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The Denver teachers union is backing three newcomers and one incumbent in November’s Denver school board election. With a majority of board seats up for grabs, political control of the state’s largest school district is at stake.
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association has endorsed:
- Amy Klein Molk for an at-large seat representing the entire city.
- Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán for a seat representing District 2 in southwest Denver.
- DJ Torres for a seat representing District 3 in central-east Denver.
- Monica Hunter for a seat representing District 4 in northeast Denver.
Gaytán is the only incumbent to be endorsed by the teachers union. Two other incumbents, Scott Esserman and Michelle Quattlebaum, did not get the union’s endorsement this year after being backed by the union when they ran in 2021.
Quattlebaum is running for reelection in District 4. Esserman currently holds an at-large seat representing the entire city but is running for reelection in District 3, where he lives.
The union wasn’t happy with the way Quattlebaum and Esserman voted on a few key issues, union leaders said. In 2022, Quattlebaum voted against a policy to require Denver’s semi-autonomous innovation schools to abide by the teachers union contract. The policy passed on a 5-2 vote, despite Quattlebaum’s “no” vote.
In March, Esserman voted with a majority of the board to accept an arbitrator’s decision in a pay dispute between the union and Denver Public Schools. Accepting the arbitrator’s decision meant that teachers did not get a bigger cost-of-living pay raise last school year.
“It’s all about the votes,” said Patrick Jiner, a teacher at Lake Middle School.
Jiner is one of nine educators on a committee that decides which candidates the union will endorse. Endorsements matter in the Denver school board election. Historically, the only candidates who’ve won have been backed by either the teachers union or by deep-pocketed advocacy organizations that support charter schools and school choice.
In the last election, in 2023, the advocacy organizations outspent the teachers union by 5 to 1. All of the candidates backed by those organizations — primarily, an organization called Denver Families Action — won their seats. All of the union-backed candidates lost.
This year, Denver Families Action has endorsed a different slate of candidates than the union.
Union President Rob Gould said the union’s candidates — Klein Molk, Gaytán, Torres, and Hunter — stood out because of their knowledge about both education and workers’ rights.
Klein Molk worked as a paraprofessional for students with disabilities at a Denver elementary school, a perspective that Gould said has been missing from the Denver board. Torres is a former Denver Public Schools special education teacher who belonged to the union.
Hunter is also a former DPS teacher and helped found a union caucus for Black educators. She now works for the statewide teachers union, the Colorado Education Association.
Gaytán is not a teacher. She is a real estate agent and DPS parent. But in her four years on the board, she has advocated for the union’s positions on issues ranging from contract rights to teacher pay. Gould repeatedly described Gaytán as “consistent.”
Some of the other candidates are also educators. But Erica Atchison, a special education teacher at Park Hill Elementary who serves on the union’s endorsement committee, said these four candidates best aligned with the union’s core values of “respect us, pay us, value us.”
“We take it seriously for sure,” Jiner said. “That school board has a lot of power and affects real people and real lives, and that sometimes gets lost in the arguments and the debates.”
Candidates’ opinions on charter schools have historically been a dividing line in Denver school board elections. Jiner said that if a candidate supports charter schools, he sees it as “not a total red flag, but something that gets my ears up.” Charter school teachers are not unionized, and critics say the independent public schools compete with traditional district-run schools.
Gaytán has been sharply critical of charter schools, saying charters “siphon” students from district-run schools. But other candidates have taken more measured stances. For instance, Hunter said she would never judge another parent’s choice to enroll their child in a charter school, even though she noted that charters “often disappoint families.”
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
