Commentary

This Mental Health Awareness Month we must listen to the stories of young people in Colorado, who, in significant numbers, have been facing a mental health crisis. I know the need for this firsthand because I went through my own mental health struggles in high school.

The extent to which Denver Public Schools and its board are stumbling and bumbling through an ill-conceived effort to limit the freedoms of their 52 innovation schools would be comical if the stakes for children weren’t so high

If passed, this legislation would update Colorado’s policies, practices, and data frameworks to make data about students’ experiences at school more transparent and to ensure that every student learns in an environment that is positive, safe and inclusive.

The initial idea to champion a financial literacy campaign started in 2019 when alumni partners came together in Ednium’s Design Lab to identify issues they could impact in public-school education.

For the last 19 years as a parent and 15 years being professionally engaged, I have heard the rhetoric of engagement and longed for the reality of it. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Reading at grade level by the end of third grade is considered predictive of future academic success. Yet according to the data, just 5 percent of Black third-graders and 5 percent of Latino third-graders met or exceeded grade level in assessments given last fall.

Simplified or not, the bottom line – curtailing the freedoms of innovation schools – remains the same. It’s a bad idea, and a classic case of a solution in search of a problem

The current attempt by the board to limit the strategic plans of innovation schools is built on a fundamentally flawed argument because it assumes that the innovation schools are the problem.

It is clear to us that the so-called executive limitations on “Standard Teacher Rights and Protections” represent a solution in search of a nonexistent problem. The Denver Board of Education would be wise to turn its attention instead to the profound challenges facing the district as we cope with the fallout from two-plus years of disrupted learning.

Denver Public Schools staff presented some troubling student learning data to the school board recently, but the board seemed largely uninterested.