After the violence in and around Denver Public School earlier this year, we are some of the many parents who founded or joined grassroots organizations concerned with the safety of Denver’s schools and classrooms.

Even after months of advocacy, there has not been enough change.

Next week’s school board election is a long-awaited opportunity for all Denver voters to send a clear message about the current Denver school board’s disregard for student and staff safety and their disdain for transparency and accountability. We join and urge all Denver voters to reject the incumbent Board candidates Scott Baldermann in District 1, and Charmaine Lindsay in District 5.

Here’s why:

After the March 2023 shooting of two staff members at East High School, and continuing this day, DPS refuses to share basic safety data with families, including the number of students who — similar to the student at East who shot the staff members — undergo a daily pat down for weapons before joining classrooms full of their peers.

Not content with hiding data, after the East shooting the board hid themselves, huddling secretively in a closed-door meeting in blatant violation of Colorado law. For a full four months afterward, DPS refused to release audio recordings of the meeting until ordered by a judge.

The tape revealed why they hid: Board members focused on the damage to their public image and a superintendent worried about his career, as much as anyone in the room were concerned about the safety of the students in their care.

In July, hoping to hide controversial personnel actions in the long shadow of summer vacation, DPS fired Kurt Dennis, the popular founding principal at McAuliffe International School — ranked second highest (out of 31) middle school in Denver on the state’s performance framework.

The firing was widely regarded, despite the district’s accusations that Dennis had violated policies, as retribution for Dennis’s revelation months earlier that DPS had, against his protests, enrolled a student in McAuliffe charged with attempted murder for shooting a liquor store clerk.

Into the current month of October, reports surfaced that DPS paid board member Auon’tai Anderson $3,500 in a secret settlement agreement in which both parties cheerfully agreed to circumvent Colorado’s public record laws. Days later came the revelation that DPS had also suppressed a comprehensive third-party report that found many teachers and staff justifiably concerned about their safety.

Under policies enacted by this board, one staff member commented, “it is harder [for a student] to return to play sports after a concussion than to return to a classroom after a threat of a weapon.”

Too many of those policies remain. Board members, out of touch with their constituents, continue to insert their personal beliefs into policy decisions in the full knowledge that they will not be held accountable for either harm or expense.

Start with the secret payment to Anderson to cover legal costs to defend his behavior – including flirting online with a 16-year-old student — that merited an unprecedented public censure from his colleagues. Add the $45,000 for the illegal closed-door meeting in March. Prepare to open the taxpayer checkbook again for the legal bills from the lawsuit McAullife principal Kurt Dennis filed shortly after the Board affirmed his termination.

But even these decisions pale next to the potential liability of this board’s radical discipline matrix, under which a student who is charged in juvenile court with attempted murder or sexual assault, or who brings a gun to school, is encouraged to return to their neighborhood classroom — a policy contrary to the practice of mandatory expulsion in virtually every other school district in the State.

The DPS Board of Education is willing to engage in egregious conduct precisely because they know all too well that they can not be held personally accountable, as the liability from their decisions falls first on DPS and is then passed onto Denver’s families and taxpayers.

Colorado law imposes an affirmative legal duty for every school district to exercise care to protect students and staff “when the harm is reasonably foreseeable.” It does not take a legal pedigree to understand that the DPS board’s stated intent to place students charged with violent crimes or gun possession back into classrooms in their neighborhood school is likely to be regarded as foreseeable harm.

A month ago a California school district agreed to a $27 million settlement for a middle school boy who died after being attacked by other students, and both Boulder and Aurora have paid millions of dollars in previous years in lawsuits for sexual assault. Just last week a 7th-grade student was repeatedly stabbed by a peer in a DPS classroom, with the stab wounds piercing the student’s skull and causing slight bleeding on the brain. “My son could have died that day” the boy’s father
said, “and it was intended for him to die that day.”

For DPS to protect our families and teachers, share relevant safety data, and accept accountability for decisions, this board must have new members. Neither incumbent Baldermann nor Lindsay have proved worthy of the safety and stewardship of Denver’s kids. It’s time for change.

Heather Lamm is the founder of Resign DPS Board, Paul Ballenger is a founding member of the Parents Safety Advocacy Group (PSAG), and a former at-large candidate for the Denver Board of Education. Stephen B. Katsaros is a founding member of PSAG, and Theresa Peña is a former president of the DPS Board of Education.

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