Howard High School

About this property

Howard High School of Technology is a vocational-technical high school in Wilmington, Delaware and is the oldest of four high schools within the New Castle County Vocational-Technical School District, which includes Delcastle Technical High School in Newport, Hodgson Vo-Tech High School in Glasgow, and St. Georges Technical High School in St. Georges. In 2022 it was designated an affiliated area of Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. Howard High School, named for General Oliver Otis Howard, who founded Howard University and was the Commissioner for the Freedmen's Bureau from 1865 to 1874, opened in 1867 at 12th and Orange St. with educator Edwina Kruse as its principal. Despite being a public school, Howard received very little state funding, particularly compared to white-only schools, and conditions rapidly declined. For many years, Howard families appealed to the government for financial aid for the building, which had been deemed "hazardous to an extreme degree, although inadequate for instructional purposes." In the early 1920s, businessman Pierre S. du Pont, who had a history of supporting education for Black students in Delaware, donated a swath of land in Wilmington for the purpose of building a new Howard High School. In 1953, Howard was the subject of Gebhart v. Belton, a desegregation case wherein parents of Howard students sued for the opportunity for their children to attend all-white schools in their town rather than the much-further-away Howard High School, which by this point had become run-down. Gebhart v. Belton was combined with four other cases in the US Supreme Court to form the Brown v. Board of Education suit in 1954. In 1975, Howard High School closed and was replaced by the Howard Educational Park, then the Howard Career Center. It sits adjacent to the original Howard High School. The school settled on its current name, Howard High School of Technology, in late 1993. On April 21, 2016, Amy Inita Joyner-Francis, a female 16-year-old student at Howard High School of Technology was assaulted and killed by a fellow student, Trinity Carr in a school bathroom while two other students allegedly assisted. The incident was widely publicized and started controversy about the appropriate charges of teenagers involved in situations of school violence and assault. Two of the students were convicted of conspiracy and one of the two was convicted of negligent homicide. The latter conviction was later overturned in a ruling that has faced some criticism. A third student was acquitted of a conspiracy charge. In addition to 10 credits within their chosen program, Howard students must meet Delaware core standards: 4 credits of English and math; 3 science and social studies credits; 2 language credits; 1 physical education credit; and 0.5 health credits. Each of the career programs has its own required courses, which allows students to gain the most contextual education possible.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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