First-graders Aileene Paredes, Veaney Chacon and Misael Diaz showed off their homemade census forms tucked inside homemade envelopes.
The three Commerce City students at Monaco Elementary had even drawn pictures of stamps and written their return addresses on the envelopes made out to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Inside, the postcards contained information on the number of people living in their households.
“Nine,” Aileene said. “Three,” Veaney said. Misael thought for a second and chimed in, “Four.”
Days before, the three had showed off the real things to their classmates — census forms completed by their parents at their urging.
In the Commerce City schools, filling out census forms is a big deal this year.
Ten years ago, only 64 percent of the residents within the district’s boundaries mailed in their forms. The resulting undercount probably cost the district about $1 million a year in federal funds, said district spokesman John Albright.
That hurts, he said, for one of the poorest districts in the state and facing a budget shortfall this year of more than $4 million.
“It’s a lot, especially when you are looking at budget cuts,” Albright said.
More than 80 percent of the district’s 7,422 students are poor, and more than half are English-language learners.
This year, the district embarked on an aggressive campaign to get the word out on the census.
Elementary schools used census problems for math lessons and census maps in geography classes, Albright said.
Aileene, Veaney and Misael’s first-grade teacher used the census to introduce the concept of 50 states and the difference between a state and a city.
“Schools, fire stations, police stations,” Aileene said when asked how the census helps.
Census posters in Spanish and English were put up in hallways and classrooms. At Monaco Elementary, a display case filled with census messages in both languages greeted visitors.
All district workers got information packets on how to explain the importance of the census to parents, Albright said.
“That way they could explain why it’s important for students and not just a civic obligation,” Albright said.
Parents got automated phone calls from the district the day census forms were mailed and again earlier this week to make sure they filled them out.
Three of the district’s schools were transformed into assistance centers where residents could seek help or get forms in different languages, Albright said. All of the schools became collection points for returning census forms.
As of Thursday, 55 percent of Colorado households had returned their census forms, compared with 54 percent nationally.
In Commerce City, it was 52 percent.
The district’s efforts culminated Thursday on Census Day at Monaco Elementary, the symbolic day for mailing the forms.
In the previous weeks, about 100 census forms had been dropped off at the school, filled out by parents at the insistence of their children.
So when postal worker Brad Weimer arrived on his rounds, the three children met him with a postal basket full of census forms. Each grabbed a corner of the basket as they took it to his mail truck outside the school.
Lesson delivered.
Burt Hubbard: 303-954-5107 or bhubbard@denverpost.com
