Kristen Kroonenberg thinks often about the 19-year-old man who lost his life as he saved hers.
If she could speak to Stevie Burns today, “I would tell him, ‘Thank you so much for everything. I wish it didn’t turn out the way it did,’ ” said Kroonenberg, pictured at right with Burns’ 14-year-old sister, Brandy, left. ” ‘What you did inspired me a lot and made me want to be a better person.’ ”
Burns, who dived into the Little Dolores River last spring to save Kroonenberg, is one of dozens of Coloradans who made a difference last year.
As the calendar turns to 2009, here is a look back at just four of them who bettered — or saved — lives last year.
STEVIE BURNS
Littleton 19-year-old
lost his life saving a
friend from drowning
In late May, Stevie Burns, Kristen Kroonenberg and four friends set out for a weekend of fun and adventure in western Colorado. They camped on a Friday night near the Little Dolores River, and in the morning, they agreed to go cliff jumping.
Burns and one of his friends had been to this place before. A cliff jutted 35 feet above the river. Waterfalls and pools of water, known locally as the potholes, lay below.
This day, they found themselves alone. Spring runoff gorged the river. The current looked swift, the water level high. But Burns plunged in and swam ashore, and “we all decided we wanted to do it,” Kroonenberg said.
Burns’ girlfriend leapt into the river, and “she had a little bit of trouble getting out. Then I decided to jump in. Once I got in the water, I was struggling to get out. I got up to this ledge. My hand slipped. The current pulled me back to the pothole.”
She expected the current to carry her to a shallow spot in the river. It didn’t. She swam, but “I couldn’t get anywhere,” she said. Icy water swirled over her. The river’s roar drowned out her friends.
“By all the water I was swallowing, I knew my time was about to end,” she said. “I’m hopeless at this point. All of a sudden, I hear this splash in the water, and I feel this huge feeling of relief.”
Burns had dived in again. He extended a lifesaving arm, urging her to grab on and hold tight. He reached the ledge, then edged along it to her boyfriend, who pulled her out.
She lay down, catching her breath. Suddenly she heard her boyfriend yelling. He sounded panicked. “I looked up and saw Stevie was going through exactly what I went through. He was caught in the same pothole. The current took him, and he started drowning.”
The Littleton man died before his friends could reach him.
Kroonenberg is 19 and knows she has a life to live only because Burns gave his. She had known him just a couple of months before his death, but “I’ve gotten closer to his family and feel like I’ve learned a lot more about him,” she said. “If he hadn’t died, we would have ended up being really close friends.”
This week, she sat in her family’s living room with Burns’ younger sister, Brandy, and talked of spending New Year’s Eve with the Burns family.
“He’s always on my mind, most of the day,” Brandy said. “He was the nicest person to everyone, no matter who you were.”
If she could talk to her brother today, “I would tell him I miss him more than anything in the world,” she said. “And that he was really brave, what he did. And I’m going to do my best to make him proud.”
David Olinger
STEVE DOBO
Entrepreneur makes it
his business to help get
dropouts back on track
In 2008, Steve Dobo got 175 high school dropouts back to the classroom.
Dobo, executive director of Colorado Youth for a Change, launched the dropout- sleuthing business three years ago after years of dabbling in tornado chasing, human-resources management and even playing the Asian financial markets.
His nonprofit started with a modest contract from Denver Public Schools to track roving Manual High students who lost interest in school when it was shuttered for a year.
The work back then was laborious, and Dobo did it on his own, traipsing through snow and backyards and businesses to find missing students and coax them into alternative schools or GED classrooms.
Dobo now has six people working for him and has a sophisticated three-part plan to cut the dropout rate in half in Colorado. He still has contracts with Denver and Aurora to find missing kids. Preliminary numbers show Denver lost 2,700 kids last year and that 1,700 dropped out of Aurora Public Schools.
He also is expanding beyond sleuthing to prevention. Last year, he helped launch two alternative schools, one in Denver and one in Aurora, so dropouts have a place to go. And he is working with at-risk ninth-graders in both districts to keep them engaged in basic subjects so they don’t lose interest before graduation.
“People used to view dropouts as an intractable problem. They didn’t know what to do,” Dobo said. “I think we’ve got it figured out. The problem, ultimately, is not with the students. It was that there was not a system or a school to help them.”
He secured a contract with Johns Hopkins University researchers to work with five school districts that produce almost half of the state’s high school dropouts.
Dobo has piqued some national interest in his work and has submitted a dropout-reduction plan to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team.
Laura Ramos is a product of Dobo’s organization. The 20-year-old dropped out of an Aurora high school when she got pregnant her junior year. After working at Applebees and living at home with her baby, Ramos was invited back to school by Dobo’s team to get her diploma.
She’s giving the graduation speech at an Aurora alternative school this month and wants to go to culinary school to become a chef.
“People were always pushing me, but this was my angel,” Ramos said. “Now I can go do something I want.”
Allison Sherry
HENRY CEJUDO
Springs Olympic champ
credits hard work for
turning dreams to gold
The dream lives on for Henry Cejudo.
Four months after his coronation as the youngest U.S. wrestler to win Olympic gold, the American Dream keeps delivering for the 21-year-old graduate of Colorado Springs’ Coronado High School.
“I kind of figured if you won the gold medal, you would take a vacation and come back and start training again for the next one,” he said from his new home in Phoenix. “It’s been a lot more than that.”
Cejudo — who only five years ago arrived in Colorado Springs with little more than a gym bag and a fire for Olympic glory — skipped the vacation and went right to the training. He’s back on the twice-a-days, but this time, he often starts sweating at 3 a.m. so he can make a 7 a.m. flight. Every weekend, he’s traveling, doing appearances, hosting a clinic or participating in a wrestling camp.
“It’s the little things you have to sacrifice and you have to do to be the best,” he said. “You have to do it. It’s part of being a champion.”
Cejudo is no stranger to sacrifice. When he moved to Colorado in 2004, he left his mother and family behind in Arizona and carried with him their dreams for the American life they had chased from city to city for most of his 17 years. An undocumented worker from Mexico, Cejudo’s mother worked two jobs to feed her family of seven, bouncing between Southern California and Arizona.
Scrappy and driven, Cejudo cashed in a lifetime of sacrifice in August in Beijing, when as a 121-pound overlooked freestyle wrestler, he toppled a world champion and became one himself. Just like he said he would.
“I was ranked 31st in the world going into the Olympics. That was underdoggish. To think in 2007 I was on the verge of quitting. But I knew I busted my whole life for this. My goal from Day One was to be Olympic champ. I trained twice as hard, and I got the gold medal,” he said. “Now, I have about 10 X’s on my back. Everybody wants a piece of me, you know. There are young guns and old guns out there looking to be Olympic champion. It’s just a whole lot more pressure.”
While aiming for 2012 Olympic gold, Cejudo traverses the continent challenging young grapplers to stay on the mat.
“They are a little star-struck when they meet me, and then they realize I’m just a knucklehead, just like them,” he said. “I make sure and tell the kids it’s all about hard work and dedication. You are going to lose, and you are going to fall, but you have to get up and learn from your mistakes.”
Despite living in Arizona, where it’s much easier for him to quickly grab a plane, he calls Colorado home. His mother, Nelly Rico, is settled in a home near Garden of the Gods.
“When I came from Arizona, I was basically a boy. I became a young man when I moved to Colorado,” he said. “Moving to Colorado was the best move I ever made.”
Jason Blevins
KRISTIN WATERS
DPS innovator turns
wave of disgust into
sea change at school
Four years ago, Kristin Waters left one of the highest-performing middle schools in Denver to become principal of Colorado’s worst- performing middle school.
Bruce Randolph Middle School in north Denver was on the verge of being taken over by the state because of its abysmal achievement and compounding problems.
Waters, armed with a reform plan called Challenge 2010, set up Saturday classes for struggling learners, started summertime credit-recovery courses, began growing the school into a grade six to 12 campus and held back students who failed to achieve. Last year, Bruce Randolph’s high school students posted greater academic gains than students like them across the state. The school climbed from an “unsatisfactory” rating to “low” on the state’s School Accountability Report card.
“We have shown great improvement with student achievement, particularly with our high school students, students we’ve had the longest,” said Waters, who at 45 years old has been a principal or assistant principal in Denver Public Schools for 11 years.
The school last year hired 16 new teachers, has seen attendance rates increase, and 13 juniors and 24 sophomores are taking their first classes to earn college credits.
Yet, the biggest splash by Waters and her staff last year was when they petitioned the school board and union to be the first noncharter school in Colorado to be free from union and district rules.
“It was recognizing that we needed more freedom, more control over everything having to do with Bruce Randolph,” she said.
The request for autonomy blasted Bruce Randolph into national spotlight and was followed by a state law that allows schools across Colorado to get similar waivers if approved by their school boards.
“It took us by surprise,” Waters said about the attention. “It was really about what can we do to help our students succeed.”
Other Denver schools followed with their own autonomy requests.
“She and her faculty are leading us toward the future of public education,” said Denver Superintendent Michael Bennet. “In a world where we struggle sometimes with accountability systems that sometimes don’t make sense, she and her staff have said to themselves, we can figure out what our kids don’t know and what we need to do as adults to make sure they can go to college.”
