Education

In Colorado, which has an extremely healthy economy but ranks 42nd in educational funding per pupil, teachers such as Stuart Sanks are increasingly turning to online crowdsourcing and benefit events to pay for school supplies or student extracurricular activities. And that’s not to mention how often they’re reaching into their own pockets to make sure the kids they teach are getting the scholastic opportunities they deserve, whether they’re part of a comparatively wealthy demographic or not.

A former first-year University of Denver student is suing over what his complaint describes as “false allegations of non-consensual sexual contact” with a fellow DU freshman that led to his expulsion. The suit is at least the second of its type filed against the university in the past two years, and the attorney handling both cases accuses the school of using a procedure that is patently unfair to those accused of such offenses and gives them little opportunity to defend themselves.

In the lawsuit between the Thompson family and the 18th District Attorney’s office, a deputy district attorney compared the child to the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, who killed twenty children and six adults at a Connecticut school in 2012 — the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

Over much of the past decade, several inmates in a Colorado prison developed a series of revolutionary programs that challenged the way most correctional facilities handle gang violence. Their approach was so successful that Colorado Department of Corrections administrators are now using some of their ideas for their own new prison-gang program.

The firing of philosophy instructor Nate Bork is a startling lesson on the plight of adjunct teachers and a window into a much larger issue: the crusade at community colleges across the nation to revamp curriculum and teaching methods to boost grades and retention rates.

A settlement has been reached in the case of Grant Neal, a CSU Pueblo student and football player who was suspended for what a witness believed was a non-consensual sexual encounter with a female athletic trainer. But as part of the pact, neither the university nor Neal’s legal representatives will say how the matter was resolved or if any money changed hands.

The new superintendent of the Jefferson County school district has hit the ground running. Only ten days into the job, Dr. Jason Glass is on the road today, July 10th for an eight-stop “listening tour” around Jeffco that is intended to allow teachers, parents and residents to speak up about what the school district needs to do next.

Approximately 3,200 school counselors from across the country and the globe are expected to descend on Denver for the annual conference of the Virginia-based American School Counselor Association, which gets underway on Saturday, July 8. And while ASCA assistant director Eric Sparks expects the event to be a lot of fun, plenty of serious topics will be discussed, and that’s appropriate. Sparks enumerates ten of the biggest challenges facing school counselors in 2017, and his run-down collectively illustrates how these educators are on the front lines of major societal changes whose impacts will be felt on young people for many years to come.

On Wednesday, June 28, parents at Educare Denver at Clayton Early Learning were informed that come August 18, their children would no longer be able to attend the school, leaving some thirty families scrambling to find childcare in six weeks.

Contract negotiations stalled last week between Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the Denver Classroom Teacher’s Association (DCTA), a major union that represents almost 6,000 Denver educators, when DPS announced that it will ask a federal third-party mediator to take over the bargaining process.

The Fifth Annual Colorado REACH (Respecting Ethnic and Cultural Heritage) Conference opens today, June 22, at the University of Denver. For the past five years, the conference has offered training and insight on multicultural education and provided participants with tools for teaching in diverse classrooms. Michelle Campbell, chair of the conference,…

Editor’s note: The author is a junior at the University of Colorado Boulder and the multimedia managing editor at the CU Independent. The names of the subjects in this story have been changed to protect their identities. Loose, blood-red vomit poured from Demetri’s mouth, his half-digested noodles swimming down the…

The Colorado faction of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation announced on Tuesday, June 7, that it will spend $200,000 on a school choice “Issue Education Effort” in June and July.

A Boulder-based program that brings performances of Shakespeare plays into Colorado schools as part of an anti-bullying program has received a $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest.

The fifth-graders in Michael Diaz-Rivera’s classroom are anxious for summer. The boys in the front fidget under rows of fluorescent lights, and a few students have their heads on their desks. But everyone perks up when the 31-year-old teacher clears his throat and begins class. “As you can see, today…

Roosevelt High School in Johnstown will be open for classes today, May 9, following yesterday’s closure. In an announcement from the Weld RE-5J School District, Dr. Martin Foster, the district’s superintendent, writes that local police say a possible threat over a Roosevelt Spanish teacher’s use of a President Donald Trump piñata has been discredited. Apparently, the whole thing was fueled by rumor.

Denver Public Schools has sent a letter to parents about 13 Reasons Why, a Netflix series about a high school student who leaves behind audio recordings that explain her reasons for committing suicide. The district’s decision was based in part on a subject of the show’s final tape, a school counselor who essentially brushes off the student’s revelation that she’s been raped. Shortly thereafter, the student takes her own life.

On Saturday, April 29, former professor Ward Churchill will return to the University of Colorado Boulder, the institution that fired him ten years earlier in what the author of a report that blasted CU’s actions calls “the most notorious academic freedom controversy in a generation.”

When Nita Mosby Tyler, a Denver-based consultant, was invited to give a talk on diversity and inclusion at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, she knew that she had a skeptical audience on her hands. The white, largely conservative crowd appeared uncomfortable as she went before it to discuss racial…

Colorado’s schools might be some of the most underfunded in the country — but last week, Denver Public Schools was one of eight districts in the nation to be recognized by the National Council on Teaching Quality as a Great District for Great Teachers.

Last night, March 13, the Cherry Creek School District voted unanimously to move start times later for middle- and high-school students and earlier for children in elementary schools. The change has broad but not universal support from older students and their folks. However, a group of elementary-school parents were unhappy enough with them to have started a change.org petition that rejected alterations for their kids with extreme prejudice.

A group of students at the University of Denver’s law school has started a petition requesting that DU reconsider its contract with Sodexo, a global supplier of food services that operates in many universities. DU is in the process of renegotiating its contract with the France-based company, which counts nearly 400,000…