Principals need more training, power and help, administration higher-ups should be thinking more about urban high schools, and no single solution is going to fix all the problems.
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet let some of his early ideas out Wednesday to an independent group of high school reform commissioners – some of whom were appointed by the former superintendent – about how to fix some of the city’s most beleaguered schools.
“There was a certain lack of precision in how people described the reform effort here,” Bennet told members of the Denver Commission on Secondary School Reform. “We are going to have to rethink what we’re doing.”
Wednesday’s talk was part of a broader discussion Bennet has quietly been having with groups across the city, including the teachers union, businesspeople and neighborhood advocates who typically criticize DPS policies.
Many commission members came to the meeting exasperated that more progress hasn’t been made on their recommendations released nearly six months ago. Those proposals called for greater principal autonomy and more tailored niche schools.
Bennet started by thanking them for their work.
“No one ever got a thank-you note; no one ever got any personal calls thanking them for all the time spent on this,” said commission executive director Patricia McNeil.
Bennet, though, was still coy about what exactly he had in store, even though many were probing about changes within the administration and at the schools.
“What can we do, Michael?” asked commission co-chairwoman Dorothy Horrell.
“Let me collect my thoughts,” he said.
Bennet has ordered an independent audit of the district’s curriculum and teaching practices. He also is working on a “strategic plan,” likely to be released in November, which should give leaders ways to go about improving the district, where fewer than half the students graduate and test scores this year were disappointing in many schools.
In his conversation with commission members, Bennet expressed concern that no one within the administration “comes to work thinking about high schools,” he said. He also endorsed stronger principal training and the creation of schools parents find attractive.
Ann Greenfield, principal of DPS’s Merrill Middle School and a commission member, said giving principals more responsibility sounds good, “but we need to have the capacity to do it.”
Greenfield is trying to spend two hours a day in classrooms, but she said she finds herself taking a laptop home and sifting through more than 50 e-mails each night. On Wednesday, she spent time with a student who was sitting alone on the grass during lunch period and called himself a “computer geek … with no friends.”
“I have to find him some friends, someone who will connect with him,” she said. “That’s going to be the most important thing in his life.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
