Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet said Monday that he hopes to appoint “as soon as possible” a citizens committee headed by two former mayors to help keep the district focused on student achievement.
In these leadership roles, former Denver Mayors Federico Peña and Wellington Webb would give Bennet political backing to make the sometimes unpopular decisions to improve the district, Webb said.
“I would block and open up holes for the … superintendent and school board to do their work,” Webb said. “Change is hard … and there’s going to be casualties along the way.”
Bennet has vowed to make DPS the best urban school district in the country.
That means boosting Colorado Student Assessment Program scores at all grade levels and increasing the graduation rate. Fewer than half of Denver students finish high school.
That also means restructuring a $1.2 billion total budget to funnel as many dollars as possible to classrooms.
“(The citizens committee) is less about the idea of backing me, or the idea of reform, as it is about making sure the district has its eye on the prize,” Bennet said. “That’s measured by student achievement.”
In his first year on the job, Bennet has closed historic Manual High School for a year and promised to reopen a “premier” institution in 2007. The school had struggled with declining enrollment and low CSAP scores. The decision to close Manual prompted community protests.
More tough decisions face Bennet, who warned city leaders in April that the district would need to consolidate schools to pay for reform.
DPS has more excess capacity in its buildings – 179 square feet for each student – than other metro-area school districts. Douglas County, for example, has 102 square feet for each student.
Closing schools is unpopular, and a broad base of citizens could help sell the idea, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools. “It’s probably the hardest thing that any school district has to do,” said Casserly, who has observed the politics of school closures in Detroit and Seattle.
Bennet is mum about whether his citizens committee, called for in his reform document “The Denver Plan,” will have any role in school consolidations.
“We did say in the plan that we would have a citizens committee to hold the district accountable,” he said. “I think it’s important for our city to have ownership in this district.”
A broad-based – yet powerful – citizens committee working on school reform has been tried in only a few cities.
In Boston, business leaders, school and city administrators and others signed “The Boston Compact” in 1982. A new compact was signed six years ago.
DPS board member Kevin Patterson sees the committee as a way of engaging the whole city, not just the “usual suspects.”
“You have three mayors talking about this, and that’s big,” he said. “Just to have these people talk about it is a huge step in the right direction.”
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has also supported Bennet’s efforts to improve DPS.
Peña – who has advocated for education reform, particularly in the Latino community, for more than a year – recently said “no decisions have been made” about his role on the committee, but he has offered to help Bennet.
Fixing DPS “is the No. 1 issue in this city,” he said. “It is far more important than any economic-development project … far more important than the airport. … This is the issue of this decade.”
Staff writer Elizabeth Aguilera contributed to this story.
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
