Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet wants intelligent, motivated people willing to work their tails off to help him implement his ambitious reform agenda.
And he wants them for free.
Bennet has asked a handful of private-foundation leaders to consider loaning him people – or give him money for their salaries – to help carry out plans to improve the district.
Though these workers would continue to collect salary from the foundations, they would be “on loan” to Bennet, who would throw them into special assignments to help with the Manual High School reform, for example, or teachers’ new pay-for-performance plan.
“The central office has been hit with five years of budget cuts, and that’s started to take its toll in terms of the capacity,” Bennet said. “We have to do the reform work. … We’re looking for a way to build capacity without our resources.”
In a private meeting held recently with foundation heads, Bennet said he needed highly qualified people for “70-hour weeks” to do reform work for the 68,000-student district, foundation leaders who attended the meeting said.
“I think many foundations stand ready to provide the support that the superintendent needs from them,” said Mary Gittings Cronin, president of the Piton Foundation. “Not only in the form of financial assistance.”
Bennet’s 92-page school-reform agenda, “The Denver Plan,” calls for stronger academic rigor for students falling below grade level, a changed role for principals and new grading policies and graduation requirements.
“I think it’s a hard budget time right now,” said Tony Lewis, executive director of the Donnell- Kay Foundation. “It’s hard to justify adding salaries and people when there is a deficit and a labor force screaming for more money.”
Teachers union leaders walked away from the bargaining table May 16 after several weeks of trying to negotiate a contract with the district. The union contends the two sides are $13 million apart.
Lewis “loaned” one of his staffers, Kim Knous-Dolan, to be a special assistant to Bennet for a year. Knous-Dolan still collects salary from Donnell-Kay but is working on the Manual reform process full time for DPS.
That process calls for hiring a consulting firm to ensure the Manual community’s involvement in designing the new school, already promised as “premier,” when it reopens in 2007.
“It’s a way we can help that’s actually better than money,” Lewis said. “It also helps them with expertise.”
Phil Gonring also sees it that way. The senior program officer for the Rose Community Foundation committed $565,000 to DPS last month to support ProComp, the district’s complicated pay-for-performance plan for teachers.
Some of that money will go to fund six full-time people to work on the project, Gonring said.
Already, about 1,250 teachers are enrolled in ProComp.
“They (DPS) are so resource- poor right now that if we didn’t give them money to support this, they wouldn’t put the money into it,” Gonring said.
Bennet said the need for outside people – he’s not sure yet how many – reflects how much the district is taking on.
He said he has complete faith in his administrative staff but that it is stretched thin.
DPS has cut about $31 million from central administration alone since the 2003-04 school year.
“We’ve got people here working with much less resources,” he said. “And it’s taking its toll.”
Strategy used nationally
Using consultants helps give districts an identity within their cities and draws on outside talent, officials say.
The use of private dollars to fuel urban school districts is not new. Total philanthropic spending on K-12 education was about $1.5 billion nationwide in 2002, the most recent year the funding could be calculated, according to the American Enterprise Institute.
The DPS Foundation received $4.9 million in the 2005 fiscal year and anticipates $6 million to $8 million for the 2006 fiscal year, said Kirstin Gerety, the foundation’s director of marketing.
But in addition to cash donations, some urban districts like Denver are using donated human capital to get reform efforts moving.
In New York, public schools chancellor Joel Klein is working with management and education consultants to dissect every aspect of the school system, which has 1.1 million students. The consultants are funded by $5 million in private donations.
Bennet said he welcomes outside minds to help improve DPS, which struggles with low state test scores and where more than half the students don’t graduate.
“We’re not going to be able to make the kind of progress that needs to be made if there’s a sense that the organization is detached from the life of its city,” he said.
University of Colorado professor Paul Teske said it makes the district less insulated.
“It shows that DPS is not just a school system; it’s all of Denver,” said Teske, who runs the Center for Education Policy Analysis at CU-Denver. “I would imagine that the stake you feel when you have a staff member there is higher than if you just wrote a check.”
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
