State Rep. Eric Morrison is seeking his third term in District 27, but first he must survive a primary challenge from charter school leader Margie Lopez Waite.
The winner of the Sept. 10 primary will face Republican Kristina Griffing in November.
District 27 is located south of Newark, encompassing most of Glasgow and extending south just below the canal and from the state line east to Del. 72 and Lums Pond State Park.
Waite, 58, is a resident of the Clairborne neighborhood in Bear. She began her career working for MBNA and later went back to school to pursue her passion for education.
She worked as a Spanish teacher in the Appoquinimink School District and then founded Las Américas ASPIRA Academy, a dual-language charter school on Ruthar Drive. She still serves as CEO of ASPIRA, which now serves 1,400 students in grades K-12 across two campuses in the Newark area.
Her position as an education leader means she’s spent a lot of time in Dover serving on boards and task forces and lobbying legislators. She said she decided she could make an even bigger impact by running for office herself.
“I just felt that at this point, in order for me to really make significant changes, especially on behalf of our students and education, I needed to go from being an influencer to policymaker,” Waite said.
She believes her experience leading a school would be valuable in Dover.
“We need to have policymakers that really understand the inner workings of education, not just from one perspective, but really from all perspectives,” she said.
Waite said that, if elected, one of her priorities to improve education in Delaware would be to make pre-K available to all Delaware students.
“We need to have our children, starting at the young age of 3, in that structured learning environment as early as possible, and that will definitely help their transition into kindergarten,” she said.
She also wants to fight for more equitable funding of public schools, rather than continuing to use a model that depends on the tax base of the surrounding area.
“We have a formula in our state that does not provide equal resources to all students throughout the state, and it’s driven by zip code. It’s driven by where you live,” she said. “And we need to dismantle that system.”
Though she leads a charter school, Waite noted that she attended traditional public school in the Caesar Rodney School District and her two sons attended Appoquinimink schools.
“My goal has always been to improve public education, period, not at the detriment of any other school or any other district,” she said. “Really, it’s about meeting the needs of the community and responding to the growing demands of the community and students.”
Another priority will be addressing traffic problems in District 27. The district has seen rapid growth, and leaders need to be more proactive about planning for that growth rather than trying to fix problems later, she said.
“A lot of our communities have been really impacted negatively by this growth, and it’s created not just congestion and traffic in their area, but really some safety issues,” Waite said.
She believes Morrison is more focused on his own agenda than listening to residents.
“You can’t be a voice of the district if you’re not listening to the constituents,” Waite said. “I distinguish myself as a leader and as a politician that will be a listener, a collaborator and somebody that is going to be mindful and thoughtful about how I approach legislation.”
While Waite is campaigning on her success at ASPIRA, it’s her ties to embattled Christina School District board president Donald Patton that have drawn criticism from her opponent.
Patton is at the center of a firestorm over turmoil on the Christina board and its effort to fire the superintendent. The state legislature recently ordered the attorney general to monitor the board, and the district’s own lawyer has alleged that Patton and his allies have shown “wholesale disregard of the law.”
In May, Waite spoke before the Christina board, lauding Patton’s character and leadership and describing how he mentored her when she was starting her career in education. Patton later served on ASPIRA’s board before being elected in Christina.
“Mr. Patton continues to mentor and inspire me,” Waite said. “There were countless times when I was faced with difficult decisions and situations as a teacher and a school administrator, and I would think to myself, ‘What would Mr. Patton do?’ And if that didn’t work, I would just call him and say, ‘Mr. Patton, what would you do?’”
Morrison, who said turmoil in Christina is one of the main concerns he hears from constituents, has called for Patton’s resignation and believes the legislature needs to look at ways to improve oversight of school boards.
“My opponent counts Donald Patton as her mentor and yet, he has been disastrous for the Christina School Board and the district’s students, parents, and educators,” Morrison said. “Mr. Patton runs the school board with an iron fist and has violated various laws and processes regarding how the board’s meetings must be run.”
This week, Waite said she stands by her comments about Patton because she understands the difficulty of having to make unpopular personnel decisions and not being able to explain them due to employee privacy rules.
Still, she acknowledged that the situation in Christina “has gotten out of hand” and needs to be resolved for the sake of the students.
“Unfortunately, this drama is taking away from the enthusiasm that people should have about the start of the school year,” she said.
Morrison, 49, lives in the La Grange neighborhood and works in human resources at a bank. He was first elected in 2020, when he defeated longtime incumbent Earl Jaques in the primary, and he is now in his second term.
He counts among his recent accomplishments a law establishing a process for people having mental health issues to voluntarily sign up for a list preventing them from buying a gun, a law cracking down on nepotism in state government and a law to expand campaign finance disclosure requirements.
If re-elected, he plans to keep working on a bill to mandate employers provide paid sick leave to employees. His bill got out of committee this year but was never voted on by the full House.
“Over 140 nations around the world guarantee paid sick time for their employees,” Morrison said. “America does not, so states are stepping in there.”
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that sick leave is a public health issue, he added, especially for public-facing workers in restaurants, grocery stores, etc.
“They’re coming into contact with people and product the most, and they’re the ones who are least likely to have paid sick time,” he said.
He also wants to expand protections for LGBTQ youth and seniors and expand the ban on conversion therapy to cover adults, not just minors.
“Not only does it not work because you simply can’t change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, but it’s extremely harmful,” Morrison said.
Like Waite, he, too wants to make school funding more equitable.
“We shouldn’t be taking the pot of money and dividing it equally amongst every student, because you have certain students who have special needs,” he said.
He also believes the state needs to do more to recruit and retain qualified teachers.
“We absolutely need to do more to incentivize people to want to go into the field of education, but also to stay in the field of education,” he said.
Morrison rejected Waite’s criticism that he doesn’t listen to his constituents.
“I have a proven track record of being a very successful and very good state representative who cares about his constituents,” he said.
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