Black and Brown Families Feel "Ignored" By DPS, Say Safety Plan Caters to White Students

With Denver Public Schools set to make major updates to its district-wide safety and security policies ahead of the 2023-24 school year, Black and brown community members say their voices and ideas are falling on deaf ears — and that the city is only catering to white students and families.

"In general, this process has been very frustrating, because it has ignored Black and Brown voices," said one woman during a May 9 community feedback session for the first draft of the DPS Long-Term Safety Plan, held at Abraham Lincoln High School and hosted by DPS Latino Education Advisory Council rep Valerie Bustamante.

Families of Black and brown students throughout DPS are currently scrambling to have their concerns heard in a conversation that has centered around East High School, according to advocates. Some community members feel that both recent and proposed security changes have come about despite hesitation and opposition from Black and brown residents.

Another assertion made by local community members is that the push to implement the new safety plan has been driven by "white parents" in the wake of the March 22 shooting that went down at East High, while violence in other parts of Denver — where larger numbers of Black and brown students attend school — has long been ignored.

"Some feedback that has been expressed to me is that, for example, 'The violence that has been consistently happening in the northeast side — why hasn't there been a solution brought up after all of these incidents?'" Bustamante says. "So there's a question of 'Why East? Why white parents? And why not northeast Black and brown families?'"

One of Bustamante's biggest challenges right now has been to try to find a way to align the concerns she has heard from her community with the DPS safety plan and city's decision-making. She's in charge of presenting the feedback she gathers to the superintendent.

The main source of contention is the plan's proposed security changes, as well as updates that have already been put into place.

One day after Austin Lyle shot and injured East High deans Wayne Mason and Eric Sinclair and later committed suicide, the Denver Public Schools Board sent a memo to Superintendent Alex Marrero, directing him to "develop a systemic Long-Term Safety Operational Plan." According to the memo, Marrero must also "engage in thorough community engagement with students, teachers, parents, families, school leaders, and others in collaboration with the Board."

Marrero released a first draft of the plan on May 1. The final version must be submitted to the school board "no later than June 30," allowing for two months of community engagement and feedback.

Bustamante, one of the individuals tasked with gathering community feedback to take to Marrero, says she had to act quickly between the draft being released on May 1 and a Superintendent Advisory Council feedback session on May 11.

"I think it's hard to get authentic community feedback when we only have a week to prepare an event," she tells Westword.

Bustamante represents the Latino Education Advisory Council on the Superintendent Advisory Council, a new group made up of representatives "from the district’s existing advisory councils, Denver School Leaders Association, Denver Classroom Teachers Association, Students Demand Action, the charter collaborative council, Parents Safety Advocacy Group and the Transition Team that supported the creation of the Strategic Roadmap," according to DPS.

Bustamante says she sees the benefits of DPS trying to implement change quickly in light of the continuing safety issues the community faces. She applauds East High parents and their ongoing activism, saying that because of them, "DPS was like, 'Yes, we have to get on something.'"

But she has also seen the outrage from people in her community who think that DPS is being reactionary in its decision-making, especially when it comes to school resource officers, or SROs.

LEAC was just formed at the beginning of April, to represent the large number of Latino community members. "We have not established bylaws; we have not established leadership," she says. "I'm not a chair. There's no chair right now. I'm just a representative that's doing the safety plan."

Groups like the Black Family Advisory Council and Asian Education Advisory Council already existed in the district. And while LEAC was not created specifically to give the Latino community a voice in the development of the district-wide safety plan, it came about at an opportune time.

In 2022, Hispanic students made up a clear majority of all DPS students at 51.7 percent of the enrolled population, according to DPS. White students made up the second-largest population block, with 25.3 percent of the population.

Had LEAC not been established before the creation of the Superintendent Advisory Council, there would be no representative for the current community feedback process. But Bustamante says the Latino community would have found another way to be involved.

"I think organizations would have stepped up and would have made their voices heard," she says.

Bustamante, who works a full-time job and is a new mother in addition to her role as a representative for LEAC, says the short timeline is the most difficult part of the process.

Prior to the March 22 shooting at East, sixteen-year-old student Luis Garcia was shot and fatally wounded in his car just outside the school on February 13. The incident reignited a conversation around the Denver school board's 2020 decision to remove school resource officers from the district. After the Lyle shooting, the superintendent and school board made the controversial decision to bring SROs back into DPS high schools.

Some Black and brown residents feel the move was a "slap in the face" to community members who had been working for decades to keep armed officers out of classrooms.

"For thirty years, the community has organized to remove SROs," said the woman who commented at the May 9 community feedback session.

One student there said that she has white friends at other schools who support the return of SROs. Meanwhile, she said, "we from low-income communities know we are going to be criminalized."

The draft of the city's safety plan proposes that SROs be allowed to remain in DPS schools permanently, but says that it should be up to each individual high school to decide whether they want one on campus.

The consensus of the room at the Lincoln High gathering — packed with students and families from the Latino community — was clear: no SROs.

Many people also took issue with the fact that the safety plan proposes a number of different kinds of armed security officers, including DPD police officers, SROs and DPS Department of Safety officers. They would like to see the money for those positions instead be put toward mental health resources.

Bustamante pushed back as well, noting that the general feedback she'd gotten during outreach she'd done prior to the meeting showed a wariness regarding the intense amount of proposed security. However, she warned that the district might implement the security measures anyway, and asked that residents come up with ideas for what they want solutions to look like if that ends up being the case.

Reflecting on the meeting, Bustamante explains, "It's very easy to be in this space and say, 'Yes, we will advocate for that'" — referring to the clear opposition to SROs that she has heard. Still, collaboration is needed "with all the other representatives," she adds.

"It's tough," she concludes. "It's tough because at the end of the day, it does seem like something that happened in one central location is impacting the whole district."