I don’t know if you caught this week’s story about Jim Christensen, Douglas County School District superintendent. He’s leaving his $245,000-a-year job to join a private, startup company searching for ways to help low-income students succeed in school.
The story quoted Christensen’s letter to staff: “I will be joining an education team that will focus on ensuring every child has a chance to learn and graduate from high school even when facing or living in situations that point to the contrary.”
The first question is obvious.
Why? More precisely, why now?
He smiles and completes the sentence: “You’re in suburban America, high-performing America, in a great community . . .”
And no, he says, still smiling, beaming, a happy man if I ever saw one, “I was not asked to leave.”
We’re in his office in Castle Rock. I’d never met Christensen before. He’s 47, a Wyoming native who has been living in Colorado for nine years. He spent three years as Adams 12 Five Star Schools superintendent before taking the lead post in Douglas County schools. It’s a district not without its challenges, but widespread poverty in the schools isn’t one of them. In Denver Public Schools, at least 66 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. In the Douglas County schools, 4.5 percent do.
I can’t tell you what reason I expected Christensen to give, but I didn’t expect it to start like this: “My family has had somewhat of a life-changing experience. . . . Let me take you back four years ago.”
To Haiti.
There is in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a priest named Jean Bien-Aime. In 1997, he founded a small orphanage. On a brochure Christensen gave me, it is called “House of the Children of the Lack.”
The priest has room for 25 children, and most are girls abandoned by parents too poor to raise them. The orphanage itself is a humble place, no electricity, no running water, never enough food.
Four years ago, Christensen’s brother-in- law, Doug Woodson, met Father Bien-Aime. Woodson is a dentist, and he donates his time and service in poor countries around the world. Woodson was moved by the priest’s work, and upon his return, he and his wife, Gina, discussed adopting a girl from the orphanage.
Their conversation became a family conversation. Gina and the superintendent’s wife, Leslie, are sisters. The two women have a third sister, Tracy Metzler, married to Nick. The family conversation became a plan.
Which is how, today, the three sisters and their husbands have among them three adopted daughters from Haiti and how they continue to support the orphanage, spending their own money, raising donations.
Christensen and his wife have two children in high school, and when they talked about adopting, he said, “We were really into it, but what we didn’t want to do is choose. We wanted Father to decide who would be best for us.”
The priest chose Linda, a girl who had been left on his doorstep when she was 2.
Christensen vividly recalls traveling to Haiti for the first time to meet Linda, who is now 8 and whom they officially adopted two years ago. He had never seen such desperation. He and Leslie took Linda on a horseback ride, and they bought her a beautiful plastic doll.
A year ago, Christensen asked Linda what became of that doll. “Oh, I don’t know,” the little girl said. “Something about the way she answered was odd,” Christensen tells me. “So, Leslie asked her.”
Christensen looks at me and says, “Well, she ate the doll. That’s how hungry they were. Some of the older girls cut it up and they shared it.”
And so a family is changed. A man looks at his life, which is a comfortable one, one which he has worked hard to achieve. He looks at his career in a community he loves. And he knows this: As long as the achievement gap persists, poverty persists, inequality persists.
“We are seeing little signs of progress, but it’s at a glacial pace,” Christensen says. “Can we afford to have this cycle continue? The answer clearly is no. We have to act now.
“This is where the action in public schools is, and I feel as though I’m up in the stands, not on the field. For me, as a leader, I want to be on the playing field.”
His last official day as superintendent is Oct. 1. For now, he is reluctant to discuss his new employers in detail. He will say they are investors who are bringing together a team of educators to work on closing the achievement gap and reducing the dropout rate. The goal is a model that can be replicated on a large scale and sold to schools. They’re starting in Texas, though Christensen will remain in Colorado.
A lot of good programs and ideas are out there already, I say, and he nods. What’s going to be different about this venture, what makes you believe it can succeed?
“I’m a pretty big risk-taker,” he answers. “If I’m not successful, well, I can say that I tried. It’s the most important issue we’re facing in education and maybe in our society.”
Before I leave, he shows me a large framed picture of 25 orphan children, girls dressed in donated clothes looking into a camera lens, girls who changed his life.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
