Winter is coming for DPS: Which of 12 applicants can survive the gauntlet?

Editor’s note:  Claude AI helped the author with research for this article.

Twelve people applied to fill the District 3 seat that DJ Torres left on the Denver Public Schools board. The board picks three finalists on Nov. 16 and could appoint one on Nov. 19, and the appointee serves until the November 2027 election.

Any candidate will need four votes to win the seat, unless the board deadlocks and the decision falls to its president. The consequences for the district are huge: whoever wins will probably cast the deciding vote on charter school renewals and approvals,, school closures, the district’s strategic plan and Superintendent Alex Marrero.

I understand that asking who will make it sounds cynical.  But I have watched this board long enough to expect something like a school board version of “Game of Thrones.”  Frankly, it is depressing.

We should be asking each candidate how they will improve student outcomes, particularly for low-income students and students of color, and what they have done that shows they have the knowledge, skills and experience to do it as a board member.

That likely will not be the frame that will decide this seat, even though it should be.

DPS has not posted the applications (I have requested them under the Colorado Open Records Act, but the district has been dragging its feet). We also still don’t know how the board will narrow the pool or how it will vote on the finalists.  What follows comes from public sources, the backgrounds applicants gave in their applications as reported by Chalkbeat, and the Nov. 4 forum.

The board they would join

Three members, President Xóchitl Gaytán, Vice President Monica Hunter, and Amy Klein Molk, were elected with the teachers union’s backing. The other three, Marlene De La Rosa, Kimberlee Sia and John Youngquist, were backed by Denver Families Action. While this used to be one of the most important dividing lines on the board and in public education debates in Denver, it has become less relevant of late, as allegiances and coalitions have become more fluid.

This board has spent more time investigating itself than governing. The previous board censured Youngquist in November 2025 on an investigation that found he may have shown bias toward staff members of color, but, s far as I can tell, offered little proof. This board censured Hunter in October 2026 after an investigation into alleged anti-Semitic remarks that, by Chalkbeat’s account, came down to “she said, she said, he said,” and lost Torres, who resigned citing “cycles of accusation.”

Meanwhile DPS lost 1,780 students this fall and Marrero’s strategic plan fell short of some of its goals. The district has also become increasingly opaque, from refusing to release its list of lawsuits and what they cost to scrapping its school ratings. Only about a quarter of Black and Latino students meet state expectations. Even though some members have pressed him on slow progress, the board unanimously gave Marrero 88 of 100 on his evaluation.

DPS desperately needs a board member who can help the board climb out of the gutter and get back to governing to improve the district. We need to move beyond the dysfunctional power games we have been watching for the past year.

A process that leaves the decision to the president

State law gives a school board 60 days to fill a vacancy. If it misses that deadline, “the president of the board shall forthwith appoint a person to fill the vacancy.” The board declared the seat vacant on Oct. 1, so the deadline is Nov. 30. Yet the board will not vote until Nov. 19, leaving 11 days to break a deadlock should the board split 3–3. The last time a divided DPS board filled a vacancy, in 2022, it took nine rounds of voting.

As of last week, the board still had not decided how many finalists to name or how it would vote on them. President Xóchitl Gaytán drafted the selection criteria herself, with help from artificial intelligence, and the board dropped a standard on whether applicants have the time and capacity to serve.

None of this is illegal. The 60-day rule is state law, not something the board dreamed up. But put the pieces together and the process looks designed so that if the board deadlocks, Gaytán decides. That makes her the most important vote in the room..

The applicants at a glance

More on the applicants (and what we still don’t know)

Scott Esserman is the only one in the pool who has cast votes on the Denver school board. He served four years as an at-large member. He voted to extend Marrero’s contract in 2021 and again in 2025, voted against the 2023 teacher raise, voted to close seven schools in 2024, then turned around and pushed for a closure moratorium. (Make of that what you will.)

He calls the charter fight “adult issues and not kid issues.” He also carries baggage: his vote to uphold Kurt Dennis’s firing, which landed the board in federal court over free speech, and his close ties to former board member Auon’tai Anderson, whose consulting business, a Denver Gazette columnist reports, ran Esserman’s 2021 campaign. Anderson was at the center of many controversies and in 2021 became what appears to be the first DPS board member ever censured, after an investigation found he had sent flirtatious social media messages to two high school girls, one of them 16.

Caron Blanke came closer than anyone in this pool to actually winning the seat, with 36.7% in 2025. She comes out of early childhood, running programs at the Denver JCC. She’s a school-choice supporter (“essential” is her word), would close schools that keep missing targets once there are better options nearby, and wants the superintendent held to goals with real consequences.

Mike DeGuire is an old-school principal. He ran schools for decades, the last 12 years at McMeen Elementary, then coached DPS principals and turnaround schools elsewhere. He’s also the field’s loudest charter critic: at least eight Colorado Newsline columns since 2023 going after charter growth and the people who fund it, one aimed squarely at Donovan, a fellow applicant.  At the forum he pitched himself as “an independent voice” with “a commitment to finding common ground.” His columns don’t show much objectivity or independence.

Verónica Figoli Fleischer spent nearly a decade inside DPS. She ran family and community engagement for former Superintendent Tom Boasberg, which meant being the district’s face on closures, boundaries and new schools (a tough job), then ran the DPS Foundation through the 2019 strike and COVID. She has argued that family engagement is “often the first cut,” which anyone who has watched a DPS budget knows is true. These days she raises money for a small-business lender. On charters and Marrero, she hasn’t said anything publicly that I can find. She served on the board of KIPP Colorado, a charter network.

Barclay Jones runs grant programs at the Chinook Fund, a social-justice funder, and consults for nonprofits. He knows DPS well: he went to DPS schools, his mother and grandmother taught in them, and his two kids went through DPS, including Denver School of the Arts (a selective admissions arts magnet). Full disclosure: I’ve known Barclay for more than a decade. He’s done good work in the community. I spoke to him about his policy positions and he shared that he is open minded, needs to understand the data better and wants to focus on board governance. He acknowledged that he’s a bit of a black box on all of the district’s hot button issues.

Pat Donovan has been at the center of Denver’s reform world for years. He ran RootED and Denver Families for Public Schools and helped found Rocky Mountain Prep. He’s also given more to school board candidates than anyone else in the pool, most of them reform-backed. At the forum he said what most applicants wouldn’t: DPS can’t move forward “without some degree of school closures.”

Sean Precious has supervised more schools than anyone in the field, 17 Southeast Denver schools serving about 11,000 students. He also spent three years as a regional vice president at Lighthouse Academies, a charter network. He credits DPS with gains in graduation and reading. His bio claims “an average of 7% growth for students of color” in 2019–20. Maybe. I couldn’t verify it.

The rest of the field has less of a public track record. David Scudamore is a Children’s Hospital doctor whose three kids went to district, magnet and charter schools. Erin Phelan chaired the District Accountability Committee. Both have put in serious volunteer time. Shannon Carson is a lawyer on the accountability committee and the board of GALS, a charter. Emily Bussey is a former investment banker and PTA president. Pete Fey works for DPS and would have to quit to serve.

Who is most likely to get four votes

My hunch is that it comes down to five people: Figoli Fleischer, Jones, DeGuire, Blanke and, perhaps, Esserman. Each is well known in DPS circles and could probably count on three votes. Three isn’t enough. The winner needs FOUR, which means holding one bloc of the board and peeling off at least one member from others. Again, blocs these days are fluid if they exist at all.

The dynamics on this board are complicated. Historically, it has split between reformers —  who want innovation, some test-based accountability, and charter schools treated as equals with district-run schools — and members who support traditional district structures and the teachers union’s voice as primary. As I said earlier, this split seems less rigid than it has been in the past,

Currently there is another, more relevant split, between members who back Marrero and those who want to hold him more accountable. And layered on top of all that are personal relationships and an undercurrent of identity politics, sharpened by the accusations of antisemitism and anti-Black bias that board members have traded. Those may matter as much as anyone’s views on the superintendent or charters: who sits next to whom, who is seen as an ally and who is seen as a personal enemy.

• Verónica Figoli Fleischer. Her Boasberg years will mark her in some people’s minds as a reformer. But this could come down to relationships. If she’s close to Marlene De La Rosa, that may be what gets her to four.
• Barclay Jones. In many ways he has the easiest path. He knows the district, has worked alongside it and was explicit to me about not wanting to take a stand on many of critical district issues. This would make it easier for him to potentially gather support needed to build a coalition of four or more could cross the multitude of board divides.
• Mike DeGuire. Arguably the DCTA’s favored candidate: a retired DPS principal who gave to Torres and Gaytán last year. But after all those vituperative columns against charters and Denver Families, where does his fourth vote come from? I don’t see it.
• Caron Blanke. As the person who came closest to winning this seat at the ballot box, she would seem to have a strong claim to the seat, but that’s also her problem. Her focus is on how the district can improve, not on whether a school is district-run or charter.
• Scott Esserman. Issue-wide, he’s mostly aligned with Gaytán and the superintendent, backing Marrero’s contract twice. But if Gaytán isn’t a fan for other reasons, he’s dead in the water. And neither side endorsed him in 2025, which suggests complicated relationships with a range of power brokers.

Donovan and Precious have the résumés but face the same math. Donovan’s identification with ed reform could cost him votes,  and Precious doesn’t have much of a public profile, so his path looks difficult.

There’s also an outside chance that one of the lesser-known applicants, say Scudamore, Phelan or Carson, could stitch together four votes precisely because they don’t have a long public record on either side of the old union-reform divide and haven’t burned bridges with anyone on the board. Stranger things have happened.

Given how hard it will be for anyone to reach four votes on this board, it seems very possible that the president will end up deciding. Jones may still be able to get to four votes. If he can’t, I suspect Gaytán will decide between Jones and DeGuire, both of whom more progressive members would likely find acceptable and neither of whom has been publicly critical of Marrero (and both may well support him).

I hope I am wrong about the board deadlocking and handing the decision to Gaytán. DPS students need a board member that will advocate for them.