“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
– William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2
Alex Marrero, the Denver Public Schools superintendent who just received a premature and ill-advised two-year contract extension from the school board, should be riding high these days.
instead, he seems fixated on the fantasy that board member John Youngquist wants his job and is willing to undermine the education of 85,000 students to get it.
In a letter with an unhinged tone sent to board President Carrie Olson April 22, Marrero threw a smorgasbord of accusations at Youngquist, and asked the board to censure him, order him to stop talking to district staff outside official channels, require him to take sensitivity and anti-bias training, and comply with policy governance, among other demands.
“Over the past year, Mr. Youngquist has consistently demonstrated a pattern of hostility, policy violations, racial insensitivity, and unethical conduct that has created a toxic working environment, undermined district leadership, and distracted from our core mission of serving all students equitably,” Marrero wrote. “Most troubling, it is increasingly clear that Mr. Youngquist is not invested in the success of Denver Public Schools. Instead, his behavior signals an intent to cause harm—in pursuit of personal ambition.”
Marrero’s letter levels seven accusations against Youngquist, none of which is backed in the letter by any hint of evidence. According to Marrero, Youngquist is bullying, racially insensitive, scheming, conniving, dishonest, undermining, a bad team player, and unwilling to play by the rules.
Wow. I’ve known Youngquist for 25 years and none of that sounds remotely like him. The timing of the letter is suspect; it was written April 22, when the board was well on its way to the contract extension vote, which Youngquist made clear he opposed because of its bizarre timing.
One has to wonder who leaked word about the closely held letter to the Post’s Jessica Seaman, who obtained it through a Colorado Open Records Act request. It almost certainly had to be another board member or someone in Marrero’s inner circle.
It’s not as though Youngquist is some guy off the street who decided to run for school board and is now sowing chaos. In more than 30 years in DPS he has been a teacher, an elementary and high school principal (two stints at East, DPS’ flagship), and an area superintendent. He has also been a superintendent in a mountain school district, and the chief academic officer in Aurora. He runs a school principal coaching consultancy.
Maybe that’s the point. One can only assume that Marrero feels threatened by Youngquist’s impressive résumé.
The crux of the matter is Marrero’s assertion that Youngquist is gunning for his job. That rumor has been circulating around insular DPS headquarters since before Youngquist was elected in the fall of 2023. Yes, Youngquist applied for the job when Susana Cordova resigned in 2020, but as he told The Denver Post yesterday, “I didn’t get the job. That was OK then and that’s OK now.”
Marrero sees it differently. “He has suggested the possibility of a buyout of my contract to raise this as a strategic option—not out of concern for the district, but as a tactic of intimidation. His obsession with my removal, coupled with his private aspirations to assume district leadership, strongly suggests a conflict of interest. It is becoming increasingly clear that his actions are driven by a personal ambition to become superintendent himself as he had previously pursued repeatedly, unsuccessfully.”
Again, Marrero offers no evidence to back any of these claims. I’ve asked Youngquist about this repeatedly, and he has denied it emphatically, including the accusation about wanting to buy out Marrero’s contract.
In any case, he’d have to be as delusional as Marrero is behaving to think the current board would ever consider him for the position.
There’s no other way to describe the tone of Marrero’s letter than paranoid in the extreme. That board members had it in their possession for more than a week before extending Marrero’s contract and yet voted to give this man an extra two years on the job provides yet further evidence that this board is breaching public trust egregiously.
The should be ashamed of themselves, but I doubt they are.
Read the letter and draw your own conclusions. And listen to Youngquist on the Boardhawk podcast later today.
