The Perennial Question: How to Be Heard?

Dissecting DPS (Dis)engagement In Three Parts

Part 1: A New Principal for Manual

A funny thing happened to me as I arrived, late, to a community meeting at Manual High School. Held on Jan. 26, the meeting was designed to give the community a chance to “interview” and give its opinion on the “top” two candidates for the school’s principal position. I felt guilty that I was 30 minutes late, but soccer carpool and the kids’ dinner had needed my attention.

As I walked in, I picked up a written bio for each candidate. As DPS staff was busy collecting questions from the audience, I began to read. I noticed right away that Robert Kelly, Jr.’s biography was very long and quite personal compared to Nickolas Dawkins, which was just a short paragraph. But Dawkins’ bio was packed with phrases that nailed all the hot buttons: reform efforts, closing achievement gaps, increasing access and equity, connecting and motivating great people, engaging families and communities, increasing student achievements.

The room began to spin a little. While I realized I could glean nothing of Mr. Dawkins from this paragraph, right then I knew he would be Manual’s next principal. I picked up my papers and left the meeting. As I went through the door, I looked back at the room full of more than 100 people. Surely, some of them also realized he was the administration’s choice. Yet they had come.

Why, when they knew who had already been chosen? Why show up to fill out a questionnaire on each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses? Why spend time thinking if one or the other is a “leader who has strong collaborative skills to execute the Manual plan?” And what is “the” Manual plan?

A week and a half later, DPS officially put out a statement confirming Mr. Dawkins as Manual’s principal, starting in the 2015-2016 school year. A longer version of his resume shows he is certainly highly qualified for the job, and will surely be missed at Hamilton Middle School, where he has been principal for just over two years. That is not the issue.

The issue is the process through which the community is superficially engaged for the benefit of a preordained agenda.

The day following the meeting, a group of parents issued a press release criticizing the lack of authentic community engagement in the selection of Manual’s new principal.

The release stated, “The tough questions from several of the parents were screened out. The questions that were asked had to be submitted via written cards. Several parents wrote questions that were not asked. The DPS office of Community Engagement decided which questions could be asked, not the community.”

The parents questioned why they had been summoned to a meeting, only to have their voices muffled.

Part 2: Disbanding the accountability committee

You may have never heard of the DPS District School Improvement and Accountability Council (DSIAC), but last fall the district decided to disband it and create a new one.

Why should you care? The council served in an advisory role to the DPS Board of Education. Its members worked long hours to counsel the Board on the DPS budget, new and renewing charter school applications and the district’s Unified Improvement Plan submitted to the Colorado Department of Education.

The committee’s existence is mandated by state law. So why dismiss its 18 members? DPS said it was non-compliant with the law.

On January 6, I met with the past DSIAC co-chairs, Kristen Tourangeau and Roger Kilgore (who is also a Greater Park Hill Community board member). Both said that, to their knowledge, the only compliance issue was the need to have more parents on the committee.

Tourangeau said she had asked the school board more than once for help to recruit more members – including adding more parents. But, she said, they never received any assistance.It was unexpected when, last August the members were told that DPS would be reconstituting the committee. They were informed that current members could re-apply to be on the committee, if they so desired.

“For the past two years, we have had countless conversations with current and past board members over how we can better serve the board’s needs,” Kilgore noted in an Aug, 15 letter to the Board of Education. “Never did it ever come up that the future was to implement new policies that may profoundly affect DSIAC. […] DPS has been accused of lacking transparency and behaving in an autocratic manner. This is a good example of where that criticism is justified.”

The new District Accountability Committee was rebuilt, with 24 members. 12 members of the old committee applied for membership. Only three were reappointed.

A new policy states that members shall serve terms of two years, — a term limit that is not mandated by the state law. Though members can be eligible for reappointment, Tourangeau and others are critical.

“The budget is massive,” she said. “There’s no way anyone only serving two years could get his or her head around it.”

Dorolyn Griebenaw was not reappointed – even though she served on the accountability committee for some 30 years. “It takes one year just to figure out what’s going on,” she said.

Sherry Eastlund, who served on committee for 25 years, is one of the three who were reappointed. She remembers times when the relationship between the district and the committee “was more of a partnership.”

“The district could have worked with us to try to expand membership,” Eastlund noted. “It could have been done in a better way. It’s very insulting for some of the DSIAC members.”

Tourangeau, who was not reappointed, spent 13 hours writing the last report on charter schools. That does not include the hours the six-member subcommittee took to read all the applications, attend the meetings, discuss the schools, and report to the Board. On Feb. 16, committee members gathered for a last time to wish each other the best. They brought their own thank you and farewell cake.

“I looked around the room and saw how many people had given decades of service,” Tourangeau said. “Good people. With four years of service Roger [Kilgore] and I were newbies in comparison. There is amazing knowledge and history in those brains.”

Responding to my inquiries about what happened, DPS Board Member Mike Johnson reported, “The board policy and procedures regarding the District Accountability Committee (formerly the DSIAC) were adopted as part of a larger effort to update all board policies to comply with state and federal law and current practice.”

He added, “Interestingly, there never was a board policy on the SIAC; the committee just sort of operated on its own.”

However, Kilgore notes that the committee was far from a rogue operation. It functioned within the DPS structure, and its meeting minutes are posted on the DPS website.

“I would say that DSIAC operated consistent with the state statute, under a specific set of written bylaws, and with full transparency and complete knowledge of the Board,” Kilgore noted. “[School] Board members attended part or all of the majority of our meetings while Kristen and I were co-chairs.”

So, why disband the old accountability committee, just to reconstitute a similar committee?

Eastlund notes, “We were a committee that existed because of law, but we questioned things.”

Part 3: Finding Your Voice

DPS has been and continues to hold “Great Schools” meetings around the city. One was held at East High School on Dec. 13.

The gathering was designed to inform the community on how DPS makes decisions about its schools, and included presentations on the Denver Plan, the School Performance Framework, the Strategic Regional Analysis, and the Call for Quality Schools.

Unfortunately, audience questions were kept to a minimum.  Discussions were done “in small groups.” Such “table talks,” in which participants mark their concerns on sticky notes, creates the illusion that people are being heard.

To its credit, DPS did post a list of survey results on its website. However, it is a laundry list of close to 200 entries. What will become of the concerns raised during those group sessions?

The issue for community members is why show up to heavily scripted meetings where the conversation is controlled and all information is tightly spun.

Since January, DPS has issued nine public relations messages from Superintendent Boasberg’s My DPS letters, which go out to parents and the community at large.

These and the community meetings may be well meaning, with the intent to inform Denver citizens. But when all the information is so tightly controlled, when committees with knowledgeable members who ask questions are disbanded, is there an avenue where local concerns can be expressed in an authentic dialogue?

When the spin is so powerful it makes you dizzy, what can you do?

You keep showing up until the room stops spinning long enough to raise your voice.

Lynn Kalinauskas is chair of the education committee for the Greater Park Hill Community, Inc.