Tuesday night’s meetings at Lake and Greenlee public schools were about what you might expect when the district sends students home Friday with a letter saying: Your child’s school is among our worst and we may fire everyone there to bring in a new school, but we’ll get your input. On Tuesday. Oh, and we’ll be making our recommendation in about two weeks.
Auditoriums at both schools: Packed. Temperature in the rooms: Hot. At the Lake Middle School meeting, school volunteer Helen Garcia, a.k.a. “Grandma Helen,” parked herself across from Denver Public Schools instructional superintendent Patricia Slaughter and shouted:
Why such short notice? Why aren’t you looking at the elementary schools; it starts in the elementary schools. Don’t let our kids be remembered as the kids who helped close a school. Why don’t you support our neighborhood schools?
We do, Slaughter said, listing the interventions and money the district has provided Lake.
“You’re shoving this down our throats,” someone shouted from the audience. A woman said: “Every single teacher, administrator and staff member cares about the kids here. We’re fighting the same battle and it’s getting old. I’m tired of fighting every year to get what we need for our kids.”
At Greenlee K-8, where the mood was angry but far less confrontational, a man got to his feet and said: “You’re giving parents 30 days to decide our future and that doesn’t make much sense.”
The room burst into applause.
How this is happening — the air of a dog-and-pony show — is a different matter from why this is happening. I heard people at both meetings complain the district should have told them earlier that things were as bad as they are. I have little sympathy for this argument. The data on individual student growth wasn’t ready until late September, but you’d have to have your head in a hole not to know how grim the situation is and for how long it has been so.
Let me say, too: There are many people in these communities, in these school buildings, working hard every day, facing high rates of mobility and poverty, as well as the challenges of an immigrant population.
But the issue driving this discussion acknowledges these schools are receiving students who are unprepared, who are three and four years behind grade level. The question is this: What are you doing with your students once you get them? Are they growing academically year to year?
That’s where Lake, Greenlee and Philips Elementary ran into trouble. At least three years of data confirm this. The schools sit at the bottom of the pack in measurements of school performance, which are heavily weighted toward individual student progress.
“We’re not getting an important job done,” Greenlee humanities facilitator Felicia Manzanares told me. “Believe me, we’re the first people who get that, but we’ve done what the district and state have asked. We’re committed to success. We don’t believe our work is done.”
We’ve been making needed changes, just give us a little more time, came the plea from both meetings.
I have heard this plea before. About three years ago at North High School, where time ran out.
One principal left. Another was hired and half the staff fired. Some of the school’s best teachers left in protest. Turmoil among students ensued. North now sits right above Lake in the district’s performance ranking. Fourth from the bottom of the heap.
I supported redesign at North. Can I say it has worked? No. I cannot say either that the outcome would have been different had the then-staff and administration been allowed to continue their work. Which is why these are wrenching calls.
North’s redesign is not working. But Manual High School’s is. Bruce Randolph’s is. It is a reminder that every school, every community, differs and requires different solutions.
The data demands action. It does not tell us what kind of action.
Just give us more time. It prompts the question: How much time given is too much time lost?
On Nov. 2, the district will recommend to the board one of three options starting next year. They range from changing the academic program, but leaving the current staff and, possibly, the principal, to replacing the whole school with another, new school. The board is expected to make its decision later that month.
I sat in the audience at Lake, moved by so much passion and dedication and belief in what could exist here given time and, as a parent, I thought this:
I can’t name a parent in my kid’s fifth-grade class who next year plans to send his or her child to Lake — even with its International Baccalaureate program, even though it’s close to our homes. Perhaps many parents at Brown Elementary, which feeds Lake, plan to do so. But Lake has 450 empty seats this year, and the parents I know in our gentrifying community are looking outside the neighborhood, outside the district. Lake’s immediate future is already being written.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
