You’d have thought it was a carnival — or a campaign rally.
Streets were closed off, rousing music could be heard from blocks away, TV satellite trucks were on the scene, politicians and government officials were whipping a crowd into a frenzy.
It was actually the first day of class on Monday, Bill Roberts style.
Mayor Michael Hancock and Superintendent Tom Boasberg, along with hundreds of Bill Roberts school parents and students, biked to the Stapleton campus to commemorate the occasion.
It was the first leg of something of a victory lap for Boasberg and Hancock, who used the occasion to congratulate students and schools that helped DPS score the highest year-to-year growth on last spring’s standardized tests of the state’s 21 largest districts.
Students in several districts around the state, including Aurora and Douglas County, along with many Denver charter school students, started school earlier in the month. But last August, many parents got heated up over their children coming home sweat-soaked and glassy eyed from sweltering un-airconditioned schools, so the district agreed to push the start date back a bit.
On the sidewalk outside Bill Roberts, Boasberg congratulated the roughly 750 pre-Kindergarten through eighth-graders, teachers and parents, and Principal Patricia Lea for some of the district’s highest growth in test scores.
School board President Mary Seawell took advantage of the opportunity to get a plug in for the ballot measure that will be on the ballot in November, reminding parents that the single biggest item that would be funded is a high school in the Stapleton area.
Then the mayor had his turn, firing up the group.
“Are you ready?” for the new school year, he shouted.
“We’re ready!” came the screamed answer from kids so excited it was as if no one had told them their summers were over.
Then Hancock and Boasberg were off, by car this time, to their next stop, Whittier K-8 school in north Denver.
There, students in uniforms sat quietly in blue plastic chairs, hands folded in their laps, in the historic auditorium.
But not for long.
Boasberg got the kids to their feet with a request that they give their teachers a round of applause.
Those teachers helped catapault Whittier students to the district’s second-highest growth in the percentage of students proficient in reading, according to the 2012 state tests.
Among middle schoolers, Whittier’s writing scores grew at the highest rate in the district and the third-highest in the state.
Karen Mortimer, president of Whittier’s Parent Teacher Organization, gave credit for the school’s upward trajectory to the fact that the school is small, has a targeted curriculum and no teacher turnover.
Involved parents have helped raise money to help take some of the sting out of recent budget cuts, too she said. They’ve brought physical education back to the school for the first time in years, Mortimer said. “And we’re just getting music now, two days a week.”
On stage, Hancock looked up to the middle schoolers sitting in the balcony and gave them a rousing congratulations. “You rocked it, top dogs!”
Karen Augé: 303-954-1733, kauge@denverpost.com or
