There is a difference between advocacy and politics, and a quick glimpse at the Delaware HS Athletic Parents Facebook group is a great living right now local example of it. An area mom, frustrated by the DIAA decision to suspend fall sports, started a FB group to coordinate parents of high school athletes in an advocacy campaign. Emails, postcards, letters to decision-makers and elected officials have been sent, and around a hundred athletes and their parents showed up for a rally in Dover this weekend to bring attention to the cause. It’s the showing up that matters. Anyone with a smartphone and 5 minutes can be a keyboard cowboy and troll social media posts. Anyone with a smartphone and te

My name is Gabrielle Ziegler and I am a rising senior at the Delaware Military Academy. I play varsity field hockey and soccer for my school, as well as club soccer for Penn Fusion. A few weeks ago, when I got home from my club soccer practice, my parents told me that the fall high school sports were postponed by the DIAA until after the winter sports season. I thought they were joking because I (as well as a variety of athletes) have been playing sports throughout Delaware all summer with no issues. Unfortunately, this was not a joke at all. I feel the DIAA decision is unjust for many reasons. To begin, sports have proven to be safe. There has not been one fatality under the age of 18 fr

In states to the south and west, the great national experiment has begun. In some areas, distance learning is up and running; in others, schools are open and students are roaming the halls, carrying their plexiglass desk dividers and masked up (or not, ahem, Georgia). What happens next? A quick google search can tell you about the Maine wedding that gave COVID cases as wedding favors - dozens of guests have gotten sick. We’ve seen headlines all week of colleges closing their dorms after only a few weeks in operation. Private and parochial area schools in Delaware and some public schools in the Brandywine Valley are opening to students in some capacity starting this week. Now it’s our turn. W

So, this week we learned that Delaware fall sports are officially suspended, and will be held in an abbreviated season this winter. 4,200 parents and students wrote emails to petition for change but nope, DIAA / DOE didn’t budge … which is so frustrating for our athletes, their support systems, and the schools that depend on athletics as a way to bring school communities together. But - in many ways, it makes sense. Our numbers are creeping back up - according to rt.live, which tracks rate of spread, Delaware is solidly in the red after a few good weeks in the green. How’d we get here? If you’ve looked around, we’ve been loosening up quite a bit …. both in general and specifically. The fatig

School announcements, sports announcements, and literally tornadoes — all packed into about 96 hours. We are reeling, and the 2020 hits just keep on coming. So what’s next? No one knows. But here’s what I know for sure: there’s a lot of summer left. I’ve decided to not spend it worrying about things I can’t change. This is not to say I’m not sad about so much that we’ve lost - jobs, trips, opportunities for our kids and families that we may never get to replicate. But I can’t change it and to dwell on it seems like the waste of perfectly good time that could be spent enjoying the NYT gazpacho recipe (trust me: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017577-best-gazpacho), a good book, a long wa

Aside from really REALLY missing restaurants — I know, I know, I could go. But the thought of the server flitting from my table to that table to that table back to me to the kitchen me again over there and now back makes me think it wouldn’t be the best idea, and so I have only been out once — but aside from that, my life is kind of back to normal this summer. A new normal. Normal 2.0. We do what we love to do the most - hang out with a friend or two on the screened porch at home, hang out with family and friends in the bubble at the beach, and go to the pool to hang with that same group of friends. Our OBX vacation was blissful - we arrived having been pretty locked down for a week, as all