The little girl had one question.
I first heard it a few weeks ago when I heard her speak at a gathering at the governor’s mansion. She and the speech made my wife cry.
“Why can’t I be taught by people who look like me?” she asked.
Her name is Aliyah Cook. She was in third grade when she posed that question in a letter to her principal, Richie Strickland, of Trails West Elementary School in Centennial.
On Tuesday, nearly two years later, I sat in a room at Cherry Creek School District headquarters with Aliyah and Keisha Hill, in whose fifth-grade classroom the little girl will sit this fall.
Aliyah Cook, 9, is black. Keisha Hill is black.
All of this would be easy to dismiss as the school district running out and finding the first black woman it could hire. It would be ignorant, too, and an injustice to the girl, certainly one to the teacher and definitely one to the school district.
No, this is a story of how grown-ups took the time to listen to a child, and how, out of a desire to address a very legitimate concern, actually did something they were not required to do.
This is the story of how it happened.
“It all started when I realized I was a proud black girl,” Aliyah began her speech that day, the fourth time she had been asked to deliver it.
“Will I ever have a black teacher while I am in Cherry Creek schools?” she asked the principal in her letter. How was it possible for her country to have a black president, but for her school not to have a single teacher that looked like her and other classmates?
“I know,” she continued in the letter, “that most of the students are white, but there are many black students. Has a black person ever walked into this school and asked for a job as a teacher? If so, why didn’t they get hired?”
The letter, she figured, was it. And then one day her mother, Elycia, received an e-mail from district Superintendent Mary Chesley’s office. They wanted to talk to Aliyah.
She went in. She remembers it was a Wednesday.
“They were very kind, and they listened to me,” she remembers.
They told her how difficult it is to hire black teachers. Blacks, they told her, account for only 18 percent of all teachers nationwide. In all of Cherry Creek, that number is 2 percent.
“They answered all of my questions,” the young girl said Tuesday. She was satisfied that was the end of it.
Keisha Hill, 39, had been a teacher in Ohio and in Florida for 10 years before she moved to Denver with her husband, Air Force Maj. Eldrick Hill, four years ago. She left the classroom to raise their four children.
By January of last year, with the youngest of their children in school, she was ready to return full time to a classroom.
In December of 2009 she was working part time at an Aurora elementary school, and volunteering at Fox Hollow Elementary, where her children were attending.
The principal at Fox Hollow called Richie Strickland. There was a teaching candidate, she told him, that he might be interested in. Maybe he should interview her.
Keisha Hill began teaching fifth grade at Trails West Elementary last August.
“She had a great deal to do with my hiring, yes,” she said of Aliyah. “The impressive thing is people heard her voice. It made them stop and think.”
But did she get the job because she was black?
“I think I would be offended by that,” Keisha Hill said. “My race, I think in the case of my hiring, was secondary. I know Cherry Creek is attuned to finding role models, and I feel I fit the bill perfectly because of my hard work.”
The experience, Aliyah Cook said, taught her to have a voice, and that she should use that voice for change.
“You know that you are going to have to work hard next year,” Keisha Hill told her new pupil. The little girl nodded her head earnestly.
They waved goodbye, and went off to have sodas together.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
