He points out that a large percentage of his pupils come from immigrant backgrounds, and several hail from countries that were once under the yoke of the British Empire. "I have kids from Jamaica, from India. And even though I don't come from a colonial history in direct relation to the queen, I stand in solidarity to anyone who was oppressed, and the queen had a deep hand in it."
Had this episode taken place when Hernández was an instructor at North High School, a Denver Public Schools institution, he might have been forced to make his own trip to the principal's office. After all, he was a deeply controversial figure at North, particularly after he publicly criticized the way his exit from the school was engineered; in May, he told Westword the move was made for "retaliatory reasons" because "I openly challenge my principal on issues of equity and anti-racism." He was subsequently placed on administrative leave after attending a rally on his behalf staged by students and community members who felt he was being punished for being, in his words, "unapologetically brown."
At Aurora West, Hernández is able to openly practice his brand of education, which doesn't shy away from speaking truth to power. But he's still processing the chaotic events of the past year.
Hernández was hired as a traditional teacher at North in January 2021 and quickly became a student favorite. But at the end of his first year, administrators maintained that the school didn't have enough money to pay his salary — so he was encouraged to apply for a one-year associate position, "where the government pays for half of it and the school pays for half of it," he recalls. As this term was nearing its conclusion, he applied for one of several open teaching positions at North, but was told afterward that he hadn't been hired for any of them because of a subpar interview — an excuse he didn't buy, since he'd successfully interviewed at the school twice in the previous eighteen months.
The rally for Hernández took place on May 13, and he was placed on administrative leave that same day. As a result, he notes, "I was officially locked out of the entire DPS system: pay stubs, grades, attendance. I couldn't get into anything, and I was formally asked not to contact students, parents, anybody, about being on administrative leave. It was a pretty hard line — like being excommunicated."
Another protest supporting Hernández was staged prior to a May 19 DPS Board of Education meeting, and it seemed to have an impact. "The board convened privately for two and a half hours, and afterward, the superintendent," he says, referring to Alex Marrero, "made a motion to remove me from the non-renewal list, which I'd been put on because associate teachers only have one-year contracts."
Marrero's declaration essentially affirmed that Hernández would have a job with DPS for the 2022-2023 academic year. But there was a problem: Because he remained on administrative leave, he couldn't personally apply for open positions at any schools — and the work-around offered to him required that he submit an itemized list of positions that interested him to an administrative staffer, who would then contact schools on his behalf and let him know which were interested in scheduling an interview.
Tim Hernández was placed on administrative leave at North High School for attending a rally staged in support of him.
In retrospect, Hernández feels the supposed job guarantee was an empty public-relations move that masked an attempt to make it as difficult as possible for him to actually remain with the district. "It was politically favorable but structurally violent," he says. But he insists these actions haven't poisoned his feelings for DPS.
"A revolutionary is driven more than anything by love," he says, "and I love Denver Public Schools. I bleed Denver Public Schools, and I very deeply love the Denver Public Schools community. I'll be straight with you: If the principal I'm working with now was at another DPS school, it'd be even better. But unfortunately, that's not how things played out for me."
Hernández continues to live only a block or so from North, and he remains in regular contact with his former students; he says that not a day goes by without him receiving a text or some other outreach from one of them checking on his well-being, asking for his advice or otherwise maintaining the connection. But he's equally invested in the students at Aurora West, who are facing plenty of obstacles, too.
"Rather than teaching second- and third-generation Chicano kids, I'm teaching students who are refugees," he says. "In one class, 100 percent of the students are children of immigrants, and they deserve a radical brown teacher just as much as my neighborhood on the Northside does. Every neighborhood deserves teachers who are proudly brown, proudly Black, proudly Indigenous, proudly Asian. But there's also a lot of school-related trauma. The school has had active shooters, and there were a lot of problems under the previous principal. It's really grasping for culture because it's so destabilized."
Even so, Hernández thinks conversations like the one that developed after the queen's death are key to establishing a sense of community among his diverse charges. "When they chose to celebrate, I asked them why," he recalls, "and they said, 'Because the queen did this to me.' And I said, 'I agree with you,' and I pulled up an article from the New York Times that showed all the places where the queen had been involved in colonialism. We took fifteen minutes to make sure these students could choose their moments and get to have their own experience in the classroom. And that's what's important."
