Category Archives: Parents

It’s important for Colorado citizens to get involved in local school board elections. A lot of important policies and other decisions are set at the local level, so it’s good to make an informed choice and cast a vote! If you live in Douglas County, you’ll want to know about two forums taking place where you can get to meet the school board candidates, ask them questions, and learn about where they stand on important issues like school choice, school accountability, performance pay, school financial transparency, and more. The first one, sponsored by the Douglas County Federation [local teachers union], is tonight from 7-8:30 PM at Chaparral High School. If you miss that opportunity, I received an email from A Parent’s Voice founder Donnell Rosenberg alerting me to another forum coming up in September:

One of the many new charter school options in Denver this year is the expansion of a franchise that’s moved its way north: the Cesar Chavez Academy Denver. Originally founded in Pueblo in 2000 by Dr. Lawrence Hernandez, CCA has grown into a small network of charter schools focused on high expectations, equal opportunity, local culture, and parent and community involvement as components of its educational philosophy. CCA Denver opened this month in the northwest part of the city, in a 5-year-old building that formerly housed the now-defunct Denver Arts and Technology Academy. The new school, under the direction of Ryan Lucas, serves roughly 350 students from kindergarten through 8th grade. The current school year is underway, but you can sign up online to get your child into the lottery for consideration to enter CCA-Denver in 2010. As the Denver Post reported yesterday, CCA-Denver is very focused on its mission, and not connected to or distracted by the controversies that have affected the Pueblo school. Other new schools featured: Jeffco’s 21st Century Virtual Academy Thomas MacLaren School (Colorado Springs) Montclair School of Academics and Enrichment (Denver) Atlas Preparatory Charter (Colorado Springs) Envision Leadership Prep (Denver) Animas High School (Durango)

The school year is back underway in most places in Colorado, and that means it’s time for an important reminder: Just as parents ought to be informed consumers and make wise decisions concerning educational options that suit their children’s needs, so teachers ought to be informed consumers in choosing a membership organization that meets their professional needs. As far as membership organizations go, the new kid on the block in our state is the two-year-old, fast-growing Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE), “a Colorado-based, non-profit, professional educator association, dedicated to the academic and personal growth of every student.” Recently, PACE’s director of membership Megan Leatham explained what her organization is about with my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow on an 8-minute iVoices podcast. For $180 a year, a full-time Colorado teacher has access to the following PACE membership benefits:

It doesn’t seem that long ago the school year was winding down, and up in Boulder many teachers were calling in sick as a form of protest: sort of a collective temper tantrum. Now students and parents in the district may wonder what’s coming next. As the Boulder Daily Camera and Denver Post have both reported, 94 percent of Boulder Valley Education Association members (or about 75 percent of all Boulder Valley teachers) have voted to reject a contract offer that included across-the-board 1 percent bonuses but no permanent pay raise. Hey, I might vote against it, too — but for different reasons, I can assure you.

It seems almost everyone is getting in on the virtual public school act in Colorado these days. But that’s a good thing, because having more options is better for students and parents. One of the latest options, opening new for fall 2009, is Jeffco’s 21st Century Virtual Academy. Operated by the state’s largest school district — Jefferson County Public Schools in west metro Denver — the program offers a wide range of high school course offerings for students ages 14 to 20 who are Colorado residents (and not necessarily of Jefferson County). Courses are aligned to state standards and local graduation requirements, but also feature an array of electives as well. Besides the core areas of English, math, science, and social studies, subjects available through the virtual program include:

The proof keeps pouring in: Give parents private school choice opportunities, and they overwhelmingly love it. A couple weeks ago I highlighted a new survey of Florida parents whose children use the corporate scholarship tax credit to attend a non-public school: Satisfaction was off the charts. Not to be outdone by its neighbor to the south, the Center for Educated Georgia also decided to measure feedback from parents who use a voucher to send their special-needs children to a private school. No surprises here, the two-year-old scholarship program is a big hit! Here are some of the key findings (PDF):

Update, 8/18: Denise at Colorado Charters offers more information on the new Thomas MacLaren School, as well as an account of the ribbon cutting ceremony. If you live in the Colorado Springs area and have a student heading into the middle school years, you may want to take a look at the new Thomas MacLaren School. The tuition-free public charter school opens this month with classes from 6th to 9th grade. Eventually the school will serve students all the way up through high school. Many things set MacLaren apart from traditional public schools, but most prominent are: A classical education curriculum that builds from the basics of grammar (6th-8th grade) to the logic of finding “implications and relationships that exist among the ideas already learned” (9th-10th grade) to the higher-level rhetoric (11th-12th grade) “wherein students begin to synthesize and relate concepts already learned” — all students will be required to take four years of Latin Student uniforms Single-sex classrooms (that’s right: No yucky girls! I may have to look into this school….), except the fine arts classes (including choir, drama, etc.) and lunchtimes will be co-ed

I’ve told you about a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators who are leading the fight to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for disadvantaged children in our nation’s capital. Well, most urgent on the agenda is saving the scholarships of 216 kids that were taken away at the last minute by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — despite the program’s proven success. Sign up on the new Save School Choice website to stay in touch and learn about ways you can help these 216 kids and many more. And listen in to the radio ad that’s debuting today in Washington DC (click the play button to hear): Let’s keep up the good fight, and let them know that both little kids and big people here in the Rocky Mountain West want to save this important educational opportunity for as many D.C. kids as possible.

Okay, okay … so Denver’s Montclair School of Academics and Enrichment isn’t exactly new. In fact, at more than 100 years of age, it’s one of Colorado’s older public schools. So what’s new about it? Montclair is one of the state’s first two Innovation Schools — as approved by the local school board and by the state board of education under the 2008 state law — and the only school to be recognized both as an Innovation School and as a DPS Beacon School. What does that mean, you ask?

It’s Friday. What better time to kick an institution that’s down, and deservedly so? If anyone is taking nominees for an American school district to tear down and start over the education system from scratch, I vote for the Detroit Public Schools. Anyone with me? The district’s well-documented failures and financial deficits are exacerbated by the latest findings of far-reaching corruption. The Detroit Free Press reports today about what was found in a pair of audits of Detroit Public Schools (H/T Intercepts): Among the findings: 160 outdated BlackBerrys, 11 motorcycles, 97 two-way phones and 50 handheld radios sat unused. One audit also showed that 411 people — including some who are dead — were receiving health insurance even though they weren’t eligible. Ending those benefits will save the district an immediate $2.1 million, [emergency financial manager Robert] Bobb said. Health insurance for dead people? To cover future embalming needs? Protection money from grave robbers? If we take away their benefits, will they be added to the rolls of Americans without health insurance? Unbelievable stuff. Do you see what I mean?