At first glance, the traditional battle lines appeared to have been drawn in this year’s Denver school board race: reformers vs. candidates backed by the teachers union.

But while the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and Denver Families Action, a deep-pocketed political group with charter school ties, each endorsed their own slate of candidates, the messaging this election cycle has not centered around school choice, charter schools or Denver Public Schools’ reform-era practice of closing and restarting low-performing schools.

Instead, the emergence of another persistently vocal group — parents — is driving conversations around the race for three seats on the Board of Education.

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Parents have rallied since the March shooting inside East High School, forming two groups — Resign DPS Board and the Parents Safety Advocacy Group, or P-SAG — that some election observers said are wildcards previously unseen at this level in a Denver school board race.

And at the forefront of their minds are school safety, the district’s discipline policies and school board dysfunction. Parents even have questioned Superintendent Alex Marrero’s leadership — something that surprised at least one previous school board member.

“Never have I seen so many decisions by the superintendent really affect the community’s awareness of the governance process. That’s new in an election process, ” said Lee White, who served on the school board in the mid-1990s and is part of the executive committee of Educate Denver, a coalition of former board members and politicians.

The parents who are calling for new leadership to take the helm of Colorado’s largest school district cross union and education reform lines and all “believe this board has not been a good board for Denver,” said Heather Lamm, the founder of Resign DPS.

Asked about school reform, she said, “Honestly, who the eff cares when we have safety and academic challenges that are as great as we do?”

Candidates, pollsters and others believe the increased interest in the school board will galvanize more people to vote in this election. And the momentum could be enough to give the three open board seats back to reformers, said pollster Floyd Ciruli.

Even if that happens, union-backed members still will hold a majority of seats on the board.

“Many people believe the DPS election is as important as the last mayor’s race for Denver’s reputation and future,” Ciruli said.

Money flowing into the election

The full impact of the parent groups’ efforts won’t be known until after the election on Nov. 7, but already their influence is appearing in the political advertising circling the city.

An independent expenditure committee called Better Leaders, Stronger Schools that’s funded largely by Denver Families Action has spent $1 million on advertising to support reformed-backed candidates John Youngquist, Kimberlee Sia and Marlene De La Rosa — outspending the teachers union by about 4 to 1, according to Chalkbeat Colorado.

Better Leaders, Stronger Schools also sent out mailers attacking the three candidates with union support — Scott Baldermann, Charmaine Lindsay and Kwame Spearman — according to the most recent filings with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. The group even paid $250,000 for a television ad — a rarity in a Denver school board election — featuring Mayor Mike Johnston, who also endorsed Youngquist, Sia and De La Rosa.

The mailers sent to Denverites’ homes in the races featuring incumbents Baldermann and Lindsay mostly discussed school safety, including attacking them for a closed-door meeting the school board held after the East shooting. Those mailers, viewed by The Denver Post, didn’t mention school choice or charter schools or anything reform-like — even the one critical of Baldermann, who has been outspoken about school autonomy and whose opponent Sia is the former head of the KIPP Colorado charter school network.

The race for Baldermann’s seat in a district that represents southeast Denver often “gets boiled down to reform vs union,” said Daniel Aschkinasi, the registered agent for Better Leaders, Stronger Schools. But, he said, “This is a different year.”

“I have never seen a year where DPS was in the news so much for so many of the wrong reasons and I think a lot of that is tied to the current actions of the school board,” Aschkinasi said, adding, “This isn’t about reform vs. union. This is about electing a new group of leaders that represent a diverse background and values.”

But not everyone is convinced that there’s not an effort by reformers to reign again.

“(What) the reform group is doing — they’re trying to pivot to safety, which isn’t genuine,” said Spearman, who is running for the at-large seat held by Auon’tai Anderson, who is not seeking re-election. Spearman is a former mayoral candidate and ex-CEO of the Tattered Cover bookstore chain.

“The reason why they are doing that… (is) they can’t talk about the issues they actually want to implement,” he added. “They can’t talk about privatizing our schools, so they are going to talk about other issues.”

Spearman, who is backed by the teachers union, pointed to the fact that Denver Families for Public Schools, the parent organization of Denver Families Action, is funded in part by a group outside of Colorado. Denver Families, which launched two years ago, receives funding from The City Fund, a national organization that supports charter schools and school reform, Chalkbeat Colorado reported.

Clarence Burton Jr., chief executive officer of Denver Families, pushed back, saying that the debates of DPS’s past are “not what folks are talking about right now and that’s not what our work has been steeped in.”

The three candidates endorsed by Denver Families Action don’t have a single ideology that unites them, he said.

“There are always going to be those who have something to gain by trying to pull us back into some of the discussions, the politicization of these education conversations that have existed in the past in Denver because they find that advantageous,” Burton said.

“You had the sense that there was real dissent”

Denver was once known as an education reform darling, but the school board flipped in 2019 when members backed by the teachers union won a majority of seats. By 2021, the union’s hold on the board was cemented.

But since last year, the school board has been beset by infighting as directors have disagreed over how to operate under a new governance model.

And in the aftermath of the East shooting, in which a student wounded two administrators, parents, educators and other community members have criticized DPS administrators and the board for having discipline policies that are perceived as too lenient.

They also have criticized the board for its unanimous decision in 2020 to remove school resource officers, or SROs, from Denver school buildings. Board members voted earlier this year to reinstate armed police in schools.

A lot of people thought that parents’ concerns about safety would have fizzled out by the time the election rolled around, but that hasn’t been the case, said Paul Ballenger, a former school board candidate and founding member of P-SAG.

“You have seen an outpouring of interest, anger, frustration from parents — real parents — not people that are in the education sector normally other than having their kids in schools,” Lamm, of ResignDPS, added.

For months, signs from ResignDPS — which has called for the resignation of the entire board — have dotted yards across the city. Parents and others in the community have shown up to school board meetings in the group’s T-shirts.

“You had the sense that there was real dissent,” said Ciruli, the pollster, adding that the East shooting is “one of those events that’s probably going to change the district.”

“That era of Denver Public Schools is over”

The teachers union is also frustrated with the school board, despite having endorsed every current member at some point, Denver Classroom Teachers Association president Rob Gould said.

“We have had some school board members that we have endorsed in the past that have not lived up to our expectations or others’,” he said. “We took our time this round.”

Spearman, who called himself the “polar opposite” of Anderson, said the union’s endorsement of his campaign shows that DCTA  “probably wouldn’t make that same decision again” — a sentiment Gould agreed with.

“Kwame Spearman isn’t running against Auon’tai Anderson so it would be helpful for him to actually focus on his campaign,” Anderson said in response.

But the union’s endorsement of Spearman also has raised eyebrows as he seemed more like a reformer, said Paul Teske, the dean of the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs.

“I wouldn’t say either one is so firmly in one camp or another,” he said of Spearman and Youngquist.

If the board were to swing more to the reform side than it currently is, the change likely could affect how the district responds to declining enrollment and future school closures, including whether to shut down charter schools, Teske said.

Spearman said he supports school choice and believes charter schools still have a place in DPS.

“But I also believe that we’ve opened up a lot of charter schools. Some have worked, some have not, and there needs to be more accountability,” he said. “And we need to embrace the notion that some charter schools are really, really hurting our neighborhood schools, and where that is occurring, I’m going to side with our neighborhood schools.”

Youngquist said he isn’t a traditionalist or a reformer.

“There’s a need to figure out our finances and figure out whether and how schools need to close and what other options there are,” he said. “And there’s need to create a definition of what it means to function well as a school.”

Ultimately, the election is coming down to individual candidates and not the organizations that are supporting them, because the lines between reform and union support are getting blurred, said Anderson, who is running for a seat in the Colorado legislature in next year’s election.

“We have to get out of this framework that you have to be pro-this or anti-that when our kids go to charter schools, when our kids go to district-run schools and our kids go to innovation schools,” Anderson said. “Every single one of those students are our students and they need board members that are willing to represent them and not get caught up in this fight of organizations. That era of Denver Public Schools is over.”

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