About a month ago, Padres and Jove nes Unidos sponsored a District 5 school-board candidates forum at West Denver Prep. West Denver Prep is a top-performing charter school. It now has a space in the old science wing of the low- performing traditional North High School.
The location was as telling as candidate and incumbent school-board member Arturo Jimenez’s decision to open in Spanish. For about seven minutes, he talked about his neighborhood roots and childhood of struggle and of the need for schools that value arts and music and languages.
That’s what I remember — that and the restlessness of the non-Spanish speakers in the crowd.
It struck me that Jimenez was speaking to the neighborhood’s past, to its working-class Latino roots, while his opponent, Jennifer Draper Carson, was speaking to its gentrifying future.
He, a longtimer, was backed by the teachers unions. She, a relative newcomer, was backed by various education- reform groups.
I return to this thought of past and future while looking at Tuesday’s final unofficial results. Jimenez edged out Draper Carson by 144 votes. He won 37 precincts. She won 34.
Where they won proved to be interesting enough that as the even ing progressed, a joke circulated among those obsessed with plotting votes — my kind of people. Why bother to map the results? they said. Just overlay the ethnic breakdown of the neighborhood from the latest census. Geek humor.
The point was that Draper Carson generally won blocks that over the past decade have been populated by white, urban professionals with college degrees. Jimenez claimed the precincts largely populated by lower-income, working-class Latino voters. She dominated LoDo and LoHi. He swept Chaffee Park and Globeville. She took most of West Highland. He took Sunnyside.
You could look at this a few ways. You could say that in north Denver, the story isn’t about reform at all but about economics and ethnicity and a growing class schism that is playing out in the schools. That wouldn’t be a new story: wealthier parents sending their children to better-quality schools in other districts or other neighborhoods. Until fairly recently, District 5’s middle and high schools have been left to those residents with no easy way to send their children to stronger programs elsewhere: lower-income, Latino families.
So, the parents whose children still make up the majority of middle- and high-school students chose the candidate they believe most closely represents their current stake. And the people whose children are still in elementary school chose the candidate they believe represents their future stake.
The map offers clean lines, which lend themselves to tidy explanations. In reality, none exists. The neighborhood has gentrified, but no hard-and-fast line exists between the people who support neighborhood schools and those who support school choice, including charters. Many of the newcomers are critical of how school choice has served to bleed neighborhood schools dry. Just as many lower-income Latinos welcome and are taking advantage of expanded school choice. In fact, the biggest controversy in the District 5 campaign erupted when a group of Latinos, many professionals, bought ads in neighborhood papers accusing Jimenez of blocking or delaying school reforms that would help Latino children.
Which leaves studying this: Each candidate basically won half of the ballots cast. In some precincts, one clobbered the other. But in roughly 30 percent of precincts, they ran to a dead heat.
The messy reality is that this is a neighborhood that split over the redesign of North High School — a failure — and the addition of West Denver Prep to Lake Middle School — a success. It is a neighborhood proud of the dual-language Academia Ana Maria Sandoval, worried about the survival of Skinner Middle School, and sending its children to other neighborhoods and other middle and high schools. It has seen crippling principal turnover at North High School and celebrated the rise of Beach Court Elementary. It has learned the hard way that neither the status quo nor where-the- wind-blows reform serves its children.
A lot of truths reside in the election map, but mostly I see a reflection of the neighborhood in which I live, the one of parents struggling — anguishing, actually — in conversation after conversation, in meeting after meeting, with how best to educate all of our children together. No matter where they come from. No matter how much their parents earn.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
