Audio By Carbonatix
part 2 of 2
By 1988 the situation at Mitchell had worsened. Dropout rates had continued to climb, as had drug use and gang activities–much of which Delia blamed on the nearby apartment complexes. Kids told her they were actually afraid to come to school. She asked superintendent Ken Burnley, a black man who’d taken the job in 1987, and newly appointed assistant superintendent Jim Kocher for extra security guards. She didn’t get them.
She also sought financial and administrative backing for what would be called the Absence Addiction Program and would look at absenteeism as an addictive behavior rather than something “bad” about the student. With support from counselors and teachers, the student would be asked to come up with a plan to change the behavior. That way, the responsibility for making the change as well as recognizing the consequences for not changing was in the hands of the child. Instead of punishing the student with expulsion, the student would be encouraged to find a reason to stay in school.
The dropout-prevention program eventually would be recognized as a model by such entities as the U.S. Department of Education and the Southwest Regional Drug-Free Schools and Community Association. Staff members for Governor Roy Romer’s office would hear of its successes and urge that it be adopted in other Colorado schools. But it took Delia’s efforts to obtain a grant from a private foundation to get the program going, because once again she received no support from school district administrators.
Having decided that she couldn’t count on the district for support, Delia took it upon herself to start the Neighborhood/Community Coalition. The local business community had grown disenchanted with Mitchell and blamed the school’s students for assorted crimes, including the gang-style graffiti that appeared on area buildings. Now Mitchell officials, led by Delia, met with representatives of the police department, the district attorney’s office, businesspeople and the owners and managers of the apartment complexes.
According to Deputy District Attorney Daniel H. May, those coalition meetings were a rousing success. May, who represented his office, noted in a letter that the cooperation between apartment managers and police resulted in the arrest and prosecution of major and street-level drug dealers “who had been attempting to sell crack cocaine to high school and junior high students on their way to and from school.”
Delia had started lobbying the legislature for a new law that would stiffen the penalties for dealing drugs within 1,000 feet of a school. When that measure passed, May wrote, it resulted in numerous arrests of drug dealers near the school, “effectively chasing dealers away from the area. Without the coalition, this could not have been done as effectively or efficiently. Ms. Busby is to be commended for this highly successful program.”
Romer’s office also took note of the coalition project and it, too, was added to the list of suggested programs for schools trying to deal with similar problems.
Delia also demanded more of her students. If they violated rules, she would suspend them. If they violated the law, she personally filed the police complaints.
Her efforts were noted by the school’s neighbors. “Dear Students,” wrote Bonnie Riley, the president of nearby Winslow Court, a retirement community, “this is a note to thank you for removing the graffiti from buildings in our neighborhood.
“We are pleased that you young people take an active interest in the better appearance of our city.”
And Delia didn’t stop there. In 1989 she announced that Mitchell would be a hat-free zone. She had noticed that the gangs identified themselves–and their enemies–by certain brands of hats.
She gave several weeks’ notice of the impending change, but there was no response until the day the rule went into effect. Suddenly, some parents were calling the school and writing letters to the local newspaper complaining that the policy was a violation of their children’s First Amendment rights. Teachers disgruntled with Delia saw the public dissension as an opportunity to foment rebellion, and they complained that she was trying to create a problem where one didn’t exist.
Delia ignored the criticism. She thought the right to attend school in safety was more important than the right to wear a hat.
One afternoon a frightened student ran into her office to report that a girl had pulled a gun on another student. Delia went to the door. Looking out, she saw a group of students standing frozen in place. Then she saw a girl holding a gun and pointing it at another girl.
Delia didn’t want to do anything sudden that might cause the girl to panic and pull the trigger. She slowly opened the door. Just as slowly, the students turned their heads to look at her.
As Delia emerged, the girl with the gun began walking away. Delia followed. When the girl picked up the pace, Delia called out.
“Carrie, wait!”
Two male faculty members had joined the pursuit; Delia worried that they might try to jump the girl. “Let’s go over here,” Delia said to Carrie, pointing to an empty building. Once inside, she motioned the girl into the restroom.
“Give me the gun,” Delia commanded.
“But it’s my mother’s,” Carrie argued. “She told me to bring it, and I have to take it back.”
Delia insisted. After several anxious minutes, the girl handed her the gun. Wondering if the girl could hear how hard her heart was pounding, Delia stuffed the gun into a pocket.
When they emerged from the building, the police apprehended the girl. Delia signed the complaint against her. The girl had told her principal that her mother gave her the gun for self-protection. But Delia wasn’t accepting any such excuses.
Delia’s mother had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1988. She was aware that her time was running out, and she worried about who would care for her grandson, Preston.
Preston was the son of her youngest boy, Preston Sr., who’d been born when Zeltee was 39. By the time Preston Sr. entered high school, she just didn’t have the energy to stay on him like she had with her first four children. He had been in trouble with the law since he was thirteen and later dropped out of high school. Preston Jr.’s mother was a drug addict who gave her eighteen-month-old baby to his grandmother in exchange for a little money.
Preston Jr. was now six, and Zeltee wanted to leave him with a relative who could be trusted to keep him on the straight and narrow. Who else but Delia?
So Zeltee and Preston had moved in with Delia, Ronald and Aaron, who was about to graduate from Mitchell and had been accepted to the University of Colorado. Aaron was a fine young man who had stayed out of trouble and inherited his mother’s love for books–to which he added his own passion for computers.
After Zeltee died, the family accepted Preston as a second son. They went to court to gain official custody when his mother, who was still involved with drugs, tried to get him back.
While going through her mother’s papers, Delia came across the documents that told her family’s story. She smiled. Her mother had told her that someday she would be the keeper of the family history, too. And as she thought about what the documents meant and about her great-great-grandfather’s commitment to education, Delia became even more determined to do what she could for the students at Mitchell.
Delia was gaining a national reputation for her educational innovations. But closer to home, the reviews weren’t always favorable.
“You’re making the district look bad,” one school board official complained about her well-publicized attempts to confront the problems of gangs and drugs.
The old guard of the faculty was particularly concerned by her efforts to keep kids in school. Dropouts made for smaller class sizes and fewer difficult kids, they reasoned.
But Delia believed that if the school let kids drop out without a fight, it had failed them. Where would they go? What kind of future would they have? She knew the answers: Nowhere and none. She had seen what that kind of indifference had meant in Los Angeles, and she was damned if she would allow that to happen on her watch.
If a certain teacher seemed to be failing a large percentage of students, she wanted to know why. Was it because the teacher had been given too many of these problem children? Or was it an effort to get rid of those students the teacher didn’t want to deal with?
The former was reason to help the teacher. The latter was no excuse at all.
Some teachers complained publicly that they weren’t allowed to fail students who were incompetent. But Delia pointed out that a district survey of standardized test scores indicated that Mitchell students’ grades were on the rise. If the teachers had been correct in their assessment, then the test scores should have been dropping.
Other teachers argued that many of the students Delia was struggling to keep in school weren’t interested, in part because of a lack of support at home. “Then I expect you to tailor your course for the individual so that he can succeed,” she responded.
Delia had suspended some teachers and removed others from department chairmanships; now some faculty members protested that these were acts of revenge against those who disapproved of her programs. Delia defended her decisions as necessary if old attitudes were to be changed and educational opportunities improved.
In 1990 Delia Armstrong-Busby, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave, received the Milken Award for educational leadership, a prestigious national honor rarely given to principals. That same year she received the Governor’s Award for Educational Excellence.
There would be other recognition, such as Mitchell’s prominence in a Colorado Springs Police Department video on how to build strong ties between schools and the community in order to fight drug-dealing. Her Absence Addiction Program was featured in an article in Career Focus, a magazine distributed on college campuses. And when Romer developed the national Education 2000 initiative under the Bush administration, the policy on how to maintain order in schools was based on the programs Delia had introduced at Mitchell High.
But Delia’s favorite reward came in the form of statistics. The graduation rate at Mitchell had gone from 70 percent in the 1989-90 school year to 80 percent two years later, placing Mitchell at the top of the heap of the district’s high schools–an outstanding feat considering the school’s demographics. And the dropout rate had plunged from 10 percent in 1989-90, which marked the beginning of the Absence Addiction Program, to 4 percent by the end of the 1992 school year.
Whatever they thought of her privately, administrators had a star on their hands, and they used Delia’s accomplishments in the school district’s public-relations efforts. Her enemies could only watch and wait.
In the summer of 1992, Mitchell faculty members who were preparing for the upcoming year heard screams coming from an office; moments later a woman ran out. She reported that longtime teacher Floyd Bement had sexually assaulted her.
Delia made sure the matter was reported to police, and she initiated procedures that forced the man to take early retirement. She was stunned to learn that ten Mitchell staff members had written character references for the district attorney on Bement’s behalf–even though Bement confessed that he had intended to have intercourse with the woman even after she refused his advances.
After that, Delia found her opponents becoming more vocal. But she wasn’t through revamping school policies.
Delia thought the open-campus concept adopted in the Seventies gave students too much unaccountable free time. Students were getting into trouble off campus, and some returned to school high on drugs. So she ended the open-campus policy and required that during free time students either attend study hall or special exploratory classes–some recreational, some career-oriented, others academic.
Although most parents supported the switch, many of the students didn’t like it. But it was the faculty that really raised a stink.
Teachers complained that she had changed the policy without consulting them as required by their contract and that the new classes would require them to work more hours.
In the spring of 1993, current and former teachers from Mitchell met with superintendent Burnley and demanded that Delia be removed. Burnley hired Robert Chadwick, a nationally known consultant for troubled schools, to try to mediate the problem. He eventually gave up, reporting to Burnley that the Mitchell teaching staff was “dysfunctional.”
Other opponents were starting to grow more vocal, too. At a boosters’ club meeting, typically attended by the more affluent parents, the complaint arose that Delia’s programs were keeping the “wrong kind of kids” in school.
One of her main detractors was Jim Kocher, the deputy superintendent. Until he arrived in 1988, Delia had received excellent performance evaluations to go with her other awards. But after he came, her performance was rated unsatisfactory. Delia noted that for her evaluations, the administration contacted her most strident critics–including those who wrote letters of support for the men accused of sexual misconduct–and none of her supporters.
The administration even asked the Colorado Springs Board of Education about removing her. But the board turned down the request.
After that things seemed quieter. That October Burnley even directed the other high schools in District 11 to emulate Mitchell.
That’s why what happened this past spring caught Delia by surprise.
On March 2 she was called to an administrator’s office for an unusual mid-year evaluation. He told her that she lacked leadership, despite a recent commendation from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs Department of Education that noted, among other things, her strong leadership.
The next day Delia attended a meeting of the Denver Regional Law Enforcement Association, which featured Attorney General Janet Reno. Delia was the featured speaker at a seminar titled “Addressing Violent Youth Crimes Through Model Programs.” She was introduced as “the woman who had done the most to improve the image of School District No. 11.”
A week later Delia was called to Burnley’s office. He told her she was being transferred to the administration building, where she would become the director of fundraising–a previously nonexistent position. When she asked why, Burnley told her Mitchell was “dysfunctional” but would discuss it no further.
Instead, he left his office. Ten minutes later Burnley was at Mitchell High School, where he called the faculty together and announced the decision. The Colorado Springs Board of Education, whose seven members oversee the superintendent, approved the transfer with only one dissenting vote.
Over the next few weeks the community, faculty, students and parents debated the move. About seventy students walked out of class in support of Delia; they said more would have followed except they feared retaliation from their teachers. Other students said they were glad she was gone, because she worked too hard to keep a certain element of students in the school. Some accused her of favoring black students, although her defenders pointed out that the school’s demographics were such that minority students were likely to make up a disproportionate number of those needing special help. And, they added, her Absence Addiction Program was as likely to have white, Hispanic and Asian-American students as it was to have blacks.
On March 28, a Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph newspaper article noted that Delia came to the school with strong feelings about increasing attendance and providing a school where students were challenged and nurtured regardless of their backgrounds. “You mirror what life has given you,” Delia told the newspaper. “I had people who believed in me in spite of the fact that I was this shy, awkward, inarticulate kid.
“They reached out to me.”
Faculty members admitted to the newspaper that they had been angry with Delia’s selection as principal from the start. Phyllis Wannemacher, the president of the Colorado Springs Education Association, said Delia had never had a honeymoon in which she could adjust to her position. She’d never developed a good rapport with her teachers, Wannemacher added, and the relationship had soured beyond the point of redemption.
A school district official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution by the administration and the teachers’ union, says Delia was a casualty of her success, her dedication to all children–and her outspokenness.
“She was the first principal in the whole region to say there was a gang problem in her school,” the official says. “And the staff went ape: `How dare you get us labeled as a gang school!’
“She looked at student failure rates as a failure for the whole school and addressed it by looking at individual teachers, some of whom were failing 50 percent of the kids in their classes.
“And she went after the dropout rate. Suddenly, students of color and the oddball students weren’t disappearing. Instead, their faces were in the classroom saying, `I’m here to get an education.’
“I think that created a certain amount of fear among the old-guard teachers who were suddenly having to deal with students they didn’t want to have to deal with.”
In August Delia sued the school district, charging that the administration had discriminated on the basis of sex and race. She noted that after her appointment at Mitchell, four other black women had been made principals at district schools–but none remained.
In addition to compensatory damages, Delia asked for her job back.
Burnley and Kocher did not return Westword’s calls. “Because this is a personnel matter and in the courts, there will be no comment,” said Norvelle Simpson, who identified himself as a spokesman for the two.
Last month the school district agreed to ask for a mediated settlement. Delia considers that a victory and a vindication, even though she thinks it unlikely that she will be allowed to return as principal of Mitchell.
But she’s already left a legacy–the students who say she gave them a second chance when no one else would.
Eric Fortin, who is white, says he was a long-haired troublemaker who skipped school more than he went. He was smart enough to get good grades when he attended class, but as he grew older and went less, his grades plunged. He seemed a likely dropout.
“But she invited me into the program, where I got the support I never had before,” he says.
Without Delia’s program, he would never have gone on to college. Eric is currently a senior at the University of Colorado; he’s preparing to take his law school entrance examinations this spring.
Rich Turner also didn’t see the point of going to school. He even dropped out for a semester before going back after realizing his future was dim if he didn’t have a high school diploma. When he returned to school, Delia asked him to join the program. “They let you know that somebody cared,” he says.
In his senior year, Turner, who had raised his grades to a B-plus average and had no absences, received an award from the mayor of Colorado Springs for his work in a job partnership with the city’s business community–another of Delia’s programs.
He received a scholarship to Pikes Peak Community College, where he’s now earning his associate’s degree in business before moving on to a four-year school.
Delia’s Absence Addiction and Neighborhood/Community Coalition programs are still listed on Romer’s list of suggested school policy. But since Delia’s removal, Mitchell has dropped the Absence Addiction Program.
“I guess they don’t want to keep `the wrong kind of kids’ in school anymore,” she says.
Delia closes the family scrapbook and places it on the coffee table next to a folder containing newspaper clips of both her triumphs and her loss. Someday they, too, will be added to the binder, along with the pardon, the land deeds, letters from men who served their country overseas–a legacy of a family that takes its responsibilities seriously, accepting sacrifices when necessary.
Someday she will give the scrapbook to Aaron, who has started his own computer graphics business. He has already plied their contents and knows what they mean to his family.
That day is still a long way off. Delia may accept whatever settlement the judge decides. But she isn’t going to go away.
She plans to officially announce her candidacy for a seat on the Colorado Springs Board of Education this spring.
She owes it to the memory of L.W. Robinson.
end of part 2
