After amassing nearly 6,000 signatures, the "Resign DPS Board" petition has been taken down, and the group's website and social media accounts will soon be inactive. While none of the seven DPS boardmembers resigned, all three members who were up for reelection in November were replaced, with two defeated at the ballot and one dropping out of the race to pursue another office.
As the remaining four incumbent members won't face reelection until 2025, Resign DPS founder Heather Lamm says it is time to move on. “Movements like this are best done when they serve a very specific purpose," she says.
"Did we ever expect all of them to resign? No. But we very much wanted to put a spotlight on the board," Lamm tells Westword. "Despite the fact that there are still four members from the old guard on this board, I do think we are going to see a fundamentally different way of them doing business, in large part because of Resign DPS."
Resign DPS formed in March after a student at East High School shot and wounded two deans inside the school before later fatally shooting himself in a wooded area of Park County. This was the culmination of a year of violence at the school. Weeks earlier, sixteen-year-old East student Luis Garcia died after being shot while sitting in his car on campus. A freshman was similarly shot near the campus the previous September, and the school went into lockdown multiple times after false swatting reports.
Members of Resign DPS often testified at school board meetings in support of policies such as bringing police officers back into schools after the board removed officers in 2020. But Lamm says the group was not about achieving specific policies; it was about developing a school board that parents could trust to make policy choices.
"What we all agreed upon is that the board didn’t even have the moral authority to be making those decisions anymore," Lamm says.
Members of Resign DPS attend a Denver school board meeting.
Heather Lamm
Warren was a member of the Resign DPS steering committee. She joined the group out of frustration over the repeated shootings, saying she did not have to worry about these kinds of issues when her oldest son graduated from East in 2011. Warren recalls her youngest son becoming accustomed to the violence when she picked him up from the March shooting: “He was almost getting numb to it — ‘Don’t ask me how I feel, it is what it is, I’m fine,’” she says.
Now, Warren tells Westword she and her son are both feeling safer after the board voted to return school resource officers and the school implemented security policies like door locking and student ID badges. She says she "absolutely" accomplished everything she set out to with the Resign DPS movement.
“I’m so glad I did it. It gave me a voice," Warren says. "Going into it, we really did not have any idea that it would have evolved and caught on the way that it did. But it showed me more parents were feeling the same way and needed a platform to share their voice and share their frustration.”
But school safety at East wasn't the only issue Resign DPS wanted to address.
Lamm says the March shooting was the "last straw" after years of public infighting, alleged mistreatment and backroom meetings from the school board. She wants to see the new school board communicate directly with parents about their plans to hold superintendents accountable, follow open-meetings law and approach decisions to potentially change the district's student discipline matrix. But she doesn't think Resign DPS is the right organization to indefinitely apply pressure on the board to address those concerns.
"This town is littered with education advocacy organizations in search of a cause," Lamm says. “I’m really looking at the board from a level of functionality, not about any specific decisions."
Resign DPS hasn't decided whether it will resurface in 2025 when the remaining four boardmembers are up for reelection. "We want to give this new board a chance," Lamm says.
For this year's races, the group ran ads encouraging Denverites to vote out the incumbent boardmembers.
For now, Lamm says Resign DPS will only return if the next two years are as "dysfunctional" and "chaotic" as the last four. She'll continue keeping an eye on the board, as will all of the Denver parents mobilized by the movement, she says, championing Resign DPS's greatest accomplishment as informing parents to be more engaged and demystifying school board governance.
In the meantime, Warren hopes her son will get through his last year of high school without another incident, and that the new school board will understand the parents' perspective.
“Time will tell how this group can work together and what it will look like for the remaining four," Warren says. “You’ve got to listen to the people. If not, the people will make you listen. And that’s what happened with this vote.”
