An Act To Amend Titles 14 And 29 Of The Delaware Code Relating To The Department Of Services For Children, Youth And Their Families And Educational Services.
HB313 codifies the Education Unit within the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families (DSCYF) and sets out its role in providing K-12 educational services to children and youth housed in department-operated residential facilities. The bill adds a new Chapter 24A to Title 14 and amends Title 29 to formally recognize the unit as part of DSCYF’s organizational structure, including its purpose, staffing qualifications, job duties, salary framework, work hours, and school schedule coordination with facility operations.
The bill also specifies that the DSCYF Education Unit is a local education agency only for limited purposes: educator loan forgiveness programs, certain competitive grants, and the issuance of credits for youth completing credit-bearing courses or returning from placement. It further requires the unit to comply with state and federal disability laws, including IDEA, Section 504, and Delaware’s exceptional children provisions. In addition, the bill identifies an Education Administrator/Director of Education Services and clarifies that students served by the unit are excluded from unit-count calculations used elsewhere in education funding and administration.
HB313 would amend Titles 14 and 29 of the Delaware Code to formally embed the DSCYF Education Unit into state law and define how it operates within the juvenile services system. It affects the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, the Division of Youth Rehabilitative Services, and the Education Unit’s employees by setting qualifications, compensation rules, hazardous-duty and supervisory supplements, and work-hour expectations. It also limits the unit’s status as a local education agency to specific funding, loan forgiveness, and credit-transfer purposes, while preserving compliance obligations for special education and disability-related services.
The available voting history suggests broad support for the bill: it passed House Third Reading unanimously, 35-0. No committee transcripts were provided, so there is no recorded debate to indicate significant opposition or divided views. Overall, the bill appears to have been treated as a technical or codifying measure intended to formalize existing educational services within DSCYF rather than as a controversial policy change.
No explicit points of contention appear in the provided materials. The main policy choices reflected in the bill are the limited designation of the Education Unit as a local education agency, the exclusion of its students from unit-count calculations, and the detailed compensation and scheduling rules for staff. If any concerns existed, they would most likely have centered on administrative classification, funding eligibility, or employee pay and work-hour treatment, but the unanimous vote suggests those issues did not generate significant opposition.