Chalkbeat

Denver school board hires outside law firm to represent it in superintendent contract, employment matters

2026-08-14T04:18:23+00:00

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The Denver school board voted Thursday to hire an outside law firm to represent it in legal matters involving the superintendent, whom the board is responsible for hiring, firing, and evaluating.

The vote comes at a tense time for Superintendent Alex Marrero and the school board, who met recently behind closed doors to discuss their working relationship.

The board will hire the firm Holland & Knight, which has locations across the country, including in Denver. The board could also ask the firm to conduct investigations or offer a second opinion on complex matters previously reviewed by the school district’s lawyers.

A contract hasn’t been finalized. But board member Kimberlee Sia said at the meeting that the cost was below the $250,000 threshold that requires the district to put a contract out for bid.

The district put out a request for proposals anyway, Sia said. But no law firms responded.

Instead, Sia said she reached out to firms to ask if they would be interested in the job. Of the two that responded, she and board President Xóchitl Gaytán chose Holland & Knight, Sia said.

The board voted unanimously to hire the firm without any substantive discussion.

The topic has generated debate in the past. Sia first proposed a policy on when and how the board should hire an outside lawyer in June 2025. Her thinking, she said, was to avoid conflicts of interest regarding the superintendent’s contract and performance evaluation.

Instead of having the school district’s general counsel represent both the board and the superintendent, Sia proposed each side should hire its own external attorney.

Gaytán pushed back on the proposal, arguing that it could displace Denver Public Schools General Counsel Aaron Thompson and policy governance attorney Marcus Johnson, both of whom are people of color. She noted that Marrero is also a person of color.

The board passed a slimmed-down version of Sia’s proposal in October. Gaytán was the sole no vote. The policy, called Governance Process Policy 18, says the board’s outside lawyer should report directly to the board president, who is currently Gaytán.

Marrero has expressed concerns about the arrangement. In a June 8 letter in which he outlined how he believes the board is overstepping its bounds, the superintendent wrote that he was “compelled to reiterate concerns regarding any efforts to create structures that function as a parallel legal advisory system separate from the District’s General Counsel.”

He wrote that such a move could “risk creating perceptions of retaliation, undermine established reporting structures, and further complicate governance responsibilities.”

The relationship between Marrero and the board has grown more tense since Marrero applied for an open position in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. He didn’t get the job.

Marrero and the board met in a three-hour closed-door session late last month to discuss the superintendent’s concerns and his contract, which says he’s entitled to a year’s salary if the board terminates him without cause. Marrero earned $346,529 this past school year. The two sides emerged from that meeting pledging to continue to work together.

An attempt by some board members to call a subsequent meeting to discuss Marrero’s employment didn’t garner enough support to be scheduled, the Denver Post reported.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Denver school board appears likely to adopt bell-to-bell cellphone ban for all grades

2026-06-04T23:48:27+00:00

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The Denver school board appears poised to adopt a bell-to-bell cellphone ban for elementary, middle, and high school students districtwide.

The policy would take effect when school starts in August and require cellphones to be off and out of sight when students are in school buildings. It wouldn’t be in effect off-campus, for example when high school students leave school to go to lunch or to an internship.

Board members discussed and fine-tuned the proposed policy at a work session Thursday. They’ll vote on a final version Monday.

Multiple board members said many Denver parents urgently want school cellphone limits.

“We’re a year behind a lot of districts in the state of Colorado with this decision-making and with this implementation,” said board member John Youngquist. “Our parents have been yearning for this.”

The board’s discussion mirrors a broader debate unfolding across Colorado as districts work to meet a July 1 deadline to adopt policies on student cellphone use. Many parents and educators want to sharply curtail cellphone use during school hours to reduce device addiction and encourage in-person social connection. But others say students need cellphones in case of emergencies, to communicate with employers or relatives, or to address health or mental health problems.

A 2025 Colorado law requires school districts and charter schools to adopt cellphone policies, but doesn’t require a ban. Many school districts have already settled on such policies, most of which will take effect in the fall. This spring, the 62,000-student Douglas County district and 34,000-student Aurora district adopted a bell-to-bell bans for elementary and middle school students, but those policies only ban cellphones during class for high schoolers, not other parts of the school day.

Several districts, including Boulder Valley, Mesa County Valley 51, and Westminster, have adopted bell-to-bell bans for students in all grades.

Denver’s proposed policy mirrors recommendations made by a 17-member district advisory committee in April.

A recent survey by the district shows that even for older students, most people agree with the away-for-the-day approach to cellphones and devices like smart watches.

Of more than 7,000 survey respondents, 64% supported a bell-to-bell ban for middle and high school students. Students respondents were the outliers though — 97% of more than 600 surveyed opposed a bell-to-bell ban for middle and high schoolers.

Sarah Almy Moore, a Denver parent and a member of the advisory committee, urged support for the proposed policy despite student opposition.

“Kids are telling you they cannot be without their phones because many have never learned how,” she said. “We must prepare students to have a healthy relationship with technology, and to know they can, at times, function without it.”

Multiple parents warned against a cellphone policy that would allow high schoolers to use phones at school when they’re not in class, an idea the board discussed in May.

“We know partial policies don’t actually work when phones are allowed during lunch or passing periods,” said Natalie Perez, a parent and organizer with the advocacy group Stand for Children Colorado. “Those distractions don’t stay there, they just come back into the classroom and teachers lose valuable learning time managing devices instead of teaching.”

No students spoke about the cellphone policy during the public comment period Thursday.

The district’s proposed policy would include a ban on smartphones, smartwatches, earbuds, and other technology not issued by schools. It would allow exceptions for students who need their phones for medical reasons or as part of a special education plan or disability accommodation.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Some students need online classes. Here’s how this Colorado school district does it.

2026-05-14T17:56:08+00:00

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Gracie, a junior at Roosevelt High School in Johnstown, missed lots of school last year. Gossip and drama were stressing her out.

“It was giving me a lot of anxiety,” she said. “It got to the point where I hadn’t shown up so much that I was scared to show up.”

This year, Gracie is one of 97 high schoolers in the online program in her small northern Colorado district — Weld RE-5J — taking a mix of online and in-person classes. She likes the freedom to work at her own pace some days, tapping out history, English, and Spanish assignments at her kitchen table.

As more Colorado districts look to add online offerings to blunt the impact of declining enrollment, Weld RE-5J’s longstanding online program is an example of what’s possible. Although the 4,200-student district doesn’t actively advertise the program, there’s been a waitlist for more than a year. In December, district leaders hired a second teacher to help oversee their online students. Next year, they plan to pilot an online program for up to five middle schoolers and expand the online high school program to 120 students — about 10% of the district’s high school enrollment.

“It’s really important to us to grow slowly enough that we grow well,” said Alexandra Ham, the district’s online administrator.

Weld RE-5J provides online classes primarily through Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, a state-supported nonprofit that offers a large menu of asynchronous online classes taught by Colorado licensed teachers.

Ham said most students in her district’s online program have at least one state-designated risk factor, often anxiety, depression, or health issues that make a full load of in-person classes challenging. About 15% of the program’s students take all their classes online. The rest, like Gracie, have hybrid schedules, with about half in-person and half online classes.

That set-up is ideal, Ham said, because it often addresses the problems students are facing while giving them in-person social opportunities and access to electives and hands-on career preparation classes at the high school.

Dan Morris, co-executive director of Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, described Weld RE-5J as a showcase for its online program.

“It’s my belief … that if a district will offer more hybrid options, fewer kids are going to want to leave for the full-time online,” he said.

Online schools with statewide reach are growing in Colorado. School districts want their students back.

Often, such full-time online offerings are provided by what Colorado calls multi-district online schools, public schools that enroll students from two or more school districts. Statewide, more than 30,000 students attend such schools. The big names include Astravo, GOAL, and Colorado Connections Academy. Some of them have optional in-person components, others operate fully online.

Over the last year, Morris’ group has worked with dozens of Colorado districts interested in launching their own online programs, in part to help win back students who’ve left for multi-district online schools or to keep them from leaving in the first place.

Weld RE-5J, which has run its online program for more than a decade, is in the enviable position of being among a small number of growing school districts in a state full of shrinking districts.

But Ham and her team still want to keep students local while satisfying the growing demand for online learning. The district has used other online class vendors over the years — Edgenuity and Florida Virtual School, for example. With Florida Virtual, it was trickier to get assistance because of the time zone difference. For some platforms, the rigor wasn’t there: Students were passive, showing knowledge through basic multiple choice assignments. Sometimes they completed semester-long classes in days or weeks.

All of Weld RE-5J’s online students — both hybrid and fully online — have a modest in-school requirement: three hours a week either at Roosevelt High or a freshly refurbished portable classroom in Milliken, on the east side of the district. That’s when the district’s two online teachers check in with students about their progress and grades.

Gracie, left, and Briley are part of the Weld-RE-5J school district's online program. They take half their classes online and half in person.

“It makes sure that we have eyes on the students, especially with how much mental health stuff there is going on,” said Ham. “If they miss a meeting, they’re not ignored.”

Gracie, who hopes to be a realtor, attended a recent in-person session with three classmates in a second-floor room at Roosevelt High School. She looked over a chemistry assignment on her tablet, while her tablemate Briley worked on a digital vision board about her aspirations for a job in healthcare, maybe phlebotomy.

Briley, a junior, joined the online program in January. She’s not a morning person and regularly overslept last semester, causing lots of absences and frequent fights with her mom. When she did attend school, she struggled to sit through 90-minute classes when she knew could get the work done more quickly on her own, she said.

Now Briley takes English, history, and physical education in person, while doing math, chemistry, Spanish, and social and emotional learning online.

“It’s definitely been the best change ever,” she said. “My mental health, first of all, is 10 times better, and my grades have honestly never been this good.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org

Online schools with statewide reach are growing in Colorado. School districts want their students back.

2026-05-13T18:10:30+00:00

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Kurt Clay, assistant superintendent in the Delta County school district, was alarmed last year to learn that 138 students had left his western Colorado district for public online schools. With them went $1.6 million in state education dollars.

“That’s just funding that goes somewhere else,” Clay said. “It’s not staying here local.“

It wasn’t just about the money though. Clay and other district leaders believed they could offer something better: The flexible online classes students wanted with the added benefit of keeping them connected to district staff, school clubs, and special events like prom. That’s how the district’s online program — Empower Online — came to be last fall.

Delta County is among the dozens of Colorado districts that have recently started their own online programs or plan to soon, competing for students at a time when enrollment is declining statewide. Such school districts, which are contending with budget cuts and even school closures, are particularly wary of multi-district online schools, which they say draw students and state funding to districts hundreds of miles away.

Colorado has 44 multi-district online schools serving more than 30,000 students statewide. About half the schools get 90% or more of their students from outside their authorizing district, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education. Just a few entities authorize many of the schools.

More multi-district online schools could be on the way. While the State Board of Education unanimously rejected one in March, it will consider three more proposals on Thursday.

This group helps districts with online programs

Over the past year, a state-supported nonprofit called Colorado Digital Learning Solutions has helped many districts launch or plan new online programs. The group is not an online school. Rather, it provides asynchronous online classes taught by Colorado-licensed teachers to school districts and charter schools. Some of its teachers still teach in-person classes, and others are retired from Colorado classrooms.

The Weld RE-5J district in northern Colorado has used Colorado Digital Learning Solutions courses for years in its online program. Emma, a junior in the district, is taking algebra, English, and world history online through the group, plus four in-person classes at her high school in Johnstown.

Emma, who hopes to graduate a semester early, said she found all in-person classes a struggle because she has ADHD.

“I just have a really hard time focusing in class and being my whole present self,” she said.

“I chose hybrid because it still gives me a social aspect, but it also gives me that flexible aspect.”

Colorado Digital Learning Solutions was selected to provide online classes to Colorado schools after the passage of a 2016 state law that required increased investment in supplemental online courses. The law sought to ensure digital equity by providing assistance to school districts and charter schools that didn’t have the capacity to build their own online offerings.

Emma, a junior at Roosevelt High School in Johnstown in northern Colorado, joined her district's online program last fall.

Colorado Digital Learning Solutions receives about 20% of its budget from the state. Generally, school districts pay the group $250 per student per semester-long class.

About half of Colorado’s 180 school districts use the nonprofit to offer online classes — sometimes a full menu and sometimes a single course. For example, the small Lamar district on the Eastern Plains contracts with the group to provide a Latin class, taught by a Boulder teacher, to one student.

As more school districts seek to win students back from multi-district online schools — or prevent students from leaving in the first place — things have become contentious at times. Some multi-district online schools are pushing back against Colorado Digital Learning Solutions.

Some students need online classes. Here’s how this Colorado district does it.

In a February letter on behalf of some multi-district online schools, attorney Brad Miller accused the group of causing “reputational harm” to the schools. He said the group’s promotional materials highlight the online schools’ low graduation rates without noting that their students tend to be highly mobile and behind academically.

Dan Morris, co-executive director of Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, said his group was reporting publicly available data.

Miller, who’s been involved in several high-profile lawsuits on behalf of conservative-leaning school districts, did not respond to requests for comment or to clarify which online schools he represents.

The online program pitch

Seventeen Colorado districts, most of them small and rural, started online programs in 2025. Colorado Digital Learning Solutions is working with 25-30 additional districts that want to start online programs next school year, Morris said.

Unlike multi-district online schools, online programs must have fewer than 100 full-time online students and no more than 10 from outside the district.

A key part of Morris’ pitch to districts is data. It’s in the presentation he’s given at state conferences: “Stop the Enrollment Drain: Build a Local Online Program that keeps students in-district.” He also shares detailed spreadsheets his team has compiled showing how many students school districts are losing to multi-district online schools.

That’s what convinced officials in the Durango district in southwestern Colorado to start an online program next year. They learned they’d lost more than 400 students — and about $5 million in state funding — to multi-district online schools.

Robert Aspen, Durango High School’s intervention coordinator, said they’ll start with up to 50 students, with plans to grow long term. The goal is to attract students who enrolled in multi-district online schools back to their home school.

While there are 44 multi-district onlines in Colorado, state data shows that most students are leaving their local districts for a few big names, authorized by just a few entities and often run by for-profit companies located out of state.

Byers Superintendent Tom Turrell, whose district authorizes eight multi-district online charter schools, said it’s no surprise that more districts are starting online options.

“We don’t view district on-line programs as competition,” he said by email. “Like Byers, other districts are innovating to better serve students and that’s great, that’s their job.”

Online learning is popular, not all options created equal

Educators say families seek online options for many reasons, including because students suffer from anxiety, have medical challenges, have experienced bullying, or have jobs or household responsibilities that conflict with a traditional school schedule. Competitive athletes also like the flexibility of online courses.

“I have a rodeo girl,” said Delaine Hudson, a former principal who runs the new online program in Delta County. “She spends her morning doing school work and then she’s either practicing or … she’s somewhere in the state doing rodeo.”

Forty students, mostly high schoolers, are enrolled in Delta County’s online program this semester, taking courses through Colorado Digital Learning Solutions with other students around the state. They take core classes, like English and science, and less common offerings like “History of the Holocaust.”

Hudson likes that there’s a real teacher available to message when students hit roadblocks. She checks in with students weekly, too, by phone, email, or text.

Most students are thrilled with the online program so far, she said. “And it’s rigorous. I don’t feel like we’re just pushing them through.”

Critics of some multi-district online schools question their quality. At 20 of the schools, so few students take state tests that state officials can’t calculate ratings, leaving the public in the dark about how they’re doing.

In addition, some of the biggest multi-district online schools routinely post low graduation rates. For example, the 2,600-student Astravo Academy Online High School, which is authorized by the Byers district, has a four-year graduation rate of 44%. At District 49’s GOAL High School, it’s 49%. The state average is about 86%, according to state data.

Supporters say the some multi-district online schools are helping at-risk students who’ve faced educational and personal challenges.

“We’ve taken on all of the kids who needed second and third and fourth and fifth chances in GOAL from the entire state,” said District 49 school board member Marie LaVere-Wright at a board meeting last June.

While GOAL is classified by the state as an “alternative education campus” — schools designed to serve high-risk students — more than 90 other Colorado schools, including many bricks and mortar schools, have the same designation.

District 49 officials declined to comment for this story.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Denver school board adds a school to the district’s last remaining innovation zone

2026-04-27T22:20:38+00:00

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The Denver school board voted last week to add another school to the district’s last remaining innovation zone, rejecting a recommendation from the superintendent who said that doing so would allow the schools in the zone to “self-segregate.”

Ultimately, the board voted 6-1 on Thursday to add Willow Elementary to the Luminary Learning Network innovation zone this fall.

Innovation zones are a reform-era invention that allow district-run schools to operate with charter-like autonomy. Zone schools are overseen by nonprofit organizations, and their principals are supervised by the zone’s executive director, not district administrators. Zone schools can also opt out of paying for some district services and spend the money another way.

The Luminary Learning Network was Denver Public Schools’ first innovation zone. It started in 2016 with four schools and currently has eight, though one of those schools — Ashley Elementary — is set to leave the zone and revert to district control at the end of the school year. Adding Willow will keep the number of zone schools at eight.

Two other DPS innovation zones were dismantled under the watch of Superintendent Alex Marrero in 2023 and 2024, leaving the Luminary Learning Network as the last zone standing.

Willow teachers and parents advocated to join the zone. Principal Catrina Pazo told the school board earlier this month that joining the zone was “an educator-led request,” and that a majority of Willow staff voted in favor of it, as is required by law.

Willow is already an innovation school, which allows it to choose its own curriculum and school calendar, for example. The school is whiter and wealthier than the district as a whole, and its students perform well on state standardized tests.

“Our strong performance should not be a reason to stand still,” Pazo said.

Marrero had questioned whether joining the zone would benefit Willow academically. He also argued that adding Willow at the same time that Ashley is leaving would make the zone into a collection of more privileged schools. About 75% of DPS students are students of color and nearly two-thirds qualify for subsidized meals, an indicator of poverty. By contrast, fewer than 60% of zone students are students of color and fewer than 45% come from low-income families.

Marrero said the board’s own policies direct him to avoid further segregating schools. But some board members questioned that logic. Amy Klein Molk asked if the policies are meant to prevent the segregation of students or to prevent “the professional collaboration between schools.”

Board member John Youngquist asked if DPS has a target for school integration.

“There isn’t a target because that’s not something we’ve discussed,” Marrero said.

Several board members said the district should examine why schools like Willow seek additional autonomy and how DPS could be more responsive to their needs.

“The work is figuring out: Why do folks want to choice out of our district?” board member Monica Hunter said. “Those are things I’ve actually heard from schools: ‘I ask for this, I get it. I don’t have to go back and forth. I don’t feel retaliated against when I bring up something that’s a problem.’”

The board took two votes on Thursday. In the first, the board voted 4-3 to defeat Marrero’s recommendation. Then the board voted 6-1 to allow Willow to join the zone.

Board President Xóchitl Gaytán was the sole no vote in the second round. She said adding Willow would increase racial, economic, and linguistic segregation, referring to the lower percentage of students learning English as a second language in the zone.

Hunter and board member DJ Torres changed their votes, shifting from opposing the addition of Willow to supporting it. Neither commented on why.

Willow was briefly part of another, now-defunct zone called the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone. Willow left that zone in 2021 amid concerns about the zone’s operations.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Superintendent says expanding Denver’s last innovation zone would increase school segregation

2026-04-17T00:43:11+00:00

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Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero has long been critical of semi-autonomous innovation zones, and he doubled down this week by recommending that an elementary school not be allowed to join the district’s last remaining zone, the Luminary Learning Network.

The students at Willow Elementary School are whiter and wealthier than the district as a whole, as is the case at half of the schools in the zone. Marrero said Willow’s request to join the zone was “privilege coded as innovation.”

“It’s very clear that I should not allow certain parts of our community to self-segregate,” he said.

Speaking more bluntly than usual and with a tinge of frustration in his voice, Marrero laid out his case at a school board meeting Wednesday night. The decision of whether to expand the zone is up to the school board, which is set to vote next week.

Marrero’s recommendation is another sign that school reform is dying in Denver. In his nearly five years as superintendent, Marrero has pushed for a more centralized approach to school improvement, which differs from the philosophy of past superintendents.

The Luminary Learning Network was Denver Public Schools’ first innovation zone and is now the last one standing. It started in 2016 with four schools and has since expanded to eight, though it’s set to shrink to seven next year.

Parents and teachers supportive of Willow’s request to join the zone urged the school board to say yes to the expansion. Teachers said being connected with likeminded schools would allow them to share successful strategies.

“Our students deserve more than a one-size-fits-all system,” said Outara Murer, a parent and paraprofessional at Willow.

Marrero said there’s nothing innovative about innovation zones. He said he believes the benefits include “shopping for your supervisor,” the ability for the nonprofit to raise money from private foundations, and protection from district decisions about school closures.

“Board members, you’ve been to these schools,” Marrero said. “Have you seen something that says, ‘My goodness, I have never seen that before. Let’s scale it.’ No.”

When he asked a principal — whom he declined to name — what they got from being in the zone, the principal smirked, Marrero said. He said the principal told him “it’s always great when we have something unexpected” and then made “the money sign” with their hand.

Luminary Learning Network Executive Director Bailey Holyfield said the zone occasionally applies for grants that benefit its schools. As for the zone schools not being innovative, Holyfield said structural or operational innovations are not always obvious to external observers.

Two other innovation zones were dismantled under Marrero’s watch, including one that briefly counted Willow Elementary as a member. But Marrero said he’s not against all school flexibility. About 20% of Denver schools are innovation schools, which means they can choose their own bell schedule or curriculum, for example. Marrero’s children attend an innovation school, he said. But unlike schools in zones, standalone innovation schools are overseen by the district.

The student demographics at Willow, which is located in the more affluent Central Park neighborhood in northeast Denver, are at the center of the disagreement. Nearly half of the students at Willow are white, and about 35% are from low-income families.

While parents and teachers said Willow is becoming more diverse, Marrero said the school is still disproportionately privileged and would decrease the diversity of the innovation zone.

That’s especially true, Marrero said, because another school, Ashley Elementary, is poised to leave the zone at the end of the school year and revert back to district control. Nearly all of the students at Ashley are Hispanic or Black and come from low-income families.

“You all are asking me to avoid at all costs decisions that increase segregation,” Marrero said to the school board, referring to policies that direct him to prevent segregation.

“This definitely moves further away from what you all are asking,” he said of Willow’s request. “Even if I would (approve it) — which I would not, because this is aligned to how I feel, as well — I simply cannot recommend approval, based on the policy.”

Marrero also questioned whether joining the zone would benefit Willow academically. Willow does well on standardized tests, and Marrero said that would continue no matter what, partly because of “the student body.” White students in Denver score near the top in the state.

Willow parents pushed back on that argument.

“High achievement is not a reason to withhold support,” said Nicole Winchester, who has a fourth grader, a second grader, and a preschooler at Willow.

Principal Catrina Pazo said Willow is currently an innovation school, but “not all of our flexibilities are consistently being honored.” Joining the zone “formalizes these conditions and connects us to a network with a strong track record of improving outcomes,” Pazo said.

Parent Tara Gallagher said the Willow PTA has raised nearly $120,000 this year to pay for support staff positions and events such as movie nights and a trunk-or-treat. But she said the PTA is “increasingly concerned at how we can sustain this level of support,” especially as more students from low-income families enroll at the school.

Zone supporters argued that Willow followed all of the steps required to join the zone, including that a majority of its staff voted in favor of joining. School board members Kimberlee Sia and John Youngquist also pointed that out. But Marrero said following the steps guarantees that a request will be considered, not that it will be granted.

Holyfield said the district’s process for approving zones has shifted from reliable to discretionary.

“That should be a concern to every board member,” she said.

However, it was clear that the board was split, with some members supporting Marrero.

“As a board, it is absolutely our responsibility to disrupt systems and structures that perpetuate inequities,” said board Vice President Monica Hunter, a former DPS teacher who once taught at Willow but is opposed to the school joining the zone. “And I don’t see how adding in a school where the PTA can easily raise $100,000 and there’s a lot of privilege (does that).”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ closes building to address officials’ safety concerns

2026-02-02T23:53:36+00:00

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Leaders of Riverstone Academy, which backers have called “Colorado’s first public Christian school,” agreed on Friday to close the school’s building in Pueblo County “effective immediately.”

The decision, which affects about 30 kindergarten through fifth grade students, came after county officials threatened to shut off the building’s utilities in a Friday letter to school officials. They cited ongoing health and safety concerns, including that the building lacks the proper fire safety systems.

Quin Friberg, a local pastor and Riverstone’s executive director, responded the same day, saying the building would close to students while school officials work to meet county requirements.

It’s unclear if the closure of Riverstone’s building marks the school’s demise or if its leaders will operate the school elsewhere until the problems are fixed. Regardless, the abrupt change represents a setback for the school, which has sparked controversy since an official involved in Riverstone’s creation announced its Christian affiliation at a public meeting in October.

Colorado school district may drop attorney who helped create state’s ‘first public Christian school’

The school’s founders opened Riverstone quickly and quietly last summer in leased space in an industrial area near concrete and marijuana businesses. They didn’t reveal the school’s religious affiliation in key start-up documents and emails obtained by Chalkbeat indicate Riverstone was created to produce a test case in the courts over whether public money can be spent on religious schools. The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on a similar case out of Oklahoma last spring.

Riverstone is currently receiving public funding, but state officials have said the money could be clawed back if they determine the school is ineligible through an audit. The Colorado Department of Education confirmed on Friday that the school’s authorizer, Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ER BOCES, as well as School District 49, which is the BOCES’ fiscal agent, will be audited this year.

In a letter to county building officials late Friday afternoon, Friberg confirmed that Riverstone would comply with the county’s order to close its building at 1950 Aspen Circle.

He wrote, “Effective immediately, Riverstone Academy will not operate the building for use as a school while the administrative process continues. Students will not be present in the building for instructional purposes during this interim period.”

Friberg also said that Forging Education, the nonprofit that operates Riverstone and that he also heads, planned to appeal the county’s closure order. Lawyers for Forging Education submitted the appeal to county officials Saturday.

On Monday, Friberg did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about whether Riverstone students are getting instruction since the building’s closure.

The person who answered the phone at Riverstone on Monday said she doesn’t answer questions from non-parents and hung up. Jenna Wolfe, whose LLC owns the Pueblo County property where Riverstone is located, couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.

Lawyers for Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ resist county order to close building

The closure of Riverstone’s building comes after months of concern by county officials over building, zoning, health, and fire code violations, and more than three weeks after an attorney for Pueblo County first ordered the school to close its building.

Despite that order, school officials didn’t close the building to students in January. Through a lawyer, they pushed back, arguing they’d made a good faith effort to comply with county requirements and that closing the building would be disruptive to students and families.

Multiple documents and interviews with county officials show that Riverstone’s leaders didn’t follow routine procedures for seeking permits, inspections, and approvals from local officials. After the school’s existence came to light in October, the fire marshal ordered fire safety checks at the building every half hour.

The monthslong back-and-forth between Riverstone and county officials over health and safety violations at the school led to a hearing before Colorado District Court Judge Amiel Markenson on Jan. 28.

The hearing in Pueblo County was not livestreamed, but Anthony Mestas, a county spokesperson, said by email afterwards, “The Court did not order them to cease occupancy of the building but did not bar any enforcement action by the County including utility disconnection.”

Two days later, on Jan. 30, the county sent a “Notice of imminent enforcement action” to Riverstone officials. In it, officials warned that they would disconnect utilities at 8 a.m. Monday to “abate unsafe and unlawful occupancy.”

The notice cited a variety of violations, including that the building is not approved for occupancy by a school and that the building does not have the proper fire safety systems, such as alarms, lighting, and building features that would slow a fire’s spread.

“Occupying a building not approved or inspected for Education use places children at heightened and immediate risk in the event of fire, emergency, or evacuation,” the notice said.

Mestas said the county didn’t order utility disconnection at Riverstone’s building on Monday morning because school officials agreed on Friday to close the building to students.

Friberg’s Friday letter to county officials said access to the building would only be allowed for non-student uses, such as administrative, maintenance, and construction activities.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Lawyers for Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ resist county order to close building

2026-01-14T01:40:24+00:00

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Lawyers representing the operator of Colorado’s “first public Christian school” are pushing back against an order by Pueblo County officials to close the school building for safety reasons.

In a Jan. 9 letter, the lawyers asked for a meeting and urged county officials not to seek an emergency court order requiring the immediate closure of Riverstone Academy’s building, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Chalkbeat. County officials had warned in a letter to school officials a few days earlier that they might seek such an order.

The dispute over the building is just one facet of the controversy surrounding Riverstone, which drew attention from state and local officials soon after it opened in August with about 30 K-5 students. The school advertises itself as a public elementary school that offers a “Christian foundation.”

In October, state education leaders warned that they might withhold public funding from Riverstone because the Colorado constitution bars religious public schools. In addition, Pueblo County officials identified more than a dozen health, fire, building, and zoning violations related to the building that Riverstone leases, and ordered fire-safety checks at the school every 30 minutes.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat suggest the school was created to spark a test case in the courts over whether public money could go to religious schools, after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on such a case out of Oklahoma last spring. But religious liberty is not likely to be the central issue if Riverstone’s operators were to face Pueblo County in court over their pending dispute.

Lawyer’s letter says operator doesn’t want litigation

In the Jan. 9 letter to Pueblo County officials, attorney Gregory O’Boyle, of the Colorado Springs-based firm Werner O’Boyle Cyberon, asked for a call with county officials to “discuss next steps and to avoid unnecessary conflict.”

“Our goal is full compliance through the normal land-use and building-permit processes, not litigation,” he wrote.

O’Boyle represents Forging Education, which is the group contracted to run Riverstone.

He said Riverstone officials have made a “good faith effort” to comply with county requirements and that “public interest is not served by abruptly displacing K-5 students, requiring families to secure emergency educational arrangements mid-year.”

O’Boyle’s letter notes that 29 children attend the school and eight staff members work there.

O’Boyle did not reply to requests for comment on Tuesday. Neither did Quin Friberg, a Pueblo pastor who is the executive director of both Riverstone and Forging Education.

Marci Day, assistant attorney for Pueblo County, didn’t respond to Chalkbeat questions about whether she would hold a call with Riverstone’s lawyers or whether she would seek an emergency injunction to close the school.

School opened without normal review processes

Riverstone school leaders did not go through the normal zoning and building review processes before opening the school to students last summer, according to previous interviews with county officials and a review of correspondence and documents obtained by Chalkbeat through public records requests.

In Day’s Jan. 6 letter ordering Riverstone officials to close the building, she cited a series of failures by the school’s leaders to follow local regulations.

She noted that county officials told Friberg at a July meeting that schools were not allowed in the industrial-zoned site where he wanted to open Riverstone. She also said that Riverstone officials had failed to submit three required documents to local officials for review, one of which was needed so fire and health officials could determine what changes would be needed to bring the building up to code.

Under the normal procedure for approving a building as a school, “health, safety and welfare concerns would have been required to be addressed prior to approval for occupancy by the appropriate agency,” Day wrote.

Day also cited proposed construction work at Riverstone’s building as part of the rationale for ordering closure.

The proposed changes include the removal of multiple interior walls; new sinks, drinking fountains, and fire safety fixtures; and the construction of a wheelchair ramp at the building’s entrance, according to architectural plans obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request.

“Due to the current conditions and the construction that will be required to bring the buildings and property into compliance with all building, fire, health, and zoning codes, it has been deemed unsafe to allow the continued occupancy of the buildings, particularly by school children, prior to final approval by Pueblo County,” Day wrote in the Jan. 6 letter.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ ordered to close building over safety concerns

2026-01-10T20:23:43+00:00

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Pueblo County officials have ordered the closure of what’s been billed by backers as Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” citing unaddressed safety concerns at the school’s building.

Riverstone Academy officials must acknowledge by Monday evening their intent to close the school at its current location, according to a Jan. 6 letter sent by the assistant county attorney to Quin Friberg, Riverstone’s executive director.

If school leaders don’t comply, county officials will seek an emergency injunction from the courts requiring immediate closure, the letter says.

The county’s order marks the latest development in Riverstone’s short and controversial existence. It opened in August with about 30 kindergarten through fifth grade students, advertising itself as offering “a Christian foundation” and Christian curriculum.

It’s unclear if the closure of Riverstone’s building, a former office located in an industrial area, will spell the end of the school or if its leaders will seek to move it elsewhere or switch to an online format. In a December email to a county official, Friberg wrote that Riverstone had “gotten a bit ahead of ourselves” but wanted to find a way to keep its students in school, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat in a public records request.

Friberg did not respond to requests for comment Friday evening or Saturday. Ken Witt and Lis Richard, the executive director and board president, respectively, of Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, the public education cooperative that authorized Riverstone to open, did not respond to requests for comment either.

This ‘public Christian school’ opened quietly in Colorado. Now there could be a legal fight.

News of the school burst into the open in October, when Witt publicly declared it Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” surprising state education officials and members of the public.

Leaders from the Colorado Department of Education quickly warned that they could withhold public funding for the school because the Colorado constitution bars religious public schools. Witt countered that withholding public money from the school would amount to religious discrimination.

An email obtained by Chalkbeat suggests that Riverstone was created to spur a lawsuit over the question of whether public money can be used for religious schools. The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on such a case out of Oklahoma last spring. Brad Miller, a Colorado lawyer who represents Education reEnvisioned, wrote in the June email that he’d been approached by a Christian law firm about starting a new test case.

In July, Friberg met with county officials about his plans for a school in leased space inside a former office near concrete, landscaping, and marijuana businesses. In late August, county officials sent a six-page letter detailing numerous zoning and building changes that would be needed first, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request. But Friberg had opened Riverstone two weeks earlier.

Christian law firm’s search for test case led to religious public school in Colorado, emails suggest

In late October, shortly after Riverstone’s existence became widely known, Pueblo County health, fire, building, and zoning officials cited more than a dozen violations and put the school on “fire watch,” which requires someone to patrol the school every half hour to look for signs of fire.

The Jan. 6 letter to Friberg, signed by Assistant County Attorney Marci Day, outlined a series of failures by school officials in ensuring the school meets regulations and is safe for children.

“You were notified at a meeting with Pueblo County Planning and Development in July that the zoning for the property did not allow for the use but proceeded to open Riverstone Academy to the public in August,” she wrote.

She noted that as of Jan. 6, school officials had not turned in three required applications. They include one for a special use permit that would allow the school to be located in a light industrial zone, one for a site development plan, and one to change the building occupancy from a business use to an education use.

She said without the occupancy application, local fire and health officials can’t determine what changes will be required to bring the building up to code.

“Due to the current conditions and the construction that will be required to bring the buildings and property into compliance with all building, fire, health, and zoning codes it has been deemed unsafe to allow the continued occupancy of the buildings, particularly by school children, prior to final approval by Pueblo County,” she wrote.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ violated health and safety rules, documents show

The removal of multiple walls inside Riverstone’s building, new sinks, drinking fountains, fire safety fixtures, and the construction of a wheelchair ramp at the building’s entrance are among the changes necessary, according to architectural plans submitted by Riverstone officials in December and obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request.

Carmen Howard, the director of the Pueblo County Planning and Development Department, said by email Friday evening that the department had received Riverstone’s special use permit application.

Other documents obtained through public records requests show that Friberg knew the school’s future was in jeopardy because of zoning and other problems.

In a Dec. 30 email from Friberg to Howard, he thanked her for organizing a visit to the school site to “explore whether there’s a path forward that keeps these students in school.”

“I also appreciate your willingness to help us work through a situation where we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves,” he wrote.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Denver’s last innovation zone could shrink as 1 school nears return to district control

2026-01-09T03:28:52+00:00

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Denver Public Schools’ only remaining innovation zone could soon shrink.

Innovation zones are a reform-era invention that allow district-run schools to operate with charter-like autonomy. Schools in zones are overseen by nonprofit organizations with executive directors who take on a supervisory role instead of district administrators.

But the number of zones in Denver has dwindled in recent years from three to one as a school board majority backed by the Denver teachers union has reined in school autonomy.

Now the last remaining zone, called the Luminary Learning Network, appears poised to go from eight schools to seven next year when one of its schools, Ashley Elementary, reverts to district control. And an effort to keep eight schools in the zone may not have support from DPS leaders.

A presentation posted on the school board’s website earlier this week said Willow Elementary had requested to join the zone for next school year. But district officials were recommending the school board vote no, according to the presentation, which is no longer on the website.

Their reasoning, the presentation said, was that the addition of Willow would make the zone into a collection of “more affluent” schools, which would contradict the zone’s commitment to equity and the school board’s emphasis on representation.

Willow has withdrawn its application to join the zone, district spokesperson Scott Pribble said Thursday. But the district anticipates Willow will resubmit it in the near future, he said. Willow Principal Catrina Pazo did not respond to requests for comment.

The Luminary Learning Network was founded in 2016 by four schools that wanted more autonomy over how they spent their time and money and the freedom to try new ideas. The district has consistently renewed its contract with the zone every three years. The latest contract is now up for renewal, and the school board is expected to vote later this month.

District officials told the board Thursday that the decision for Ashley Elementary to return to district control next school year was a mutual one between Ashley and zone leaders.

Paige Neuharth, the district’s director of authorizing and accountability, also cited Ashley’s “current academic performance trajectory.” Ashley’s test scores have declined recently and the school earned a red rating this year, the lowest on the state’s color-coded scale.

“A transition to district management is viewed as the most effective way to prioritize instructional coherence and operational stability for the Ashley community,” a district spokesperson said.

Superintendent Alex Marrero has pushed for a more centralized approach to school improvement in the four and a half years that he has helmed DPS. That approach is a departure from past superintendents who used flexibility as an improvement strategy.

Bailey Holyfield, the zone’s executive director, said the renewal period was a chance to evaluate whether the zone’s schools were aligned with its theory of action that flexibility from district curriculum, training, and other mandates empowers educators and better serves students.

In an interview, Holyfield said that “it makes the most sense for Ashley to rejoin district management” at this time. She said the decision was made with “mutual respect for and care for Ashley,” and she noted that the zone is open to working with any school, regardless of its rating.

Ashley Elementary Principal Janet Estrada referred questions to Holyfield.

Willow Elementary has the state’s highest rating, signified by the color green. But district leaders had other concerns about Willow joining the zone, according to the now-removed presentation.

The students at the zone schools are already whiter and wealthier than the district as a whole, and while the students at Ashley are nearly all students of color, Willow is almost half white.

Replacing Ashley with Willow would drop the zone’s percentage of students of color from 59% to 56%, according to the presentation. That’s far below the districtwide percentage of 75%.

Willow was briefly part of another now-defunct innovation zone called the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone. Willow left that zone in 2021 before it dissolved in 2024. Another zone, Beacon Network Schools, was dissolved by the school board in 2023.

The board has rejected innovation zone expansion requests before, though never for the Luminary Learning Network, which has grown over the years.

It’s unclear when the board might vote on adding Willow to the zone. The board is scheduled to vote on renewing the Luminary Learning Network’s contract, without Ashley, on Jan. 22.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Denver to end reform-era partnership of Grant Beacon and Kepner Beacon middle schools

2025-12-10T01:34:13+00:00

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In another move away from the practices put in place during the peak of education reform in Denver Public Schools, the school district will end a unique arrangement in which two middle schools with extra autonomy were overseen by an executive principal.

Grant Beacon and Kepner Beacon middle schools will join a network of other district-run middle schools next year and be overseen by an administrator who works for the district’s central office, according to a letter district officials sent to families Monday.

The two schools’ arrangement began in 2016 when former DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg tasked Grant Beacon Principal Alex Magaña with running a second school. Dubbed Kepner Beacon, it was a restart of a struggling southwest Denver middle school. Magaña served as executive principal over both schools, each of which had a regular principal of its own.

Boasberg borrowed the idea of linking the two schools and giving them extra flexibility from the charter school world. He called it an “innovation management organization.” The hope was that the strategies that had helped Grant Beacon boost its test scores would do the same at Kepner Beacon without causing Grant to lose its leader.

But nearly a decade and two superintendents later, DPS is dissolving the arrangement, according to a copy of Monday’s letter obtained by Chalkbeat. Current DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero has pushed for a more centralized approach.

“This shift will help us provide consistent services, strengthen daily supports, and offer long term stability for students, staff, and families,” says the letter, which is signed by Executive Director of School Transformation Joe Amundsen and Operational Services Director Christine Sylvester.

Magaña’s executive principal role will be eliminated after this school year, the letter says. The move comes about a month after Magaña lost a bid to serve on the Denver school board. He ran for an at-large seat representing the entire city, but voters elected Amy Klein Molk instead.

Magaña declined to comment for this story.

In a statement, DPS said the Beacon schools “have a long history of innovation, and that will continue.” The Beacon model involves blended learning tailored to each student’s academic level, character development lessons, and in-school enrichment activities.

The district said the decision to dissolve the innovation management organization was not based on test scores. Kepner Beacon and Grant Beacon will remain innovation schools, which gives them extra autonomy over things like their calendar and curriculum.

But DPS confirmed that the elimination of the Beacon organization and the executive principal role are indicative of a shifting approach to school management and improvement.

“The district is moving toward consistent, sustainable support structures across all DPS middle schools,” the statement said, adding that the new model “provides principals with direct instructional and operational support, opportunities to collaborate with other middle school leaders, and clear pathways for professional learning.”

“This shift is about aligning support, not reducing autonomy or innovation for either of these schools,” the district said in the statement.

DPS embraced education reform under Boasberg and his predecessor Michael Bennet, now a U.S. senator who is running for governor of Colorado. From 2005 to 2018, the district closed struggling district-run schools and approved more high-performing charter schools. It gave all schools more autonomy and paid teachers based on performance.

Whether those strategies helped or hurt depends on whom you ask. While graduation rates and test scores went up, the reform policies were unpopular with teachers. The backlash helped spark a 2019 teachers strike and flipped the school board to union control.

Today, four out of the seven Denver school board members are backed by the teachers union. Magaña was not endorsed by the union when he ran for a board seat this fall.

For the past six years, Denver’s union-backed school board has undone many of the reforms put in place by Bennet and Boasberg, including limiting the autonomy of innovation schools.

The Beacon schools have undergone changes, too. Grant Beacon and Kepner Beacon became an “innovation zone” under Boasberg in 2018, which granted the schools even more say over their curriculum, schedule, and the hiring and firing of teachers.

But in 2023, Marrero recommended the Beacon innovation zone be dissolved, in part because of low test scores at Kepner Beacon. The board agreed. Beacon sued the district, but a judge ruled in favor of DPS. The dispute was one of several in which Marrero and Magaña disagreed.

Monday’s letter thanks Magaña “for his leadership, vision, and steady commitment to both campuses.” Asked if Magaña would serve as principal at either Beacon school next school year, the district said it is looking for a longtime leader for Grant Beacon, which currently has an interim principal.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ violated health and safety rules, documents show

2025-11-26T00:12:33+00:00

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A Pueblo County school billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school” has racked up more than a dozen zoning, building, and health code violations since opening this school year, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

And a local fire official said concerns about Riverstone Academy’s fire detection system prompted him to require patrols around the school every half hour.

The school employee tasked with that is “basically the fire alarm system,” said Rodney DeSiata, fire marshal and assistant fire chief at the Pueblo Rural Fire Protection District.

Riverstone, a K-5 school that describes itself as offering “a Christian foundation” and Christian curriculum, opened in August with about 30 elementary students, according to the school’s executive director.

Since then, four local departments have identified problems related to health, safety, and other rules and ordered school officials to make fixes, records show. The school is located in a former office in a light industrial zone near concrete, landscaping, and marijuana businesses.

Riverstone Academy occupies leased space in a building just outside Pueblo City limits.

Local officials said Riverstone skipped routine steps that should be followed when opening a school. While most public schools take more than a year to plan and launch, Riverstone opened in about three months.

In a statement emailed Tuesday, Riverstone Executive Director Quin Friberg said school officials have met with relevant county departments and are implementing their recommendations. Most updates, such as those from the health department, were completed weeks ago, he wrote.

“All departments confirmed that there are no health or safety concerns requiring closure, which is why we have been allowed to continue operating throughout this process,” he wrote. “ … We remain focused on serving our students and families with excellence and look forward to continuing to provide a safe, high-quality educational environment.”

An email obtained by Chalkbeat suggests that Riverstone was created to spur a lawsuit over the question of whether public money can be used for religious schools. The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on such a case out of Oklahoma last spring. The Colorado lawyer who authored the email said he’d been approached by a Christian law firm about starting a new test case.

Christian law firm’s search for test case led to religious public school in Colorado, emails suggest

State officials warned Riverstone’s authorizer in October that they could withhold funding from the school because of its religious character, a step the authorizer described as unconstitutional. If the state follows through and withholds funding, that could trigger a lawsuit and a test case.

Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, suggested that the school’s various code violations indicate its founders may have launched the school quickly to take advantage of the legal moment or because of a “move fast and break things” approach.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t wait another year, create a more viable school and a stronger test case,” he said.

Riverstone faces 13 violations

Riverstone generated headlines and caught the attention of some public officials in mid-October when its authorizer’s leader publicly declared it Colorado’s “first public Christian school.”

Riverstone’s authorizer is Education reEnvisioned BOCES, or Board of Cooperative Educational Services. Colorado has 21 BOCES, which are public entities that typically provide special education services, teacher training, or other programming to member school districts.

Ken Witt, executive director of Education reEnvisioned BOCES, did not respond to Chalkbeat’s requests for comment for this story.

By late October, local officials in Pueblo County had found at least 13 violations related to the school, according to documents obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request. One, issued to the property owner, Jenna Wolfe LLC, was for locating a school in a zoning district where schools are not allowed. Wolfe declined to comment for this story.

County officials also found the building’s occupancy type was not changed from a business use to an educational use as it should have been, records show.

Another 11 violations were cited by the Pueblo County Department of Public Health and Environment during an Oct. 29 inspection. They included a lack of drinking fountains, lack of a bathroom near the health room, missing radon testing and asbestos management records, improperly stored chemicals, and a finding that “the school campus is not maintained to prevent fire hazards.”

In mid-November, Sheryl Gifford, a Riverstone official, told a Pueblo County health inspector by email that she was in the process of getting radon testing done and that an architect was working on site plans, records show.

She also noted that Riverstone students had access to bottled water and water from a dispenser, according to documents obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request.

It’s not clear if parents of Riverstone students have been notified about the violations. Chalkbeat asked Riverstone for any emails or letters sent to parents about the violations or compliance issues, and school officials said no such records existed.

Authorities worry about lacking safety features

Multiple local officials told Chalkbeat they were moved to issue violations or demand extra precautions because of safety concerns.

DeSiata, the fire marshal, said when he learned from a news report this fall that Riverstone was up and running with students in the building, it was “an ‘oh no’ type of situation.”

“It was kind of like, ‘Wait a minute. This can’t be happening,’” he said. “Parents are trusting you with their kids. We have to make sure the safety features that are required for this are in place.”

DeSiata said he put Riverstone on fire watch, which requires someone with the ability to call 911 and evacuate students and staff to check every part of the building where a fire could occur every 30 minutes.

He said he’s placed other schools on fire watch from time to time, for example if their fire alarm systems weren’t functioning properly.

Mark Guerrero, a building official with the Pueblo Regional Building Department, said Riverstone moved into space designed for an office and used it for a school.

“They’re not allowed to do that,” he said. “We had enough concern to put these folks under violation, because if we had done nothing and something would have happened, we would have been blamed.”

Guerrero said school officials should have gotten a commercial permit and submitted plans to the county showing how they’d comply with building code rules for schools such as the number of exits needed for the number and ages of children on the premises. He said his department will require Riverstone to hire a design professional to do a code study to see if the building can be safely used as a school.

But first, he said, Riverstone is working with the Pueblo County Planning and Development Department to see if it will be allowed in the light industrial zone where it’s now located. County officials recently changed zoning rules to allow private schools in such zones under certain conditions.

Is this Christian school public or private? The answer has financial and legal implications.

To meet those conditions, county officials said, Riverstone will have to go through the county’s site development plan process and obtain a special use permit. Friberg said in his emailed statement that Riverstone is finalizing the remaining administrative steps to do so.

While Riverstone advertises itself as a public school and is seeking state funding, school officials have simultaneously described it as a private school on certain paperwork and to certain officials. Carmen Howard, director of the Pueblo County Planning and Development Department, told Chalkbeat the department considers the school private based on information “from Riverstone.”

The school’s commercial insurance policy lists Riverstone as a private school. The policy, obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request, is through Mutual Brotherhood, an Indiana company that insures Christian ministries, including churches and schools.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Christian law firm’s search for test case led to religious public school in Colorado, emails suggest

2025-11-12T20:08:19+00:00

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A prominent conservative law firm looking for a test case on whether public money can fund religious schools was the impetus for what’s been billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” according to an email obtained by Chalkbeat.

In the June 4 email, Pueblo County School District 70 attorney Brad Miller wrote to the district’s school board and superintendent seeking permission for a public education cooperative he also represents to open a school with about 30 students within district boundaries.

Miller wrote that the cooperative would then work with Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based group involved in high-profile conservative legal causes, to test “the legalities around the issue of whether a public school may provide religious education.”

On June 24, the school board signed off on Riverstone Academy, allowing it to operate within the southern Colorado district’s boundaries for five years. In August, the school, which describes itself as offering “a Christian foundation” and Christian curriculum, opened quietly in an industrial zone in Pueblo County with about 30 elementary students.

Miller explained in that June email that Alliance Defending Freedom had hosted him when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about whether a Catholic charter school could open in Oklahoma.

“The case resulted in a 4-4 tie and so the question did not get answered,” Miller wrote. “ADF asked me if I could find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado.”

In the email, Miller portrayed Pueblo 70’s role as minimal.

“We would anticipate that this will create a surge of public attention at a point in time,” he wrote. “But it would not be anything for which the district will have any participation.”

Neither Miller nor Alliance Defending Freedom responded to requests for comment for this story. Quin Friberg, Riverstone’s executive director, also didn’t respond.

Colorado has said it may withhold public funding

Friberg and Riverstone’s authorizer, Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Education services, or ERBOCES, have said the school offers quality educational programming the community wanted. Ken Witt, executive director of ERBOCES, also argued that previous Supreme Court cases require Colorado to fund the school just like other public schools. That’s despite a state constitutional provision that bars public funding for religious schools.

The June 4 email suggests Miller knew and had informed Pueblo 70 board members that Riverstone would be testing the existing limits of church-state separation. It also suggests that the school’s opening is part of a larger legal strategy to further expand public funding for religious education in the aftermath of the Oklahoma Catholic charter school case.

This ‘public Christian school’ opened quietly in Colorado. Now there could be a legal fight.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which describes its mission as “grounded in the historic Christian tradition,” has been involved in more than a dozen successful Supreme Court cases. That includes the Trinity Lutheran case, the first in a series of decisions that expanded public funding for religious private schools. The law firm then applied that same reasoning to argue for public funding for religious charter schools.

After the Oklahoma Catholic charter case ended in a tie that blocked the school from opening, observers have expected another test case to emerge. A recently proposed Jewish charter school in Oklahoma would reignite the same legal arguments.

Riverstone Academy could also provide a test case.

In October, Colorado education officials warned ERBOCES, the school authorizer, that the state may withhold public funding from the school. If the state follows through and the school or ERBOCES sue, it could set up the legal test case that Miller’s email referenced.

When asked by Chalkbeat in October if Riverstone’s opening was meant to spark a legal test case, Witt said, “If a legal contest is required, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Witt said by email on Monday he hadn’t seen Miller’s June email to Pueblo 70 officials, but that he has profound respect for Alliance Defending Freedom’s work.

“Education reEnvisioned would welcome their assistance were there related litigation, which there is not at this time,” he wrote.

Religion wasn’t discussed when school was approved

Most public officials involved in Riverstone’s opening didn’t respond to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about Miller’s email. Miller hung up quickly Monday when Chalkbeat reached him by phone. He did not respond to a follow-up email. Miller represents several Colorado school districts that have taken conservative positions on various culture war issues.

Lis Richard, the president of the ERBOCES board, didn’t respond to Chalkbeat messages. Neither did Pueblo 70 Superintendent Ronda Rein or school board members A.J. Wilson, John Christenson, Cathleen Culhane Howland, and Chris DeLuca.

Pueblo 70’s school board was the only elected body that voted on Riverstone. Although BOCES like Education reEnvisioned are allowed to open public schools under state law, they must get the consent of the school district where the school will be located if the district is not a member of the BOCES. Pueblo 70 is not a member of ERBOCES.

The five members of the ERBOCES board, who are appointed not elected, also voted to approve the school, according to board meeting minutes.

At two June school board meetings where the Pueblo 70 board considered letting Riverstone open within district boundaries, neither board members nor Rein mentioned that the school would be religious or that it was intended to prompt a lawsuit.

The school’s religious affiliation wasn’t widely known until Witt, the ERBOCES leader, publicly declared that Riverstone was Colorado’s “first public Christian school” in October.

Shortly after that announcement, Pueblo 70 school board president Anne Ochs told Chalkbeat she hadn’t known it would be a religious school when she voted to approve it. The next day, she called back and said she knew the school planned to use Christian curriculum, but added, “to me that doesn’t make it a religious school.”

When Miller sent his June 4 email to the Pueblo 70 school board, an email exchange obtained by Chalkbeat shows Ochs replied to Miller four minutes later. “Thank you for the information,” she wrote. “We will discuss putting this on the June 24th agenda.”

Ochs started a job with Education reEnvisioned BOCES in July, shortly after the board’s Riverstone vote. Contacted this week about Miller’s email and her response, Ochs said:

“My constituents voted me in, and they wanted me in. I don’t get paid for this position. This is an elected position. I make my votes depending on what I feel is right.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Is this Christian school public or private? The answer has financial and legal implications.

2025-10-29T23:00:49+00:00

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Riverstone Academy, a new school in southern Colorado, has been billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school” by its authorizer. Its website calls it a public elementary school.

But some state and county officials say Riverstone is a private school — a designation that means different rules on everything from fire and building inspections to funding and student achievement.

Riverstone’s murky status could become a key factor in a potential legal fight over whether the state will fund the school, as Riverstone’s backers want. Public schools in Colorado are entitled to state education funding but private schools are not.

The school, in leased space just outside Pueblo city limits, has four classrooms and just over 30 students. It first garnered headlines and sparked consternation among state education officials in early October. That’s when Ken Witt, the leader of the group that authorized the school, declared at a public meeting that Riverstone is Colorado’s “first public Christian school.”

The news caught some elected officials and members of the public by surprise, because Riverstone opened quietly with no reference to its religious affiliation in at least three key start-up documents, Chalkbeat found. Riverstone’s website says the school offers a “Christian foundation” and mentions Christian curriculum.

On Oct. 10, the day after Witt’s declaration, the Colorado Department of Education threatened to withhold public funding from the school in a letter to Witt’s group, Education reEnvisioned BOCES. The group, based near Colorado Springs, is one of 21 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services in the state.

Will this ‘public Christian school’ spur the next big legal fight over religion in education?

Witt said repeatedly in a recent interview with Chalkbeat that Riverstone is a public school because it is authorized by a BOCES, which are allowed to authorize public schools under Colorado law, and has a school code from the Colorado Department of Education.

Information about Riverstone being characterized as a private school in certain situations emerged after Chalkbeat requested information from the Pueblo County Planning and Development Department about the school’s location on Aspen Circle. The area is zoned “light industrial,” a designation that permits a variety of businesses, including marijuana operations, warehouses, and freight depots, but not elementary schools.

Carmen Howard, the department’s director, confirmed by email this week that the property occupied by the school is not in compliance with county zoning regulations but did not answer follow up questions about whether the school can continue operating there.

“Our department is working through the standard process to bring the property into compliance under the County’s Unified Development Code,” she wrote. “Because this is an active zoning case, we’re limited in what we can share, but we can confirm that the use as it’s currently operating is not permitted at that location.”

On Wednesday, Howard noted by email that the department considers the school private based on information “from Riverstone.” In November, Pueblo County commissioners will consider a proposal to allow private schools in light industrial zones.

Quin Friberg, Riverstone’s executive director, said by text that the school is run by a private organization via a contract with a public entity, “so when talking with zoning they said for their purposes it would be considered private.”

“We have also been working since July to get the zoning corrected and are optimistic that will happen soon,” he wrote. “There is a plan in place that everyone has agreed to in order to resolve the issue.”

He didn’t respond to follow-up questions from Chalkbeat about the plan.

Chalkbeat also inquired about Riverstone’s status with the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention & Control, which typically oversees building code and fire code compliance for public schools.

An unsigned email from the division’s public information office on Wednesday said, “Riverstone Academy is being deemed a private school” and referred questions to local officials in Pueblo County.

Officials have different takes on Riverstone’s Christian affiliation

Riverstone came about through an unusual arrangement involving Education reEnvisioned BOCES, two nonprofit groups, and two school districts 60 miles apart. Unlike most public schools, which typically take more than a year to plan and open, Riverstone was proposed and launched within months.

The first day of school was Aug. 11, less than three months after a tie at the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the nation’s first religious charter school from opening in Oklahoma. Lawyers in that case argued not that Oklahoma should fund religious public schools, but that charter schools aren’t really public. Instead they described them as semi-private entities, more like a nonprofit that contracts with the state to provide a service.

Many observers expect advocates for publicly funded religious education to find a new test case, one where Amy Coney Barrett, who recused herself from the Oklahoma case, could cast a potentially decisive vote.

It’s not clear if Riverstone will become that test, but its backers have forcefully pushed back against the Colorado Department of Education’s argument that public schools can’t be religious.

Witt said in an Oct. 21 letter to the department that he was “alarmed at the threat” to Riverstone’s funding, and that not funding the school because of its religious affiliation would amount to religious discrimination.

Along with mixed messages about whether Riverstone is public or private, there are still questions about whether public officials who had a hand in allowing the school to open knew it was a religious school.

Asked if she knew of Riverstone’s Christian affiliation before she voted to approve a contract with the school, Lis Richard, president of the Education reEnvisioned BOCES, first said she was puzzled by Chalkbeat’s question.

“Every public school and district in the state of Colorado has a ‘Christian’ affiliation by the shear (sic) fact that there are Christians who attend their schools an (sic) serve in their district,” she wrote by email.

Asked if she was aware that Riverstone planned to offer a “Christian foundation” and “Christian curriculum,” she said she was.

But Anne Ochs, president of the Pueblo District 70 school board, said she didn’t consider Riverstone a religious school when her board voted in June to approve an agreement that would allow the school to open within district boundaries.

She said she knew the school planned to use Christian curriculum, but “to me that doesn’t make it a religious school.”

Ochs said she took a job with Education reEnvisioned BOCES in July, but had not yet interviewed for the position when she voted to approve the Riverstone agreement.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

This ‘public Christian school’ opened quietly in Colorado. Now there could be a legal fight.

2025-10-22T01:53:22+00:00

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A group that authorized what its leader called Colorado’s “first public Christian school” told the state education department Tuesday that it would be unconstitutional to deny the school state funding.

The school, called Riverstone Academy, opened quietly in southern Colorado this August, just months after a tie at the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the nation’s first religious charter school from opening in Oklahoma.

Riverstone Academy’s website describes a tuition-free public elementary school that “blends strong academics with classical values, hands-on trade-based learning, and a Christian foundation.”

Riverstone Academy's Facebook page cites the school's "Christian Foundation."

But Colorado’s constitution requires that public schools be nonsectarian — meaning not religious — and the Colorado Department of Education is pushing back. Department officials have suggested that Riverstone students may not be eligible for public funding. The school’s backers said they are “alarmed at the threat” and that not funding the school would amount to religious discrimination.

If the disagreement were to end up in court, the outcome of any legal challenge likely would turn as much on the bureaucratic details of how Riverstone Academy is organized and authorized as on larger constitutional questions of religious freedom. And Riverstone Academy likely won’t be the last case to test the boundaries between church and state and the evolving definition of a public school.

“The people who want to tear down the wall of separation between church and state are going to keep pushing these issues because they think they have a sympathetic audience in the current Supreme Court,” said Steven Green, a law professor at Willamette University who specializes in church-state issues.

Few mentions of school’s Christian character in paperwork

Riverstone Academy opened this fall and has just over 30 students occupying four classrooms in a leased space just outside Pueblo city limits. It was authorized by Education reEnvisioned BOCES. The group is one of the state’s 21 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, which offer services such as special education to member school districts.

Riverstone Academy includes four classrooms and a few offices.

Riverstone exists due to an unusual arrangement involving the authorizer, two nonprofit groups, and two school districts 60 miles apart. Unlike most public schools, which typically take more than a year to plan and open, Riverstone was proposed and launched within months.

Quin Friberg, Riverstone’s executive director, said the school is meant to serve local families who seek an education that “feels like private school but doesn’t cost like private school.”

“I mean that in the sense of smaller classrooms, the religious element, and … we have an emphasis on kind of hands-on [activities],” he said.

Quin Friberg is the executive director of both Riverstone Academy and Forging Education.

Over the summer, BOCES authorized the school and contracted with Riverstone Academy, a new nonprofit Friberg heads, to run it. Riverstone subcontracted with a two-year-old Christian education nonprofit called Forging Education, which Friberg also leads, to help run the school.

District 49, which is based near Colorado Springs, is one of the two school districts that belong to the Education reEnvisioned BOCES and serves as the groups’ fiscal agent. An hour south is Pueblo District 70, which is not part of the BOCES but approved an agreement to allow Riverstone to open within its boundaries.

References to the school’s Christian character are absent or muted in Riverstone’s application materials and contracts. An application for a school code submitted to the state in late June makes no mention of Riverstone’s religious nature. It also went unmentioned in the agreement approved by the Pueblo 70 school board in late June and in the contract between the school and the BOCES approved by the BOCES board in August.

Friberg said Riverstone wasn’t hiding anything, but that the school’s religious foundation wasn’t a relevant response to questions on some of the documents.

Unlike the Oklahoma Catholic school at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case, Riverstone is not a charter school. Rather, both the BOCES and the Colorado education department have referred to it as a “contract school,” a term that’s not defined in state law.

Ken Witt, executive director of the BOCES, said Riverstone is a public school because it was authorized by the BOCES, and the application went through the BOCES’ normal review process.

“It was a quality educational program that they were describing,” he said. “And we said, [the] U.S. Constitution and federal law says you don’t discriminate based on religion, so we are not going to discriminate based on religion.”

State officials warn that religious public schools are not allowed

Although the first day of school at Riverstone was Aug. 11, state officials didn’t address its Christian affiliation until two months later.

That’s when Witt described Riverstone as “Colorado’s first public Christian school” near the end of a routine 12-minute update about his group’s programming at a District 49 school board meeting on Oct. 9.

“We’re delighted that they came to us and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to operate this school,’” he told the board.

He then cited a 2020 Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which found that states could not exclude religious schools from private school voucher programs.

Witt has long been involved in the Colorado education world, frequently championing conservative positions, including expanded school choice. He was recalled from the Jeffco school board in 2015 following anger over proposed changes to the district’s AP U.S. history curriculum and other issues. In March, Witt resigned as superintendent of the Woodland Park school district.

The BOCES contract with Riverstone states that “The School shall constitute a public school in Colorado” and be subject to all applicable state laws. But it also describes Riverstone as “a provider of educational services at the School” and says Riverstone “is not itself a ‘public school.’”

At the Oct. 9 meeting, one member of the District 49 school board, which leans conservative, expressed alarm after Witt’s briefing on Riverstone.

“Eroding that separation of church and state is very concerning, and for us to be a partner in that … does not sit well with me,” board member Mike Heil said.

Board president Lori Thompson immediately responded, “Just a note of clarification, separation of church and state is not contained in the United States Constitution.”

“Separation of church and state” commonly refers to the First Amendment’s prohibition on government-established religion, but the actual phrase does not appear in the Constitution.

The day after the board meeting, the Colorado Department of Education sent a letter to District 49 and Education reEnvisioned BOCES warning that religious public schools are not permitted under the Colorado Constitution.

The Gazette first reported on the Oct. 9 board meeting and the education department letter.

On Tuesday, District 49 sent a statement to Chalkbeat indicating that district officials will request funding for Riverstone students and let the education department and the BOCES “have appropriate dialogue about eligibility.”

Also on Tuesday, Witt responded to the Colorado Department of Education’s warning letter.

“The U.S. Constitution prohibits discrimination against Riverstone solely on account of its religious affiliation as such exclusion from a generally available governmental benefit would be unconstitutional,” his letter said in part.

A spokesperson for the education department said officials there are reviewing that letter.

Riverstone Academy is relying on a loan from Forging Education — not state money — to operate the school for the first several months.

When asked if he’s worried about the state withholding funding, Friberg said “I’ll just say we went in eyes wide open … on every implication of what we’re doing.”

Is Riverstone the next St. Isidore?

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself due to a long-standing friendship with an adviser to St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, the Supreme Court justices tied 4-4. That meant the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that blocked the opening of a Catholic charter school remained intact.

The justices didn’t lay out their thinking, leaving open questions about where the line is. But if Riverstone Academy’s backers say it’s a public school, it might not be a good candidate for such a test, Green and others said.

The trio of cases that have redrawn the line between church and state — Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson — all involve a religious entity being denied access to a benefit that was available to the general public or to secular entities.

Those conditions don’t apply to public schools. Lawyers in the St. Isidore case argued not that Oklahoma should fund religious public schools, but that charter schools aren’t really public.

“A public school cannot be religious,” said Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The government cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, fund a religious school directly. That’s as established as it gets.”

Riverstone opened without much public scrutiny

BOCES generally operate less publicly and less transparently than many school districts.

Education reEnvisioned BOCES doesn’t record its meetings, and some recent board agendas and minutes are not posted online because the group is revamping its website, Witt said. As is true of other BOCES, Education reEnvisioned board members are not elected by the public, but rather appointed by school districts or colleges that are BOCES members or by BOCES board members.

Originally launched under a different name in 2013, the BOCES authorizes several online and bricks and mortar schools as well as more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs around the state.

Last May, Riverstone Academy submitted a new school application to the BOCES.

In June, the BOCES asked the Pueblo 70 school board to approve an agreement allowing Riverstone to open in the district. During a June 10 board discussion of the agreement, which doesn’t mention that the school is Christian, one board member asked Superintendent Ronda Rein if she had anything to share about the school.

She said the school would have 30 students, then said, “That’s really all the information that I have at this point.”

Neither Rein nor any of the district’s five board members responded to messages from Chalkbeat asking if they knew about Riverstone’s religious foundation prior to agreeing to let it open in the district.

Witt said the BOCES didn’t conceal the school’s Christian affiliation in conversations with Pueblo District 70 leaders.

District 49’s school board wasn’t involved in Riverstone’s authorization. However, if the state eventually agrees to fund the school, the money would pass first to District 49, then the BOCES, and then Riverstone.

A copy of Riverstone’s application, provided to Chalkbeat by Witt, makes only one mention of Christian features in a paragraph about science instruction. It notes the use of a curriculum called Berean Builders offering “a Christian worldview in their exploration of scientific topics.” A paragraph about social studies instruction mentions Master Books, but doesn’t say it’s a Christian home school curriculum.

Witt said BOCES board members were aware of the school’s religious affiliation when they approved it in August. The minutes for that meeting are not posted online.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s how a task force suggests changing the way schools and districts are rated in Colorado

2024-11-14T00:58:21+00:00

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Colorado should start considering the career and college prep that students take, stop counting at-risk students more than once, and expand testing in other languages for annual school and district ratings.

Those are among the 30 recommendations made by the 1241 task force, a group created by lawmakers in 2023 to examine the state’s accountability system.

The recommendations were presented to the State Board of Education on Wednesday. Some of the recommendations will require a board vote to implement, while others would require legislative action.

State Board members Wednesday asked some questions about the recommendations, but were asked by the Education Commissioner, Susana Cordova, to hold most of their thoughts for a discussion at their December meeting. Most board members said the recommendations seemed like good changes, although at times, they wondered if some would require a lot more research to implement.

For example, one recommendation is that the state should work to expand testing options in other languages. State Board members questioned if testing students in their native language makes sense when they aren’t being taught in that language or if their year’s learning is better assessed in English, the language of their instruction.

The state’s school accountability system, in use since 2009, mostly uses standardized test scores to rate schools and districts. High schools are also rated on their graduation rates and on how many students move on to postsecondary options.

Schools can earn one of four ratings, while districts can earn one of five. State law dictates that schools or districts that earn one of the bottom two ratings for five years in a row must be placed on a plan for improvement under state orders. The state is also limited in what improvements it can order, but can escalate to closing a school, turning it into a charter school, or ordering a district to reorganize.

Last year, Adams 14, which has had the lowest ratings for more than 10 years, was ordered to reorganize. That could have meant dissolving or merging parts of the district with neighboring districts, but after strong pushback from the community, the state backed off its orders.

The majority of schools and districts first identified for support based on low ratings do manage to improve before needing state intervention.

An audit completed in December 2022 found that the state’s system is reasonable, but also that schools serving more students of color and students in poverty on average do worse on state tests.

Some questions critics of the system hoped to answer, such as whether the system itself is helping or harming student learning or is biased against more disadvantaged students, were not addressed.

School district leaders pushed legislators to create the 1241 task force to consider broader changes to the system.

The task force of 26 school and district leaders, parents, advocates, and other educators have met for more than a year to consider the recommendations.

The report, however, states that the group “strongly believes the accountability system alone cannot advance academic opportunities or prevent academic inequities.”

Still, some of the recommendations are designed to limit inequities around schools that serve more disadvantaged students or schools with such small numbers of students that their ratings can be volatile from year to year.

Report explains findings, recommendations, areas to study

In addition to recommendations, the group’s report also points to several areas of the system that require more study for possible changes.

For instance, the group suggests that the state’s review panel (a group that goes into schools and districts to make recommendations when the State Board must order an improvement plan) should perhaps be asked to evaluate factors beyond academics. That would include looking at a school or district’s budget, governance, and facilities and then recommending how the district might focus on improving those areas, including being able to recommend a change in leadership.

Here are some of the task force’s recommendations:

Students who fall into subgroups such as students with disabilities, English learners, or those who qualify for free and reduced price lunch should be combined into one “super subgroup,” so schools are only evaluated for them once.
The state should consider lowering the number of students needed in a group for the state to report data, as opposed to suppressing it for privacy purposes. Currently that number is 16. The recommendation doesn’t state a better lower number but asks the state to study what would be appropriate.
Students with disabilities should continue to be counted in that group for two years after no longer needing services, aligning with how students learning English are followed after services are no longer provided.
The state should revisit the weights it gives to each piece considered in these ratings every five years, with help of experts, to try to move away from having strong correlations to student demographics.
Individual student results should be made available to families as soon as possible, even before a public release of data. The state should also try to speed up the time it takes educators to get results.
The rating labels schools and districts earn should be changed to be easier for the public to understand, but that should be done after research and gathering public feedback.
Schools should have more state support when they reach two years of low ratings, or being “on the clock,” to provide more early interventions before they are subject to state mandates in year five.
The state should “design budgetary expectations” for school turnaround and plan to sustain bold plans for improvement once funding is exhausted.
Schools and districts that have low test participation and can’t be rated getting only “Insufficient data: Low Participation” labels, should create a corrective action plan submitted to the state.
The legislature should require schools and districts under state-ordered improvement plans to meet with, learn from, and share their progress with each other.
The State Board of Education should delegate authority to allow state officials to approve small changes to state ordered improvement plans allowing flexibility when conditions change.

Read the full report and all of the recommendations:

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Northeast Denver Innovation Zone to dissolve, reverting two middle schools to district control

2024-05-07T22:21:45+00:00

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The Northeast Denver Innovation Zone, an independent nonprofit organization that oversees three semi-autonomous Denver public schools, will dissolve as of June 30, according to a letter signed by the zone’s board of directors.

The dissolution will revert two of three schools in the zone — McAuliffe International School and McAuliffe Manual Middle School, which is in the process of changing its name — to the control of Denver Public Schools. The third school in the zone, Swigert International School, will seek to join the last remaining Denver innovation zone, the Luminary Learning Network.

The dissolution of the zone known as NDIZ also has symbolic significance as another pulled thread in the unraveling of a decade and a half of school reform policies in Denver.

Innovation zones are a reform-era invention that grant traditional public schools some of the same flexibility and freedom enjoyed by charter schools. The idea is that freeing schools from district bureaucracy allows them to experiment in ways they believe will help student learning, and several NDIZ schools have indeed posted high test scores.

But in a letter to families and staff, the zone’s board of directors said DPS’ “shifting philosophy on innovation zones” has created “an uncertain environment to operate NDIZ.”

Control of the Denver school board has changed in recent years from members who favored reform policies to reform skeptics who have questioned innovation zones.

A year ago, the board voted to dissolve another innovation zone called Beacon Network Schools at the recommendation of Superintendent Alex Marrero, who was concerned about Beacon’s organizational health and low student test scores.

DPS has also had concerns about — and conflicts with — NDIZ.

The former principal of McAuliffe International, Kurt Dennis, was fired by DPS in July in the aftermath of a televised interview he did with 9News expressing concerns about gun violence and school safety. In August, the district opened an investigation into the improper use of seclusion rooms at McAuliffe International. A summary of the findings revealed school staff were at fault, though Dennis’ attorney disputed the findings and NDIZ called for an independent investigation.

In connection with the seclusion investigation, DPS banned the executive director of NDIZ, Colleen O’Brien, from all district facilities and information systems in November. DPS and NDIZ also struggled to agree on a new version of the zone’s “innovation plan” after teachers at what was the largest school in the zone, Northfield High, voted last year to leave NDIZ.

The letter from the zone board says the board “engaged in mediation with DPS in January 2024 and were unable to resolve ongoing challenges,” according to a copy provided to Chalkbeat.

“After careful consideration and extensive dialogue with school leaders, we have concluded that sunsetting operations is the most prudent course of action currently,” the letter says.

The zone’s board of directors declined an interview with Chalkbeat.

The Denver school board does not have to vote on the dissolution of NDIZ, said DPS spokesperson Scott Pribble. However, the board will have to vote on whether Swigert International School, an elementary school in the Central Park neighborhood, can join the Luminary Learning Network, Denver’s first innovation zone and the last zone remaining.

Created in 2016 with four schools and since expanded to six, the Luminary Learning Network appears to be going strong. The Denver school board voted unanimously last month to add a seventh school, Merrill Middle School, to the zone next school year.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Denver’s Lincoln High School gets more time to improve, as State Board praises efforts

2024-03-14T01:07:09+00:00

When Colorado officials ordered Denver’s Lincoln High School to work on a turnaround plan to improve the achievement of its students, no one knew schools would be interrupted by the pandemic just a month later.

But the school pushed forward with its improvement plan, despite the switch to remote learning and a more recent influx of new students. And although the school’s test scores and state rating remained low this year, State Board of Education members praised Lincoln’s progress Wednesday and agreed to give its leaders more time to boost its rating.

So far, school leaders have completed a leadership program with the University of Virginia, created a new ninth grade academy, and rolled out new career-focused pathways for students. A program called PTECH allows students to stay in high school for a fifth or sixth year to earn an associate’s degree in business. Lincoln’s first participants are graduating this spring.

Those changes were made possible partly by Lincoln’s status as an “innovation school,” a model allowed for state-ordered improvement plans that gives the school autonomy from some district and state rules and provisions of the teachers union contract.

Lincoln was one of just two Denver schools with state-ordered improvement plans. The other, Manual High School, received an improved rating this year. If it sustains that rating for one more year, it can be freed from its state orders.

Lincoln, on the other hand, has not improved and had to have its plan reviewed this year. The state board unanimously approved a district plan on Wednesday that will keep Lincoln as an innovation school while the state monitors its progress.

If the school doesn’t manage to earn a higher state rating by 2026, then it will have to return to the state for another hearing.

When a school receives several years of low ratings, the state is obligated to order an improvement plan, which can include requiring external management, turning the school into a charter or even closing it. Recently, State Board members have stayed away from those drastic options. One alternative has been to grant innovation status.

With Lincoln, State Board members said they were encouraged that school and district leaders’ assessment of the school and its ability to improve mirrored the feedback from the community, the Colorado Department of Education staff, and an external state review panel.

“I’m constantly reminded of, we leave a school alone, great things happen,” said State Board member Angelika Schroeder. “What you’re offering is something really special.”

Under the district’s plan, Lincoln will continue to expand its offerings for workforce development while students are in high school.

The school will also focus more in the coming years on attendance. Currently, the average attendance rate at Lincoln is 83%, up from 81% last year.

Principal Antonio Esquibel said attendance rates are low among new immigrant students who are facing other challenges that make it difficult to attend school, such as housing instability.

School leaders also talked about the challenges they’ve faced most recently in supporting a rise in students who are new to the country. Lincoln High School houses one of Denver’s newcomer centers, which help students who are new to the country adjust to life in an American high school.

Esquibel said the school enrolled another six new students Wednesday.

He said the school has added staff, and is now doing an orientation every Monday for new students and their families. The orientation introduces them to Lincoln and the U.S. school system, and to living in southwest Denver.

As part of the improvement plan, the school will also expand its efforts to help all teachers accommodate their lessons for English learners through sheltered instruction, where teachers can adjust lessons to incorporate help for English learners throughout the day.

About half of Lincoln’s roughly 1,000 students are identified as English learners, but about 75% identify Spanish as their first language. With so many arriving students who are new to the country, those percentages are rising.

“Every teacher has to be a teacher of English learners at Lincoln,” Esquibel said.

The school also uses a model it calls TNLI that offers students Spanish instruction and then slowly moves toward more English instruction, allowing students to remain bilingual, Esquibel said.

“We know if given the right supports and resources, our students flourish,” he said.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

A ‘mixed bag’ — again — for test scores at Colorado innovation schools, new report finds

2023-12-22T19:55:16+00:00

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For at least the third time in the 15 years since Colorado lawmakers created them, innovation schools have gotten middling marks in a new report meant to measure whether freeing the schools from bureaucracy boosts student test scores.

The report by the Keystone Policy Center found that students who attend innovation schools did no better on state math and literacy tests last spring — and, in many cases, performed worse — than students who attend traditional district-run schools and independent charter schools. The report did find some bright spots, such as students of color performing better on some tests and higher scores in Denver’s innovation zones, which have been controversial.

State policymakers had hoped innovation would be an effective strategy for turning around low-performing schools. That hasn’t necessarily turned out to be the case, as indicated by the report’s title: “A Decidedly Mixed Bag.”

Van Schoales, senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, said there’s nothing particularly new or different about the report’s conclusion.

“What’s different is that this started in 2008, so we’re now 15 years later … and it’s sort of like a, ‘Meh,’” Schoales said in an interview.

On the spectrum of school autonomy, Colorado’s innovation schools fall between district-run schools, which are the least autonomous, and charter schools, which are the most.

Under state law, innovation schools can waive certain rules to do things such as extend the school day or opt out of granting teachers Colorado’s version of tenure. The idea is that giving schools more autonomy allows them the flexibility to better meet students’ needs.

While the report says innovation schools’ academic results last school year were “lackluster,” innovation supporters argue that it’s hard to make generalizations. There are more than 100 innovation schools in Colorado and lots of variation between them, from the population of students they serve to the reasons they sought innovation status.

While some schools wanted the freedom to grow their own vegetables or focus on the arts, others sought innovation status in the hopes of boosting persistently low student test scores.

“Innovation is a strategy that has been used across the state in many different contexts and for many different reasons,” said Bailey Holyfield, executive director of an innovation zone in Denver called the Luminary Learning Network. “As we look at high-level aggregate data, it is unsurprising then in some ways that the data reflects a mixed bag, to quote the author’s title.”

What the report found

At least two other reports, in 2014 and 2019, concluded that innovation schools fared about the same academically as district-run schools.

Those reports were done by different research groups and focused only on Denver, which has more innovation schools than any other district in the state. The Keystone report looks at all innovation schools in Colorado.

Among its conclusions:

Overall, fewer students at innovation schools met expectations on state math and literacy tests this past spring than students at district-run or charter schools.
But there were some bright spots. For instance, Black and Hispanic students in grades three through eight at innovation schools outperformed Black and Hispanic students at district-run schools on the state literacy test. The same was true for students experiencing poverty at innovation schools on both the literacy and math tests.
A “more robust longitudinal study” is needed to figure out whether innovation status is an effective way for a school to boost student test scores. The Colorado State Board of Education has the power to order changes at chronically low-performing schools, and innovation status is considered the least disruptive option. But State Board members have wondered if it works — or if harsher options, such as closure, are warranted.
Innovation schools face barriers in being innovative. “At least some evidence exists that district systems may be slow to evolve, if they do at all, and may functionally prevent innovation schools and zones from fully implementing approved autonomies.”
Some innovation schools actually aren’t innovative, either because leaders are “simply ‘checking boxes’ that higher-ups want to see” or because higher-ups block ideas they see as too revolutionary. Innovation schools “may not actually be empowered to innovate in deeper ways that might truly transform outcomes for students.”

A zoom in on Denver and innovation zones

Another bright spot in the Keystone report is the academic results of innovation zones. The zones are groups of innovation schools. In some districts, innovation zones are run by district administrators. In Denver Public Schools, the zones are overseen by nonprofit organizations.

The report shows that statewide, innovation zone schools fared better on state tests last spring than did innovation schools that were not in zones.

A separate analysis of Denver data provided to Chalkbeat by Keystone shows the innovation zones in Denver did particularly well, outperforming every other type of school in DPS.

The report comes at a tumultuous time for Denver innovation schools. Of all the districts in Colorado, DPS has most embraced innovation and is home to about half of the state’s innovation schools. But a few years ago, shifting politics led to a backlash of sorts.

In 2022, the Denver school board voted to limit innovation schools’ autonomy in an effort to shore up teacher job protections. All seven board members had been elected with help from the teachers union, which didn’t like that innovation schools could waive parts of its contract.

This year, the school board dissolved one of the district’s three innovation zones. Instead of being overseen by a nonprofit organization, the two schools in that zone, Kepner Beacon and Grant Beacon middle schools, will now be overseen by the district.

Of the two Denver zones left, one has experienced a string of controversies, including the high-profile firing of a school principal and an investigation into the improper use of seclusion.

That zone, called the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone, is still in negotiations with the district over the renewal of a plan for how it will operate. Earlier this month, the school board met behind closed doors with the district’s attorney to discuss “legal options” for the zone.

Innovation supporters are hopeful that the election last month of three new school board members perceived as more friendly toward innovation will turn the tide.

“I’m hopeful we are getting to a generally less contentious place where folks doing good work and getting outcomes for kids can keep doing that work,” said Holyfield.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado foundation bets on new charter and private schools seats

2023-09-26T19:40:20+00:00

A Denver foundation wants to help create tens of thousands of new seats in the state’s charter schools and other settings outside district-run public schools at a time when Colorado’s school-age population is shrinking.

The effort, launched by the conservative-leaning Daniels Fund last year, is part of a larger initiative foundation leaders are calling the Education Big Bet. The goal is to put 100,000 more students in what the Daniels Fund calls “choice seats” by 2030 in a four-state region that includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

Tapping into both the pandemic-era appetite for alternative forms of schooling and worries about COVID’s impact on learning, Daniels Fund leaders say the Big Bet is about meeting the needs of students and families.

On its face, the creation of so many new seats in charter schools, private schools, and homeschool programs could leave Colorado’s traditional public schools hurting. Many Colorado districts, including Denver, Jeffco, Aurora, and Mesa County Valley, are already facing the prospect of closing schools as enrollment declines. A flurry of new schools or seats could intensify the competition for students and put more financial stress on school districts, leading them to shut down some of their own schools.

But while the foundation’s goal is ambitious, its investment in the Big Bet is modest. In 2022, when the effort launched, the foundation spent $10 million on the initiative in the four-state region — about 20% more than it had spent on K-12 grants the year before.

The Daniels Fund, which was established with the fortune of the late billionaire cable executive Bill Daniels, is best known for its generous college scholarships. Foundation leaders say if the Big Bet is successful, the number of students learning outside district-run public schools will grow from 350,000 to 450,000 across the four states by the end of the decade — a nearly 30% increase.

Hanna Skandera, the foundation’s president and CEO, said education isn’t one-size-fits-all and that families want options so kids can pursue their passions.

“There’s nothing more powerful than giving parents and kids the opportunity to have a great education,” she said.

It’s not yet clear what the Big Bet means for students and schools in Colorado or the other three states. Experts say philanthropic efforts like the Big Bet that promote charter school growth or private school options under the banner of market competition aren’t new, though they also note that most parents give their own child’s school good marks.

A variety of groups have received grants through the Big Bet so far, including a new agriculture-focused charter school north of Denver, a group that gives private school scholarships to lower-income students, and a nonprofit that makes grants to home-school co-ops and tiny private schools, often referred to as microschools.

The Daniels Fund doesn’t plan to pay for all the new seats its leaders hope to create.

“We aren’t trying to do this alone,” said Luke Ragland, the fund’s senior vice president of grants. “We’re definitely looking to rally partners.”

Currently, the foundation has no formal Big Bet partners, but Ragland said potential partners could include other foundations, education entrepreneurs, and even families.

Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University, said although the Daniels Fund is using private money for the Big Bet, it’s helping create infrastructure that could shift public money and support away from the traditional public school system.

“Giving some kids a better shot of getting out of their public schools may come with a big price tag in terms of democracy and public accountability,” he said.

Skandera said critics are taking an unfortunate “zero-sum view of school choice.”

“Choice programs that help students find a school that meets their unique needs usually helps both that individual student and their public school peers, something backed by significant amounts of research,” Skandera said, citing a report from EdChoice.

Daniels Fund will focus on charter seats

Three-quarters of the 100,000 new choice seats Daniels Fund leaders hope to add over the next six years are slated to be in charter schools. About 40,000 of those will be in Colorado, representing nearly 30% more charter enrollment than there is today.

Research shows that expanding charter schools puts financial stress on school districts and may require them to shut down some of their own schools.

About 15% of Colorado students already attend charter schools — one of the highest rates in the country — and the sector has grown steadily for years. But charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, sometimes face the same struggles traditional public schools do, including declining enrollment and spotty academic performance.

Still, charter openings often outpace charter closings. Following the closure of two Colorado charter schools at the end of the 2021-22 school year, seven new ones opened in the fall of 2022, according to the Colorado Department of Education.

The STEAD School, a charter high school in Commerce City north of Denver, is one recent addition to Colorado’s charter school landscape. It opened in 2021 and recently landed a $280,000 Big Bet grant from the Daniels Fund that will help with staff training and curriculum planning over two years. The school — which has a soil and seed lab and takes its students to the National Western Stock Show every January — focuses on agriculture and science.

Amy Schwartz, the school’s co-founder and board chair, said STEAD leaders always planned to scale up to about 700 students, up from 273 this year in grades 9 through 11. So the Big Bet grant isn’t driving STEAD’s expansion, but without it, “the quality of our curriculum and instruction wouldn’t be where it is,” she said.

Schwartz said STEAD launched during a period of rapid growth in the Brighton-based 27J district, which authorized the charter school.

In addition to providing a unique academic focus, the school came at a time when the district “just couldn’t build school buildings fast enough,” she said.

The STEAD School has the state’s highest green rating this year.

A recent study found that students in Colorado charter schools made slightly more progress on math and reading tests than similar students in nearby district schools. This aligned with national findings.

However, there’s significant variation in performance within the charter sector.

“It’s a mixed picture, and a lot of charter schools don’t do a better job or even as good of a job as traditional public schools,” Henig said.

Big Bet also pushes for more private seats

Daniels Fund leaders hope to send about 23,000 more students to private schools or some version of home schooling in the four-state region over the next six years. In Colorado, the number is 15,000.

In service to that goal, the foundation is giving money to groups like ACE Scholarship Fund, a Colorado group that gives private school scholarships to lower income families in 12 states. More than 4,000 students in Colorado receive the partial scholarships, with families paying just $2,000 a year in tuition on average, said Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships.

The scholarships are for religious or secular private schools that charge $8,000 to $15,000 a year, not schools that charge $20,000 or more.

Rainey said the scholarships give families more choices and help private schools fill empty seats.

“There are quite a few available seats in private schools,” he said

VELA Education Fund, an Arlington, Virginia-based funder of “small learning environments,’’ also received a Big Bet grant. The nonprofit is using the $750,000 it received last year to give dozens of smaller grants to microschools and homeschool groups, as well as to groups that create curriculum materials or otherwise support private and homeschool programs.

CEO Meredith Olson said demand has grown every year since VELA launched in 2019, both from individuals who run alternative education programs and “families who are looking for something different for their kids.” Just under half of the programs funded by the nonprofit were founded by people of color and more than 90% serve low- and middle income families, she said.

In Colorado, VELA has awarded grants to a variety of organizations. Among them are a Denver microschool called La Luz that serves sixth- and seventh-graders and emphasizes field trips and experiential learning, and Catch a Star Academy, an Aurora microschool that serves third through fifth graders who struggle academically. Both schools are tuition-free, though Catch a Star notes on its website that the tuition assistance is for the 2023-24 school year. It’s unclear if families will have to pay next year.

Microschools, like other private schools, are not regulated by the state education department or obligated to administer state tests. Skandera, of the Daniels Fund, said foundation staff ask Big Bet grantees to share student achievement outcomes, but acknowledged that they may use different tests or measures. There’s no stipulation that grantees share student achievement with the public, she said.

Recent studies in other states have found students experience either declines or no improvements in math scores while attending private schools with a voucher. However, some older studies have found more positive effects on longer-run outcomes.

Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in some cases harmful academic effects were on the order of those caused by the pandemic or Hurricane Katrina.

He also noted that families may choose a private school they like, but the school decides who to admit. That means that students with certain kinds of disabilities, those who have behavior challenges, or those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community may not be welcome.

It’s important to recognize that the last choice belongs to the school, not the family, he said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Denver’s first big merger of charter school networks poses leadership test

2023-06-28T20:48:25+00:00

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It was portrayed as an exciting plan with lofty goals: Two of Denver’s homegrown charter school networks would join forces to strengthen academics, support students’ mental health, and better prepare them for life beyond high school. English learners and students with disabilities would achieve exceptional results.

The merger of Rocky Mountain Prep and STRIVE Prep, announced last summer, also would help the organizations survive a host of challenges: declining enrollment, tighter budgets, and more scrutiny of their academic records by a skeptical school board.

To shepherd the merger, the schools’ leaders chose a charter school executive named Tricia Noyola, who had overseen a major charter expansion in Austin, Texas.

But the past year has been tense and chaotic, with hundreds of employees from the two networks leaving, an about-face by network leaders on which name the new network will carry, and a chorus of concerns about Noyola’s leadership. Now, with just days until the merger becomes official, it remains to be seen if the two networks will be stronger together or an ill-fated match.

The new network will take the Rocky Mountain Prep name and serve nearly 5,000 students in preschool through 12th grade across a dozen campuses. It will be the second largest charter network in the city and carry the hopes and dreams of thousands of Denver families, many of them low-income parents of color and immigrant families who fear their children won’t get the education they deserve in district-run schools.

Meanwhile, STRIVE Prep, once a key player and thought leader in the charter sector, will cease to exist.

Supporters of Noyola, who has been CEO of both networks for the past eight months though they are still separate organizations, see a Latina leader who comes from the same background as many students, champions student achievement, and brings a strong hand to management decisions.

Patrick Donovan, chair of the Rocky Mountain Prep board, said Noyola has tremendous expertise in running schools, particularly when it comes to academics and school culture.

Detractors paint a different picture, describing a leader who rules through fear, drives away experienced educators, and fails to support new teachers. They also see a single-minded pursuit of higher test scores and a diminished focus on student mental health, support for students with disabilities, and programming that elevates student voices, such as middle school speech and debate classes and social justice-themed events for high schoolers.

Tricia Noyola, CEO of STRIVE Prep and Rocky Mountain Prep

Under Noyola, who’s on track to earn $340,000 from the two networks this school year — more than any superintendent in Colorado — teachers have been urged not to unionize and warned not to talk to the media about the merger.

“There’s only one reason people want to unionize, and it’s because there’s mistrust and dissatisfaction, and you feel unappreciated,” said Jenny Bisha, whose job as STRIVE Prep’s director of continuous improvement is being cut at the end of June. Bisha has not been involved in any unionization efforts.

Several educators said their recent experiences at Rocky Mountain Prep or STRIVE Prep schools were so toxic or upsetting, it soured them on charter schools or teaching for good. Two said they counseled families to leave Rocky Mountain Prep because the schools weren’t meeting their children’s needs.

Chalkbeat spoke to more than three dozen people for this story, including current and former employees, network board members, parents, students, and education policy experts. Some asked that their names not be used for fear they could lose their jobs, have trouble getting references, or face retaliation.

Noyola declined repeated requests for interviews, but provided written answers to questions.

“I certainly set a high standard and expect everyone to meet it. To do any less would be a disservice to our students and families,“ she wrote. “I may be demanding, but I always strive to be fair.”

Board members from both networks suggested that Noyola’s critics are holding her to a higher standard than they did the former leaders of STRIVE and Rocky Mountain Prep, both of whom were white men.

“As a woman of color in this space, sometimes you’re subjected to more criticism than, I think, white men,” said Amber Valdez, vice chair of the STRIVE Prep board. “I think that Tricia came in with a clear vision and made no apologies. She’s not conflict averse, because she wants to get things done.”

STRIVE, Rocky Mountain make plans to merge

Leaders from STRIVE Prep and Rocky Mountain Prep publicly announced plans to join forces last August, saying the merger would create a cohesive preschool through 12th grade pathway — something they said families had sought for years.

Rocky Mountain has four elementary schools and STRIVE, since the closing of two middle schools this month, has eight mostly secondary schools.

Last summer, both organizations were in moments of transition.

“No [charter] network that I know of came out of a pandemic feeling like they were in a strong position,” said STRIVE Prep founder and former CEO Chris Gibbons.

Schools were also facing the end of a huge influx of federal COVID stimulus dollars that had helped pay for extra staff and services over the last few years, he said. Budget cuts were inevitable.

Valdez also said STRIVE families and stakeholders told leaders “that what STRIVE was missing was a clear vision, a clear goal.”

She and other board members say that’s what Noyola brought to the table.

Noyola had moved to Denver from Austin in spring 2021 to take the helm of Rocky Mountain Prep when founder and CEO James Cryan left.

In spring 2022, Gibbons announced he was leaving STRIVE for a job with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (The foundation is a supporter of Chalkbeat. See a full list of our funders and read our ethics policy.)

Noyola applied to replace Gibbons, proposing that STRIVE and Rocky Mountain Prep merge and that she lead the combined network, according to STRIVE Board member Ulysses Estrada, who chaired the network’s CEO succession task force.

Gibbons said STRIVE leaders had previously considered the possibility of merging with another charter school or network. Rocky Mountain Prep had gone further, doubling the size of its network by taking over two struggling schools — a charter school in Denver and a district-run school in Aurora — by 2018.

STRIVE Prep and Rocky Mountain Prep serve similar populations, mostly students of color, with many coming from low-income families. About half of Rocky Mountain Prep students and nearly three-quarters of STRIVE students are English learners.

“Quite frankly, we were evaluating Tricia as any other CEO candidate,” said Estrada. “If we didn’t think Tricia had the right skills to lead STRIVE, we wouldn’t pursue [the merger].”

By July of 2022, the board decided that Noyola and the merger both were right for STRIVE. The two networks decided she would continue leading Rocky Mountain Prep for another year and become CEO of the united network when the merger was final on July 1, 2023.

Denver is a tough market for charter school expansion

Experts say the number of charter school mergers around the country has ticked up in recent years, sometimes fueled by the departure of founders who launched networks in the early 2000s, declining enrollment, or financial pressures.

STRIVE has closed three schools in the last three years, including the Lake and Kepner campuses earlier this month. Denver has seen a spate of other charter school closures and other networks have slowed their growth.

“Sadly, this wasn’t a merging. It was a takeover.”

A 2021 analysis by the Charter School Growth Fund concluded that if charter networks want to grow in the Denver market, mergers are the only reasonable path. The growth fund, which has provided funding to both STRIVE and Rocky Mountain Prep, helps fund charter school expansion around the nation.

Gibbons said the step is an important long-term strategy to address shrinking enrollment, financial sustainability, and a political climate in Denver that’s become less friendly to charter schools.

As for the recent spate of staff departures and simmering discontent in some quarters, he said, “We always knew this would be a very disruptive strategy in the short term.”

Merger prompts major cultural change at STRIVE Prep

When leaders from the two charter networks unveiled the merger plan last August, they said the new network would bear the STRIVE name. STRIVE leaders tapped the network’s lead attorney, Jessica Johnson, to serve as interim CEO until the union was official.

But within three months, Johnson was gone — a major personnel change that current and former employees said happened abruptly with no explanation.

Both Johnson and the network agreed to “communicate to everyone that Ms. Johnson’s departure from STRIVE Prep was voluntary,” according to a copy of Johnson’s severance agreement obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request. The agreement promised Johnson would receive her interim CEO salary through June 30.

Johnson declined to comment for this story.

On November 2, the STRIVE Prep board named Noyola the new CEO of STRIVE Prep, making her the leader of two different charter school networks simultaneously. She received a base annual salary of $220,000 from Rocky Mountain Prep and, when she took the top job at STRIVE, her monthly consulting fee was upped from $4,000 to $5,000. In April, that consulting fee was doubled to $10,000 a month, retroactive to Oct 1.

That means Noyola’s pay, including a $24,000 bonus she received from Rocky Mountain Prep this year, totals $340,000. That’s more than the CEO of DSST, Denver’s largest charter school network, or the superintendents of Denver and Jeffco, Colorado’s two largest school districts, earned this year.

Noyola wrote, “I was asked to do the job of two individuals when I became CEO of both networks, and my compensation remains lower than that of the combined compensation of both roles.”

Next school year, Noyola will earn a base salary of $290,000, with the possibility of a bonus.

In February, STRIVE board members announced a reversal on the new network’s name. Rocky Mountain Prep’s name, practices, and standards would replace those of STRIVE. They cited data from a consultant’s report that showed better academic and instructional results at Rocky Mountain Prep than STRIVE.

In 2022, fewer than 10% of students at five STRIVE schools were proficient on state math tests. The same was true in literacy for one STRIVE school. About 30% of all Rocky Mountain Prep students were proficient on math and literacy tests, still below the state average.

Parent Tracy Hill said her fourth grader has had a good experience at Rocky Mountain Prep–Berkeley since preschool. Keeping the Rocky Mountain Prep name feels like a win.

But this spring, Hill was surprised to learn from a reporter that the closest STRIVE school — the Lake campus — would close and won’t be an option when her daughter goes to sixth grade.

“That is a shame, because that’s walking distance from our house,” she said.

Meanwhile, the name change rocked some STRIVE students and families.

“Everyone in my neighborhood has probably gone to a STRIVE Prep school,” said Jacobo Gracia-Meza, who graduated from STRIVE Prep–SMART Academy in June and is headed to Colorado State University in the fall.

“The thought of our name being taken away, it’s also taking the hard work we put in,” he said.

His parents, meanwhile, are worried about the cost of buying new school uniforms for his younger brother.

This summer, STRIVE Prep–SMART will become Rocky Mountain Prep–SMART.

Educators see new emphasis on test prep amid merger plans

Zion Gezaw, an assistant principal at STRIVE Prep’s Westwood middle school for most of the 2022-23 school year, noticed a shift around the time Noyola was named CEO of STRIVE schools.

First, it was little things. Teachers were told they had to use the same colors and borders on their bulletin boards. Then rules came down requiring strict adherence to the lessons and pacing in the curriculum.

The adaptations that Gezaw and the school’s eighth grade English teacher had made to create more culturally responsive and engaging lessons, such as adding the young adult novel “The Poet X,” were no longer acceptable.

Student grades and interest in those classes plummeted, Gezaw said.

“They made sure we knew they didn’t like it,” she said. “They would just not do it. They would put their heads down; they would sleep.”

Jeremy Story, a public relations contractor who emailed answers to Chalkbeat on behalf of the networks, said STRIVE schools continued to use their own curriculum, and there were no pacing guides last school year. He didn’t address questions about whether modifications were allowed to make lessons more culturally responsive.

As a Black educator, Gezaw said she’d been attracted by STRIVE’s focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but grew disillusioned as the emphasis shifted to test scores and uniformity. She quit in April.

Some former Rocky Mountain Prep employees say this approach is typical of the network’s philosophy, even with the youngest children, and they’re dismayed to see it spread.

Ellarie Anderson said when she learned of the merger, she thought, “Wow, we really don’t need more schools becoming like Rocky Mountain Prep.”

Anderson spent two years at Rocky Mountain Prep, starting a year before Noyola’s arrival. Throughout that time, she said her students, kindergartners and third graders, were expected to sit up straight at their desks, with their hands folded and eyes following the teacher. She said when supervisors observed, they’d count the number of students who met those standards. Those children were considered “engaged.”

Rocky Mountain Prep officials denied that students are expected to sit this way, with Story writing, “Absolutely not.”

Anderson also said she was expected to follow rigid lesson plans prescribed by the network.

“You’d show up every day and read your script to the kids, and if the kids got it or didn’t, it didn’t matter. You just moved on the next day,” she said.

Story said Rocky Mountain Prep schools do use scripted curriculum, but that teachers can make adjustments based on the needs and best interests of students.

Annie Nelson, a former fifth grade teacher at Rocky Mountain Prep who left a year ago, said as state tests approached during the 2021-22 school year, she was asked to put more focus on students who were on the cusp of reaching proficiency at the expense of students who were far behind.

An English teacher at one of STRIVE’s high schools described a change this year that required math and English teachers to drop their regular lessons starting in February to focus on SAT prep until the tests in April.

“It’s been SAT all day every day for kids, which has not been great,” the teacher said in late March. More kids were missing classes and their behavior was getting worse, he said.

But Adam Lenzmeier, the vice president of schools for STRIVE, sees test prep in a different light. “The best thing we can do for kids is to position them to go into those assessments with the confidence they deserve,” he said.

Asked about whether there is a growing emphasis on test prep and test scores, Noyola wrote that test scores are “only one way we measure success,” and that other measures include state ratings, student attendance, and whether students and teachers return each year.

STRIVE Prep evolved to focus more on equity

The history of STRIVE Prep traces the evolution of Colorado’s charter sector. STRIVE launched in 2006 with a single school called West Denver Prep. The idea was to provide a rigorous alternative to district-run middle schools with low test scores. Gibbons promised the mostly Latino families in southwest Denver eight hours of school per day, no summers off, strict discipline, and a focus on getting their children to college.

With high test scores and a long wait list, West Denver Prep opened more schools. By the time the network changed its name to STRIVE Prep in 2012, it was growing from four schools to seven. That same year, Rocky Mountain Prep opened its first school in southeast Denver.

By 2014, test scores at STRIVE’s eight schools began to fall. Gibbons pointed to high teacher turnover, curriculum changes, and too many innovations at once. Around that time, STRIVE began accepting a larger share of students with disabilities than in the past, part of the network’s “equity agenda.”

Josue Bonilla, left, gets a high five from special education teacher Wendi Sussman at STRIVE Prep–Federal in 2016.

In many ways, it signaled a shift away from the network’s “no excuses” style origins and a commitment to serving all students.

Bisha, STRIVE Prep’s director of continuous improvement who oversaw a grant related to special education, worries that Gibbons’ legacy is “being destroyed” through the relentless push for better test scores and the state’s top green rating.

“Is that the be-all end-all that gives kids equitable access after high school?” she said. “No, it’s not.”

Some current and former STRIVE employees worry the merger will rob the schools of STRIVE’s unique traits, including its focus on antiracism, its commitment to serving students with disabilities, and its robust college and career readiness programming.

A current STRIVE employee who helps oversee college and career programs said impending staff cuts will make it impossible for the merged network to continue offering overnight college trips, extensive concurrent enrollment classes, work-based learning, and career and financial aid advising for alumni.

“College and career readiness is not a priority from this new central team,” the employee said. “Sadly, this wasn’t a merging. It was a takeover.”

Noyola acknowledged the cuts and said each high school “is now empowered” to lead its own college and career programming.

Noyola disputed that the focus on students with disabilities and antiracism is diminishing, and said the network’s commitment to both “is greater than it has ever been.”

Through the changes, Noyola has maintained the support of both boards.

Estrada, the STRIVE board member who himself attended the network’s first middle school, said it’s misleading to say the network is moving away from its commitment to antiracism.

“I think our priority as an organization and the most antiracist work we can do is giving each student a college prep education,” he said.

Who is Tricia Noyola?

Noyola grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas and has often talked about being underestimated by her teachers growing up. She has described herself as opinionated and headstrong, and said she fell in love with education while working in an elementary school during college.

On the weekly podcasts Noyola records with updates for STRIVE and Rocky Mountain Prep staff, she strikes a conversational tone, discussing movies she plans to see with her husband and children and network goals like getting students to read a million words.

Noyola started her career at a large Texas-based charter network called IDEA Public Schools, which promotes a no excuses, college-for-all philosophy. Prior to her arrival in Colorado two years ago, Noyola helped IDEA grow from four to 16 schools in the Austin area.

Lenzmeier, who started as a STRIVE principal in 2020 and will manage four principals in the new network, said Noyola is uncompromising in what she believes is possible.

A former army officer, he believes that “Tricia Noyola shares a lot of similarities with the best commanders I worked with.”

But many STRIVE and Rocky Mountain Prep employees describe her as harsh and intimidating, with little tolerance for dissent. Under her leadership, staff have been fired with little or no notice, and others have been notified of impending job cuts on group Zoom calls that lasted just a few minutes, according to current and former employees.

“At my campus, staff were very afraid of her,” said one former mental health provider at Rocky Mountain Prep. “I’m very afraid of her. I do not want to be on her list or her radar.”

Noyola’s most recent performance review from the 2021-22 school year at Rocky Mountain Prep credited her with achieving three of five key goals and praised her for showing “leadership, resolve, and courage to make the necessary changes to achieve student results.” The review urged Noyola to give more attention to how changes are communicated, show more “vulnerability and humility,” and work with the board to avoid the strained relations that sometimes occurred over the previous year.

Gibbons said he hasn’t followed every change that Noyola has made, but said, “Tricia is coming into this experience with a lot of urgency, appropriately so, around raising results for kids,” he said. “I have tremendous confidence in her.”

Cryan, the founder and former CEO of Rocky Mountain Prep, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Hundreds of employees left their jobs before the merger

About half of STRIVE Prep staff and two-thirds of Rocky Mountain Prep staff — nearly 400 of 730 total employees — left their jobs between June 2022 and mid April 2023, according to numbers provided by the networks. Districts around the country are grappling with high turnover and teacher burnout, but teachers and staff interviewed by Chalkbeat say the level of turnover reflects a punitive network culture and hurts students.

Several educators told Chalkbeat the flood of departures meant that students missed out on legally required special education services, English language development instruction, or mental health support. Sometimes, students felt confused or hurt after a trusted teacher disappeared without notice.

Among the departures, which resulted from resignations, firings, and job cuts, were more than 160 teachers and 40 principals, assistant principals, deans, or principal fellows. STRIVE lost 32 high-level central staff — chiefs, directors, and managers — and Rocky Mountain Prep lost 24. The networks lost 18 mental health providers, including social workers, social emotional learning specialists, and a psychologist.

Eleven STRIVE employees, most of whom are Black or Latino and half of whom were central administrators, have left since last June with severance agreements that awarded them between one and eight months of pay but also banned them from criticizing the network. Chalkbeat obtained the agreements through a public records request. No Rocky Mountain Prep employees received severance pay or signed separation agreements during that period.

“We want teachers in our network who are behind our new mission, all of our values, and our new leadership.”

Noyola attributed some of the turnover to the so-called “Great Resignation,” a pandemic-era trend in which many employees, including teachers, left their jobs. More STRIVE administrators left because their network is undergoing bigger changes, she said. Some of the employees who left were in temporary positions, and their departures may have inflated the turnover rate, she added.

Noyola acknowledged that the networks have suffered from a shortage of special education providers but said her team aims to rectify problems immediately when they are identified. She did not address the claim that English learners have missed language development sessions.

Valdez, vice chair of the STRIVE board, said, “We knew with the change of leadership … some people were going to leave and that we were okay with that because we want teachers in our network who are behind our new mission, all of our values, and our new leadership.”

Donovan, the Rocky Mountain Prep board chair, said the board has monitored departures and that turnover is slowing.

Nelson, the former fifth grade teacher, said the network struggles with teacher retention in part because it recruits young, inexperienced teachers, provides them insufficient support, and holds them to an impossible standard.

Noyola said the network “has a number of positions whose responsibilities include directly coaching and supporting teachers. I’m confident based on our outcomes that our system is effective.”

Even as Noyola cut some employees in response to purported budget pressures, she gave generous raises and bonuses to others — a move she said was warranted by the additional work those employees are doing and the value they provide to students.

School staff protest their working conditions

Throughout fall of 2021, teachers or other staff members at Rocky Mountain Prep–Berkeley seemed to be quitting almost every week, said Meghan Mallon, a former music teacher at the school. Teachers who stayed were constantly juggling extra kids or classes to cover for departed colleagues. For students who were supposed to get daily instruction to improve their English language skills, that meant sometimes missing three or four sessions a week because their teacher was assigned elsewhere, she said.

In late January 2022, after one lead teacher was told she’d be removed from her position and reassigned elsewhere in the building, Mallon and a colleague organized a one-day sick-out in protest. About a dozen teachers participated, sending an email to Noyola and other Rocky Mountain Prep administrators with a list of the group’s concerns, including the teacher’s abrupt demotion, the missed sessions for students learning English, and the lack of coaching for teachers.

Cesar Chavez Academy, a struggling single-site charter school, was taken over and became Rocky Mountain Prep–Berkeley in 2018.

Mallon and the other main organizer were fired the day of the sick-out, and other participants were given a warning and told they couldn’t talk about it, according to a charge later filed by Mallon with National Board of Labor Relations.

A lawyer for Rocky Mountain Prep responded to the labor board’s charge with a nine-page letter arguing the case should be dismissed because charter schools don’t fall under the labor board’s jurisdiction. The labor relations board ultimately agreed and dismissed the case.

Grievances describe ‘worst’ work environment

Shortly after Mallon and the other sick-out organizer were fired, Ana de Vries, the principal of the Berkeley campus, filed a grievance against Noyola.

In response to a public records request, Rocky Mountain Prep provided a copy of the grievance that was heavily redacted to protect the privacy of minors. A less redacted copy of the complaint obtained by Chalkbeat contends Noyola used her power to “harass, intimidate, discriminate against, and coerce RMP staff.” It describes a meeting in which Noyola demanded that a teacher “admit her white privilege” as well as wrongdoing unrelated to the reason for the meeting.

De Vries, who is Latina, said in an interview she felt Noyola’s demands of the teacher were inappropriate. She filed the grievance after Noyola refused to meet with her to discuss the meeting. After she submitted the complaint, she said Noyola cut her out of all communications related to the Berkeley campus.

It “created the worst environment I’ve ever worked in,” said de Vries, who resigned in February 2022 after two and a half years with the network and 12 years in the charter sector.

Rocky Mountain Prep officials said de Vries’ grievance prompted the board to adopt a policy outlining how conflicts should be addressed in select circumstances. (Chalkbeat is not describing the circumstances to protect the privacy of children.)

In a second grievance, a Berkeley teacher named Alyssa Papiernik described a culture of fear and constant hostility between Noyola and some employees.

Papiernik closed by writing, “I dread coming to work everyday ... I am hoping next year Tricia changes her attitude towards her staff.”

The Rocky Mountain Prep board found no substance to Papiernik’s claim.

A third grievance came last November, shortly after Noyola was named CEO of STRIVE Prep and was conducting a series of town hall meetings to introduce herself to STRIVE staff. Mallory Tozier, a white assistant principal at STRIVE’s Smart Academy, described a tense exchange during the question-and-answer period in which she felt Noyola implied she had a white savior complex.

A staff member of color whose account was included in the grievance echoed Tozier’s account and said Noyola’s reaction “seemed cruel and unnecessary” and “painfully silenced people like me.”

Chalkbeat obtained Tozier’s grievance through a public records request. STRIVE Prep officials said an investigation found no wrongdoing by Noyola.

“I doubt there is a principal or CEO in [Denver Public Schools] who hasn’t had a complaint filed against them at some point,” Noyola wrote in response to questions. “Grievances reflect a single point of view, and we have a process that takes every grievance seriously.”

Rocky Mountain Prep enters a new era

When the new school year starts in August, STRIVE Prep will no longer exist, and Rocky Mountain Prep will have triple the schools it had last year.

Some current and former staff from both networks have serious misgivings. They say Rocky Mountain Prep’s “rigor and love” slogan now rings hollow.

But for Noyola and other network leaders, it’s an exciting time.

They say student achievement is increasing, and almost all families are planning to return next year. Enrollment projections provided by the network suggest K-12 student numbers will hold steady at about 4,700 even with this summer’s closure of two STRIVE schools.

“The sheer optimism is remarkable,” Rocky Mountain Prep’s Chief of Staff Indrina Kanth said in an email.

In a recent message to staff, Noyola thanked those who remain and those who have joined her for the “awe-inspiring” results produced this school year.

“I know this came at costs and sacrifices that each of us made to further the mission,” she wrote.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Aurora proposes new approach at struggling Gateway High School in wake of mismanagement allegations

2023-06-13T00:05:07+00:00

The State Board of Education this week is considering a new plan from Aurora leaders to improve Gateway High School, a low-performing school that hasn’t improved with past efforts, and was recently in the spotlight for allegations that a previous principal had misused money and changed student grades.

The district is proposing a plan under state innovation status, which grants the school more autonomy from various state and district rules. An independent review panel found it’s the best option of the ones the state can mandate.

Gateway, which serves about 1,400 students including 90% students of color, has been under state orders since 2019. Ronald Fay, the principal initially hired to oversee the plan, is now under investigation for allegedly embezzling more than $100,000 from the school over a two-year period, starting in 2019, according to a report by Fox31. The report names Fay’s secretary as a possible accomplice.

A whistleblower alerted the district in 2021, prompting an audit, resignation, and criminal investigation. When Aurora Public Schools completed its own internal audit, it sent the information to law enforcement for criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said there was no update on the status of the investigation into the former principal. According to court records, he has not been charged.

State officials say they weren’t aware of the allegations or the problems before this year, when details were first reported by Fox31. In Colorado, state officials don’t oversee school-level finances, and state leaders said they depend on schools being honest in reporting academic data such as grades and graduation rates.

Aurora Public Schools declined an interview request, and board members did not return calls seeking comment.

Groups that worked inside Gateway High School to improve student achievement, Communities in Schools and Zero Dropouts, also said they had no idea about the alleged mismanagement.

The Aurora school board has not discussed the accusations publicly, nor what they mean for district oversight of struggling schools. The district has two other schools on state-ordered improvement plans, and more than a dozen that could be headed for state intervention if they don’t improve in the next few years.

That the alleged misconduct went undetected speaks to the limits of Colorado’s accountability system, which looks at achievement on state tests and some other academic measures, but typically leaves nearly all aspects of district and school governance to local authorities.

“In Colorado there’s local control and a lot of that responsibility falls to the local board,” said Lindsey Jaeckel, executive director of school and district transformation for the state department of education. “In our experience, districts do have strong checks and balances.”

School’s improvement efforts first focused on targeted needs

By 2019, Gateway had received four consecutive years of low ratings — due to low standardized test scores and graduation rates. Rather than wait for a fifth year of low ratings, when state law would then require the State Board to intercede, district leaders proposed their own improvement plan to get ahead of the state and avoid being told what to do. It was the first district to propose a plan ahead of the five-year timeline.

State officials at the time praised the district for the initiative and approved the plan local leaders crafted.

Gateway’s plan was to hire a partial external manager to focus on social emotional learning support. The external manager, Communities in Schools, placed three caseworkers at the school to work with students who needed extra help with nonacademic issues, and help train teachers on how to integrate social and emotional learning support in their classroom work.

But one of the complaints about Fay, at the time, was that he hired a large culture team with unclear job responsibilities at higher pay rates than teachers at the school.

Christopher Murray of Communities in Schools said that his team saw the large number of resources in the school as a bonus, but they weren’t used as well as they could have been.

“We felt it was great, the district and the community are committed to addressing needs in this school,” Murray said. “What I felt was the missing piece was, how are we integrating all of that? There was continued confusion around roles and what we were there to do, and ultimately a lack of trust or buy-in in the school.”

Communities in Schools ended their contract with the district in 2021. Murray said that the organization wanted more cooperation with leadership, a role in decision making, and ultimately felt they were no longer “achieving the outcomes and goals that we wanted to achieve.” The district then revised its improvement plan, which the state approved in the fall of 2021.

In the second version of the improvement plan, Gateway contracted with another organization, Zero Dropouts. This time, the contracted work focused on credit recovery as students were returning to in-person school after initial pandemic disruption.

According to email correspondence obtained through public records requests, there was disagreement about how many students benefited from Zero Dropouts’ work. The independent State Review Panel’s report details problems with the work including no communication with teachers on which of their students were working with the group, whether they needed to approve the recovery work, and a lack of student participation in afternoon and weekend tutoring opportunities the group offered.

The latest state rating, for 2022, showed the school again in “turnaround,” the lowest rating given to schools.

And while the graduation rate improved significantly for the Class of 2020, it has since dropped again to 64.2%, for the Class of 2022, lower than the state rate of 82.3%.

Multiple teachers at the school raised concerns about grades being changed, according to the Fox31 report. A district audit reports that the district investigation had found there were more than 400 grade changes, far more grade changes than at other district high schools. The audit found there was no evidence of grade changes in exchange for payment, but that teachers did feel inappropriately pressured to change them. The audit also states that the internal district investigation into the grade changes may have been inadequate.

Sentinel Colorado reported that during a school board meeting with superintendent finalists this spring, Andre Wright, who was identified as the administrator who oversaw the possibly inadequate investigation into the grade changes, claimed that most of the changes weren’t beneficial to the students and that grades were actually lowered.

“APS should consider whether additional inquiries should be made with respect to the grade change practices at Gateway,” the audit recommendations state. “As Gateway is a turnaround school, metrics related to student performance and graduation are important to the school’s status.”

Since Gateway first got a state-ordered improvement plan in 2019, the school has received a total of $500,000 in state school improvement dollars. State officials said they don’t have any concerns about those dollars having been misspent.

The money is given to districts, not schools themselves, and state officials say they track that the work that is supposed to happen with the grant money does, in fact, happen. In Gateway’s case, the money has gone mostly to pay for the external managers.

Asked if the state could impose penalties related to accounting practices or other financial concerns, Jennifer Okes, chief school operations officer for the Colorado Department of Education, said in an email that districts could face downgraded ratings “if CDE determines a district or charter schools are not in substantial, good-faith compliance.”

“We have not had any instances of this during the past 10 years. While we do have districts that are out of compliance with some provisions from time to time, these have not risen to the level of substantial, good-faith compliance,” she wrote.

A new approach

Gateway’s newest principal, Scott Fiske, hired in January 2022, evaluated the school’s needs and determined that a more comprehensive plan to improve instruction is necessary. The push to use innovation status came after a visit from the state review panel in the fall.

District leadership has also changed, including the chief academic officer, and a new superintendent will start next month.

The school held focus groups with staff and students, and created a plan that would push the school to offer “experiential learning” tied to college and career experiences. Students would get opportunities to do job shadowing, internships, service work, and earn industry certifications.

The school is requesting innovation status waivers including to hire unlicensed teachers for certain career class offerings, have flexibility in the school calendar, and change graduation requirements to offer different diploma options. Graduation requirements would need to at least meet, if not exceed, the district’s requirements.

The local school board approved the plan unanimously in April, after members praised it, as well as the community engagement done while creating the plan. Some school board members asked why this work hadn’t been the focus from the start.

The district and school staff working on Gateway’s improvement plan are all new. They said they believed the people who worked on the original plans hoped more targeted work would be enough. Now district officials want a more comprehensive approach.

Jaeckel, executive director of school and district transformation for the state department of education, said that when state officials do site visits, they focus on systems and helping school and district leaders narrow their focus to a few improvements that can be done well.

“We do seek information about, how are you supporting students who are failing?” Jaeckel said. “We get to see that. But we don’t get down to an individual level, talking to a teacher or even a principal about how did a student end up with a D? It’s more about, are there systems in place?”

Jaeckel said that when the state publicly posts academic data offered by schools, it helps provide accountability because the public can see what is being reported, and ask questions of their local officials.

In Aurora, although the district denied an interview request and school board members haven’t questioned the district’s policies in a public board meeting, the district issued a statement defending their policies.

“We have multiple policies and protocols in place to ensure that funding is used appropriately to serve Aurora Public Schools students,” the district’s statement reads. “We do not tolerate misconduct and hold staff to high standards. We work to fully investigate complaints and concerns. In this case, the actions of the two former employees are appalling. We remain committed to upholding high standards for all employees.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Denver charter focused on inclusion for students with disabilities to close

2022-01-14T00:40:22+00:00

A Denver charter elementary school focused on fully including students with disabilities will close at the end of this school year due to staffing and academic challenges school leaders say were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The board of directors of REACH Charter School voted last month to close the school after learning that Denver Public Schools staff was going to recommend the school board not renew its charter with REACH — which would have been the first such recommendation in nearly a decade. The REACH board decided to surrender its charter instead.

Principal Jason Marsh, a former special education teacher who helped found the school seven years ago, said REACH weighed what it would take to fight the district’s recommendation against giving families as much time as possible to find new schools for their children. The Denver school board voted Thursday to accept REACH’s charter surrender.

“We thought this would be a way we would be able to afford more time to work on student transition and getting our staff transitioned as well,” Marsh said.

Parent Mariam Arab, whose 3-year-old son has a hearing disability, is worried about finding a school that provides the same support and family environment as REACH.

“He loves his teachers,” Arab said of her son, who started preschool at REACH last spring. “I just hope the school we find later has what they have, but I doubt it.”

REACH will be the eleventh Denver charter school to close in the past four years. Many of the charters closed due to low enrollment, an issue affecting the entire district that will likely lead to more school closures.

REACH has also suffered from declining enrollment. It has just 82 students in preschool through fifth grade right now, Marsh said, down from 140 two years ago.

The recommendation to not renew REACH’s charter stemmed partly from a school visit conducted by district staff in November. While teachers were observed treating students respectfully and providing emotional support, the academic instruction was not always rigorous or high quality, according to a report obtained by Chalkbeat. The report notes “significant gaps” in teaching grade-level content and providing extra help to students who need it.

That wasn’t the experience of Jaclyn Miller and her 8-year-old son, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and anxiety. When he started at REACH in kindergarten, he would get so overwhelmed in the classroom that his behavior would become explosive. Now in third grade, he’s learned to advocate for himself and his needs, and he’s reading on grade level.

“They just saw him for who he is,” Miller said of the REACH staff. “That’s what’s so powerful about REACH. … They know what each kid’s unique gifts are and where they need support, and I think that really empowers the kids to grow there.”

REACH’s model is unique in Denver Public Schools in that one-third of its students have special education plans and two-thirds do not. All students are taught in the same classrooms, a practice known as inclusion.

Though Denver Public Schools has said it wants to become a nationwide model for inclusive practices, many Denver students with disabilities are still served in separate classrooms at least some of the time. In accepting REACH’s charter surrender, Denver school board members said the district should learn from the parts of REACH’s model that worked well.

Several said it pained them to see the school close.

“We must make sure — not just as a board, not just as a superintendent, not just as staff, but as community partners as well — that schools that are serving vulnerable communities are able to keep their doors open,” said board member Michelle Quattlebaum.

Marsh said REACH’s model made it difficult to find qualified teachers who believe in the mission — a challenge that was exacerbated by pandemic-era staffing shortages. A schoolwide instructional leader hired in the summer of 2020 left after only one year, the district report notes. A new instructional leader hired this year lasted only a few weeks. Marsh said he was unable to fill a third grade teacher position until the day before school started in August.

REACH also struggled these past two years with the frequent back-and-forth between in-person and remote learning, some of which was driven by districtwide decisions and some of which was in response to COVID outbreaks at the school. When district staff visited REACH to evaluate the school for its charter renewal, students had just returned from a stretch of remote learning, which many students with disabilities found difficult, Marsh said.

“REACH was never intended to be a remote learning program,” he said. “It was very challenging for our impacted young students to be online and then transitioning them back to in-person learning and being able to maintain the high level of rigor. It was very challenging.”

REACH board President Jonathan Leinheardt, whose son attended from first through fifth grade, said it was a difficult decision to surrender the school’s charter. But he said the school is committed to doing all it can to help current families find new schools, including hosting information sessions about the district’s open enrollment process, which starts Friday.

Miller said her 8-year-old son, who formed deep bonds at REACH and has had the same group of friends since kindergarten, is anxious about starting over in a new place.

“I asked him, ‘What is the most important thing you want out of a school?’ and he said, ‘I want my teachers to understand me and I want my friends or my classmates to understand me,’” she said. “He’s very nervous about not being able to find that again.”

State Board will change its order for one year, placing more trust in Pueblo district

2021-03-11T02:04:36+00:00

The Pueblo 60 school district will regain some control over its lowest-performing school — at least for one more year.

After hearing district officials on Wednesday present their case, the Colorado State Board of Education members said they felt just enough confidence to roll back part of the order to hand control of Risley International Academy of Innovation to a private company.

The private company that had taken over full management, MGT Consulting, left Pueblo earlier this school year after the State Board scaled back its order, to allow for temporary partial management of Risley given multiple challenges.

The State Board will vote next month on the formal language of the order to allow the district to contract with an outside group for only partial management of the school, rather than full management. The external manager must be in control of the instructional programming and teacher training.

The district had asked for a two-year relaxed order, but State Board officials were nervous about allowing two years of partial management given the school’s nine years of low performance ratings.

“A two-year extension was going to cause a leap of faith for me,” said Angelika Schroeder, State Board president.

In 2018, the State Board had asked the Pueblo district to hand over management of Risley International Academy of Innovation to an external group, in an attempt to improve student achievement after years of lagging ratings.

It was the same year that the State Board ordered the Adams 14 school district to do the same for its entire district. The orders were a last resort meant to ensure improvement in districts that the State Board had lost confidence in.

But as a first-time tactic in the state, the rollout of the orders faced problems, including Pueblo 60 not getting a qualified applicant the first time it looked for an external manager and the State Board rejecting Adams 14’s first choice. The State Board has not issued similar orders again.

Some lawmakers and educators are questioning the state’s accountability system as a whole and wondering if the state has done enough to help schools and districts before ordering such extreme measures. A bill expected to be introduced this session would audit the system.

Wednesday’s State Board vote means the state will draft a new one-year order that will allow for Risley to have partial management from an outside group.

In September, Pueblo 60 officials told the state that MGT Consulting, the external manager that had been hired for Risley, was having trouble managing the school, a challenge worsened by school closures as a result of the pandemic.

Wednesday, Pueblo 60 leaders told the state that under the modified improvement plan, it has worked with Relay Graduate School of Education as a partial manager and produced positive changes. Moving back to a full outside management would disrupt that momentum, Pueblo officials argued.

A state review panel also concluded in its report that the partial management was working. The panel found evidence of the school developing leadership capacity, something a similar review panel in 2018 had found lacking.

Pueblo 60 also presented local metrics that show the school heading in the right direction with improved teacher attendance, local test scores, and positive feedback from parents and teachers. Average student attendance has also improved in the second semester of this school year, though it is lower than in 2019-20 before the pandemic.

Board members said they were heartened to see signs of improvement, but board member Steve Durham also cautioned that the changes weren’t overwhelming.

The slow start to improvement came even before the pandemic. After having to ask the state for an extension in its search for a manager, the district eventually hired MGT Consulting, a for-profit group that also won the contract to manage the Adams 14 school district, and later to partially manage an Aurora school.

MGT’s model to hire local experienced educators to do much of the work on the ground faced challenges in Pueblo in southwestern Colorado. MGT’s positions had high turnover, which caused delays in creating a plan for improvement and its rollout. After some of those challenges appeared to have been resolved, COVID-19 shut schools down, and stirred up new problems for MGT.

The company helped hire a new principal for Risley, but was expecting to rely heavily on subcontractors for its second year of work. Instead, Pueblo officials asked the state to work with a partial manager, and terminated the MGT contract.

Now the district is working with Relay, based in New York. District leaders say they already had a collaborative working relationship with Relay because of previous work with the group.

“My hope is that the positive indications of forward momentum, however modest, are cause for some confidence here,” said Rebecca McClellan, a State Board member.

But she and other board members said they want to be able to look at more data next year as they continue monitoring the progress of the school.

Denver school principals unionize, request recognition to negotiate a contract

2020-08-21T01:42:27+00:00

Denver school principals have formed a union and are asking the school district for recognition. Their goals include fighting for fair compensation and against institutional racism.

The newly formed Denver School Leaders Association consists of 196 principals and assistant principals, representing 59% of school leaders in the district, said Co-president Cesar Rivera, who is principal of Samuels Elementary in southeast Denver.

The union has asked the district to recognize it as a collective bargaining unit, which would allow the principals to negotiate a contract as the teachers union does. But current school board policy doesn’t list principals among the employees allowed to unionize.

Board President Carrie Olson and Vice President Jennifer Bacon publicly acknowledged the principals’ request Thursday. Olson, a former teacher and vocal supporter of the teachers union, said the board has begun reviewing the request.

Superintendent Susana Cordova, a former principal, also showed a degree of support.

“I hear you and I understand why you brought forth this request,” she said Thursday. “I deeply believe in the power of collective voice to advance our profession.”

But Cordova also cited board policy, while noting that state law is silent on whether public school administrators can unionize. Cordova said she was a dues-paying member of a previous district principals association that no longer exists. She said she welcomes the opportunity to meet with the leaders of the principals union and is open to memorializing a compensation structure in writing even if the union is not formally recognized.

“I realize that’s different than what you’ve requested,” Cordova said.

Cordova and union leaders are scheduled to meet next week. The union co-presidents said being recognized as a collective bargaining unit, not simply an association, is important.

“If we’re just an association, principals don’t have any shot at a contract, which is needed to ensure that our leaders’ voice is heard,” Rivera said.

The Denver School Leaders Association is organizing with the American Federation of School Administrators, which represents principals in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco and has been pushing to increase its membership in recent years.

The Denver union’s platform includes advocating for equitable pay for principals. The co-presidents said they’ve heard stories of female principals with the same experience as male principals working at similar schools getting paid thousands of dollars less. Or principals who used to be teachers who would make more money if they went back into the classroom.

The principals also want a way to share their collective opinions about big district decisions, such as whether to reopen schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, how to reform the district’s controversial school ratings system, and whether to close struggling schools.

“DPS is rife with institutional racism,” said Eric Rowe, principal of PREP Academy high school and union co-president. “We’d like to use our collective voice to dismantle it.”

Colorado’s state board gives Aurora Central one year to improve its ratings

2019-11-14T22:41:03+00:00

The State Board of Education on Thursday gave final orders to Aurora Central High School in its efforts to keep improving student achievement, but only gave the school one year to increase its state ratings.

Aurora superintendent Rico Munn had cautioned the state board during a hearing on Wednesday that giving the school just one year doesn’t give officials much time.

Although other schools have had to answer to the state for low student performance, Aurora Central is one of a small number of schools to come back for a second hearing after initial interventions were not successful.

The state says it is giving Aurora a year to improve, but in fact, the new rating that it will consider will be based largely on state tests which will be given this spring, around March and April — less than six months away.

If Aurora Central continues to receive one of the lowest two ratings the state gives, then the motion states “in the 2020-2021 school year, the State Review Panel will review the school and the board may redirect action.”

Colorado Department of Education

One of the suggestions the state board added to its order is that Aurora Central should hire outside experts on instruction who can help accelerate improvement efforts. By law the board can’t order the collaboration.

Munn told the state board Wednesday that the earliest he would expect the district to be able to hire a partner would be January or February, meaning they wouldn’t have much time to make a difference for the ratings that the board will consider.

Aurora Central was already on a state ordered improvement plan for the last two years, using an innovation plan which gave the school autonomy in hiring, budgeting, and scheduling. School officials say the changes that the school has seen so far, such as improved graduation, decreased teacher turnover, and improved parent engagement are a result of that plan.

Officials said Aurora Central’s work needed more time to result in better student achievement on state tests. State board members acknowledged that some improvement has been made, but doubted the plan had enough power to make quick changes in student achievement.

“We are pleased that the State Board recognizes the strong improvements, both large and small, we have made at Aurora Central when it comes to school climate and culture,” Munn said in a statement Thursday. “Turnaround work, especially at a comprehensive high school as unique as Aurora Central, takes time. But we have a staff that is dedicated to putting in the time and effort needed to strengthen our academic and student success outcomes every day.”

State Board member Val Flores cast the only vote against the orders. She attempted to amend the motion to give the school two years instead, but had no support for that proposal.

Read the full order, here.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that a few other schools also failed to meet state deadlines for improvement last year.

Will Aurora Central’s small improvements be enough to fend off more drastic state measures?

2019-11-12T01:38:30+00:00

Two years of making small improvements, even without producing dramatic results, could be enough to enable Aurora Central High School to fend off deeper involvement of state officials this week.

The high school, trying to meet a state deadline for improvement, must show why it deserves more time to boost student achievement.

The school wrote its innovation plan — which gave it freedom from parts of its union contract, district rules, and state laws around hiring, budgeting, and curriculum — in 2016.

The next year the State Board of Education gave the school two years to improve. It has succeeded in cutting teacher turnover and improving graduation rates. But Aurora Central’s state rating has stayed low, and the school earned fewer points in the state rating system than last year.

Colorado Department of Education

This week, the State Board must decide whether to change its improvement orders or allow the school to keep trying. If it were to choose a different direction, the board would be limited by law to certain options, such as closing the school, ordering an external company to take over, or turning the school into a charter school.

Aurora district officials will argue that Aurora Central has been showing improvements in its culture through improved student behavior, attendance, as well as parent and teacher satisfaction, as shown on surveys, and that the improvements in academic achievement will follow in time.

A state review panel of outside experts agrees that is the best path forward. It notes small improvements and agrees the past few years required setting the foundation to improve school culture. Now the real work begins, it says.

The 1,900-student high school sits in a historical and diverse area of the city near 11th Avenue and Peoria Street. About 45% of the school’s students are English language learners. About two-thirds of all students qualify for subsidized lunches, a measure of poverty.

School and district officials boast that the school has improved its graduation rate to about 70%, up more than 25 percentage points from 2014-15. But over the last five years, Aurora Central has lost the most students in the district to other schools outside Aurora, and to dropouts.

Teacher turnover has improved. It was only 18.42% last school year, down from a high of 52% in 2015-16. The school also started this school year with 100% of its jobs filled — a first, at least in recent times.

But teachers who are now staying at Aurora Central are, on average, newer teachers. That’s why one of the biggest keys to improving Aurora Central involves teacher planning.

The school, exercising its budgeting flexibility, has hired a coordinator who oversees professional learning communities — that’s the name for the groups of teachers that meet to plan together. This coordinator has started coaching teachers to facilitate their own meetings.

Because there are so many teacher planning groups, and not enough instructional coaches to lead each one, a consultant, Mass Insight, helps coach teachers to become planning facilitators.

“I do believe that is the key to teacher retention,” said Gerardo de la Garza, who is in his fourth year as principal of Aurora Central. “Providing a structure for those folks to come together and learn together, you provide that opportunity to build that capacity — to in a sense become leaders.”

One report from a third-party review found that Aurora Central’s teaching and teacher planning have improved, but found that teachers are still not using enough strategies to educate English language learners, particularly outside of literacy classrooms.

De la Garza said that this year, he is now focusing more on improving instruction. He said teachers are digging into state standards, and working together to track how students are doing.

The third-party review notes that instruction has improved and moved away from lectures to more student activities that engage students, but also found that teachers are still not always providing enough rigor.

And while student attendance has improved over several years, chronic absenteeism started to rise again last year. The problem spilled out on television news when neighbors called police to report students roaming the neighborhood littering and fighting.

But school and district officials point out that more than 100 students took to the streets a week later to clean up the neighborhood, hoping to repair their school’s image.

When Araceli Quezada’s daughters were starting high school at Aurora Central, they were skipping classes, and having trouble engaging with school, but she credits the school’s attention to turning them around.

Quezada said school officials sat down with her and her daughters to set goals and talk to them about the consequences of missing school. Her daughters graduated in 2018 and 2019.

“I’ve seen the way the school talked to them,” Quezada said. “I’m pretty sure if the school had not approached them the way they did, they would not have graduated.”

It’s also a contrast to the experience of an older daughter who Quezada said was able to graduate from Aurora Central in 2009 because she was a self-starter, even though she noticed the school wasn’t engaging most students at that time.

The school’s state rating decreased slightly this year, as did some state test scores. The school’s average scores on the SAT are lower than Adams City High School’s, another chronically low-performing school under state orders to improve.

Papa Dia, a district parent and community activist, said that he believes the school and the district still have a way to go in helping non-English speaking families — a large portion of the Aurora Central community — engage with schools.

For instance, he said, more home visits are needed. Teachers started doing home visits in 2018, in some cases in place of parent-teacher conferences, but Dia said most of the immigrant and refugee families he works with have not had a home visit.

“I think home visits would be very important in engaging with the families and getting families involved,” Dia said. “Families don’t understand the report card or how the kids are graded or what is a good grade, so most of the time they cannot help the kids with their homework.”

Engaging with families, Dia said, would allow the school to connect families to resources so that parents can find additional help for their children outside of school.

As of last week, district officials said the school had conducted almost 300 home visits this year. In the last two years, school officials have done about 1,600 home visits, a district spokesman said.

The school has also tried to increase parent engagement with dedicated staff, regular “parent coffee” meetings where officials talk to parents about different topics, and with a more involved Parents in Action committee.

Quezada said she attended the parent coffee meetings, but would have liked to have been more involved.

“Sometimes you can’t do it because of work,” she said. “I’ll be more involved with my grandkids.”