Opinion: Education Has a Million Moving Parts

Election season is here, and change is in the air. While the presidential vote is still a year away, another election next month carries a heavy burden and will greatly impact our youngest citizens.

August brought the back-to-school season for over 800,000 pre-K through twelfth-grade students who attend about 1,867 schools in Colorado. With over 178 school districts, the task of providing education and services to our state’s learners is a challenging job at best, involving an aggregation of administrators, teachers, paraprofessionals and therapists...not to mention the individuals who work hard to keep bellies full and buildings functioning. When you take a deep look into what seem like a million moving parts that make a school district function, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the complexity of the system and all of the facets required to meet the unique needs of our learners. Yet all across our state, people show up every day to their jobs, oftentimes with a deep passion, as they take on the task of educating our kids.

November brings us school-board elections and the elevation of people who wield the power to decide how schools and districts are operated and maintained. School boards are a facet of our government that works closely with people; they were established even before America had officially become its own country. In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted laws that controlled public education and, with them, the expectation that towns would create and maintain schools and provide education in their communities. That’s almost 400 years of realizing the importance of public education.

But in those centuries, has the United States figured out a way to provide public education successfully nationwide? How about Colorado?

Most average citizens are unaware of the power that school boards yield. Yet every parent, teacher, student, para and school administrator has an opinion about them. The comments I have heard from teachers and parents who work and live in different districts in the state have not been especially positive. The 2022/2023 school year was a particularly tumultuous one for Denver Public Schools, as our state’s youngest school board vice president, Auon’tai Anderson, attempted to navigate two incidents of gun violence at East High School that left parents and students not just at East but in the entire district feeling unsafe. Subsequent heated debates at school-board meetings as to whether SRO and police presence are needed have resulted in shouting matches, with both sides unable to come up with real solutions that sit well with parents, educators, administrators and board members.

This year, Jeffco Public Schools also saw heated debates about recent school closures, busing issues and a haunting decline in the student population that extends across the state. School populations are declining, and we don’t know exactly why. Covid and mass school shutdowns also brought a sharp decline in enrollment, and exposed some heart-breaking realities when food and social service programs had to be extended to families staying at home. Some kids don’t come to school just to learn; some also come to receive nourishment and help they aren’t getting at home. Teachers have known this for years, but it didn’t really come to light until the pandemic hit. And now parents are having to work even harder as housing costs and inflation in the state continue to rise.

Even in my tiny school district of Sheridan, feedback about the sufficiency of our school board is mixed. Some people feel that the members are meeting the needs of students and the community, while others feel that things are out of touch.

I challenge you to take a moment to question those closest to you who have a connection to a public school in Colorado. Ask if they feel happy with the education and services being provided, ask if they’re satisfied with their local school board — and listen to what they have to say. Do they feel as though this component of our government, which was made for the people, is truly representing the people and our communities? Do you? 

“What do teachers eat for breakfast?” a fourth-grader once asked me. “Coffee and ibuprofen,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. There’s usually a bagel as well as my usual Rolaids thrown in the mix, but after almost twenty years of being knee-deep in the education world, my choice of breakfast hasn’t changed much. My energy for teaching certainly has, however. I could blame it on the passage of almost two decades, but I know deep down, teaching in a lot of ways has changed, and not exactly for the better.  

Problems that I have seen existing for years continue to exist, and a lot of the time the root cause is lingering poverty; my ability to change this is frustratingly limited. I do, however, have the ability to get up every morning and give my students my best. I know that when the day comes for me to step back, there will be young blood to take my place. Because some way, somehow, there are always going to be people born knowing they are meant to be teachers, that the world needs them — and that’s how I think it’s been for a very long time.

This November, we all have a duty to vote. In a way, it’s a duty to our kids, and at the very least our community. It might take almost another 400 years to make the changes we wish to see in the world, but the first step can start at the ballot box.

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