board we have learned the extraordinary benefit of adding people different from ourselves to the exciting tapestry that is America.  So we are excited to have you here: your presence makes our country stronger and richer.

A diversity of views and talents, of course, is only an asset if there is freedom to express and use them.  That is the second part of the formula that has fueled our country’s success for generations: we give people the freedom to use their talents and and fulfill their dreams.  In the song we just heard, the lyrics say “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.”  Part of the beauty of this country is that you could probably find a bunch of different Americans who wouldn’t even agree on what that means – freedom is so important here that we spend a lot of time arguing over how it should be exercised at the margins, in areas that other countries wouldn’t even consider.  When I leave here today, I am going to go to Dover to participate in a discussion over how much we can restrict what students say on the internet in our effort to try to curtail on-line bullying of other students.  The idea that students would have any freedoms of any kind to say whatever they want on the internet is a problem for those of us trying to stop bullying, but it is a uniquely American problem and a good kind of problem to have.  And that same freedom which gives me such a headache in trying to stop bullying will cause some of those students to be great writers and scientists and artists.

You all came here for different reasons – some of you for work, some for love, some to escape oppression.  But you are all part of our family now, and you can dream the same unlimited dreams for your children and grandchildren that I do for mine.  These are more than daydreams, because we have seen over and over in this country that the children of immigrants are often those who best take advantage of our freedoms here.  There are plenty of examples just from the last few years.  Tony Fadell, the inventor of the Ipod, born in Detroit to Lebanese parents. Steve Chen, one of the inventors of YouTube, came to America from Taiwan at the age of eight. His partner Jawed Karim was born in Germany and came to America as a teenager. Subhendu Guha, the inventor of the solar roof shingle, born in Calcutta and moved to America after college.  I have no doubt that ten or fifteen years from now, a future Lieutenant Governor will be reciting the names of some of your children in his list of success stories – in fact, one of your kids will probably be the Lieutenant Governor, and he or she will probably be one of the underachievers.

Welcome to our country, welcome to our family.  I am proud to call you my brothers and sisters, and I look forward to the future that we will build together for this country and for our children.

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.

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.

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.

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.