Education

At 2:30 p.m. Saturday, December 2, teams representing Pomona and Eaglecrest will face off at Mile High Stadium in the Class 5A championship game. But even as excitement builds for the contest, plenty of observers are wondering about something more fundamental: How much longer will good parents let their kids play high school football? This question is being asked more frequently in an age when worries about potentially fatal consequences from repeated blows to the head are growing. Now, research by a University of Colorado Boulder professor shows that 25,000 fewer boys played high school football across the country last season than the year before, continuing a trend that shows no signs of slowing.

The folks at Delta County High School, on Colorado’s Western Slope, are learning what can happen when you mess with Cidney Fisk. The teen is suing the public school and a slew of other related individuals and entities in United States District Court, alleging that her identity as an atheist and criticism of activities such as allowing a Christian group to hand out Bibles on campus resulted in a wide range of discriminatory acts, including the arbitrary lowering of her marks in a student government class.

On Saturday, October 14, in an extraordinarily blatant attempt to bury a controversial decision, the Denver District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not file criminal charges over videos of East High School cheerleaders crying out in agony while being forced into the splits position. But the prospects of the case winding up in court haven’t disappeared. Two families are working with one of Denver’s most dogged and successful civil-rights attorneys, who’s issued a statement that hints strongly at the prospect of future litigation.

Although Colorado has joined a lawsuit intended to stop the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as DACA, President Donald Trump’s plan to end the program on March 5, 2018 remains in place at this writing. That leaves DACA students who were brought to this country as children in limbo and potentially vulnerable to deportation for even otherwise insignificant offenses. And according to an advocate for restorative practices, a process being used in Denver Public Schools, such risks can also extend to DACA students’ loved ones.

As we’ve reported, tempers flared at a September 22 football game between the Weld Central High School Rebels and Denver’s Manual High School Thunderbolts over claims about the display of a Confederate flag made by Manual principal Nick Dawkins, among others. Weld Central reps subsequently denied anything like this actually happened, and now, Dawkins has signed on to a letter released just shy of 9 p.m. last night, September 26, that absolves the visiting team and blames unidentified spectators for trying to bring in a flag. However, the document, on view below, doesn’t address other assertions made by Dawkins about injuries to Manual players and the alleged use of racial slurs by some members of the Rebels.

After losing $1.5 million in federal funding, the Denver-based nonprofit Colorado Youth Matter is closing its doors on December 31 — a decision that could impact our state’s teen pregnancy rates.

Days after the end of a public-comment period about proposed changes in how sexual-misconduct accusations are handled on college campuses, the Department of Education, headed by the controversial Betsy DeVos, has announced that it is retracting two Obama-era documents that provided guidance in this area. A University of Colorado Denver expert in the field tells us this development won’t immediately alter how schools deal with such matters, but it suggests that the future could bring policy changes that will be sweeping and potentially problematic.

Friday, September 22, was a rough day for Denver Public Schools. First, a number of East High School students joined assorted parents at a protest prompted by the de facto ouster of principal Andy Mendelsberg and assistant principal/athletic director Lisa Porter in regard to their handling of videos showing cheer team members being forced into splits. Then, that evening, claims about a Confederate flag at a football game between the Weld Central High School Rebels and the Manual High School Thunderbolts resulted in charges of racism and alleged in-game injuries to three Manual players that may have been related to bad blood stirred by the controversy.

In May, Colorado submitted its state plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to the federal government for review and approval. In August, the U.S. Department of Education responded, requesting that Colorado do more to move students towards grade-level proficiency.

Controversial Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has called for sweeping changes in how sexual assault accusations are handled on college campuses. Now, against the backdrop of numerous lawsuits filed against universities in Colorado on behalf of men accused in such cases, who maintain that the process treats them unfairly, a group of officials, including many affiliated with colleges in the state, have combined forces to argue in favor a more thoughtful approach to the issue.

Over the years, Colorado colleges in general, and public colleges in particular, have performed weakly in national rankings. Unfortunately, the same scenario has played out in a new study of the best community colleges in the state. Nine Colorado institutions were analyzed among 728 nationwide, with only one school from here landing in the top half of the rankings and the lowest-rated facility finishing only fifteen slots away from dead last. And the latter’s location is mighty close to home.

Colorado’s 238 charter schools were also required to disclose to the State Board of Education which curriculum standards they choose not to adopt.

Shortly after a former first-year student sued the University of Denver over what his complaint describes as “false allegations of non-consensual sexual contact” with a fellow DU freshman that led to his expulsion, the law firm representing him has filed a similar suit against the Colorado School of Mines. The Mines student in question says he was never given a chance to properly defend himself against inaccurate claims that he’d taken advantage of a drunk female student during a threesome and captured and distributed a video of the encounter.

A Jefferson County Public Schools investigation has concluded that a principal and a psychologist at Governor’s Ranch Elementary School violated district policies in their response to one student’s alleged threat to shoot another.

Months-long negotiations between Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association (DCTA) concluded on September 1, ending the possibility that teachers would be left without workers’ rights just weeks into the 2017-2018 school year.

“A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes himself to light the way for others.” I remember reading that quote on a syllabus back around 2008, in one of my teacher-education classes at the University of Colorado Denver. I remember considering the slight hint of morbidity in that quote, and deep down in my gut I knew it was a foretelling of what was to follow.

After Colorado legislators passed House Bill 15-1170, which changed the measurement for high school success to include any post-secondary schooling, districts around the state began laying the groundwork to make big changes. Many are now shifting from a college-preparation model to a career-preparation model, asking individual students what they’d eventually like to do and then tailoring their courseloads to those goals.

Five oil and gas companies lent staff, resources, and donated educational materials for use in the classroom in a partnership with the Poudre Learning Center, which builds workshops for students and teachers in northern Colorado. Among the companies were Noble Energy, the second largest producer of oil and natural gas in the state, as well as Anadarko Petroleum — the company responsible for the home explosion that killed two in Firestone last May.

The students at ACRES aren’t just growing vegetables; they’re growing their career portfolios and reaping college credit in the process. And at the same time, Jefferson County is cultivating a model for future high school programs across the state.

Steve Myers changed his name to Steve Swarup Jackson and taught English for four and a half years at Yeshiva Toras Chaim, an orthodox Jewish school on West Colfax.

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.