An appointed incumbent and two new candidates are vying to represent District 5 in the Denver Public Schools Board of Education directors race.
Marlene De La Rosa and Adam Slutzker are looking to unseat board member Charmaine Lindsay in the Nov. 7 election. She was appointed to fill the seat by her board peers during a vacancy hearing in 2022.
What neighborhoods and schools are in the district?
The west and northwest Denver seat covers a large span of neighborhoods from the westside heading east including Sun Valley, Villa Park, Sloan Lake, Sunnyside, Elyria-Swansea, Globeville and a small portion of Five Points. Some schools include Colfax, Trevista and Swansea Elementary schools, along with Skinner Middle, West High and Bruce Randolph School.
What are the issues in the district?
One of the biggest issues in the district is low school enrollment. Colorado and Denver school budgets are based on a per-pupil model, so with low enrollment come lower budgets.
Denver schools began experiencing dwindling enrollment in 2015, specifically within elementary schools. According to DPS data, the Northwest region has lost more than 700 students from 2015 to 2020. That equates to a little less than two full-sized elementary schools.
In a contentious decision taken this spring, District 5 saw one school close due to low enrollment, Fairview Elementary the only school in the Sun Valley neighborhood. Several other elementary schools were considered for closure at some point including Cheltenham, Colfax, Columbian, Cowell and Eagleton.
Many neighborhoods in the district have been identified as areas experiencing high levels of gentrification and displacement, so the low enrollment gap could grow as housing and the city get less affordable, something DPS has little control of.
Concerns about student safety, the return of school resource officers (SROs) and teacher retention have also been a focus in the district.
Who has endorsed the candidates and what money have they raised so far?
One of the biggest endorsements a school board candidate can receive is from the teachers' union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. That endorsement has gone to Lindsay. The Union said Lindsay "consistently demonstrated her commitment to listening to educators and the DPS community to make informed decisions." They also said she was "a deep and thoughtful thinker."
The second biggest endorsement would be from organizations promoting reform or that work with charter schools. That organization would be Denver Families Action and they've endorsed De La Rosa. DFA said De La Rosa is a "leader in the Denver Latino community" and "she is committed to closing the achievement gap and ensuring that every student, regardless of their background, has access to the resources and opportunities they need to succeed."
Endorsements from teachers unions are influential while endorsements from reform or charter organizations lead to more financial backing, according to recent reporting from Chalkbeat.
Lindsay has raised $6,875, according to the latest filings on the Secretary of State's website. Those numbers will be updated on Oct. 16. De La Rosa on the other hand has raised a little over $24,000. It's unclear what endorsements Slutzker has received and according to the state's website, he has not raised any funding.
Besides the two big endorsements, Lindsay has also being endorsed by the Colorado Education Association and DPS At-Large candidate and former mayoral candidate Kwame Spearman. De La Rosa has endorsements from a number of local representatives and leaders including City Council Members Amanda Sandoval and Jamie Torres, both of whom represent their respective portions in the District 5 area. Several former board member have also endorsed De La Rosa, including Denver Parks and Recreation Executive Director Happy Haynes, Theresa Peña, Rosemary Rodriguez, Arturo Jimenez and Elaine Berman.
Here are the three candidates (listed in ballot order) and where they stand on these issues:
Marlene De La Rosa
De La Rosa is focused on community and equity. If elected, she said she intends to face the big issues on the board with those two focuses in mind.
De La Rosa grew up in Sunnyside and has lived in North Denver most of her life. She has two kids that graduated through the DPS system, from Denison Montessori elementary school to North and East high schools.
She's a longtime volunteer and committee member with DPS and has also worked alongside families through policy advocacy. Some of her work includes implementing parent engagement standards and being chair of the Hispanic Education Advisory Council. Outside of DPS, De La Rosa said she currently serves on the Denver Latino Commission and the Denver Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. She's also the founder of LatinasGive!, a small woman-run and -operated organization that gives grants to groups that service the Hispanic community.
"I have been dedicated to serving my community my whole life and I feel like that's what's important," De La Rosa said. "My passion has always been education...At the end of the day, what I'm looking out for is the best interest of the students and how we can do everything we can to support them."
That first level of support comes by increasing equity for all students and "closing the achievement gap," which is one of De La Rosa's priorities, especially in District 5 where many of the students are people of color. One of the ways she wants to look at closing the gap is through language access and ensuring multi-language learners are getting the assistance they need.
Teacher recruitment and retention efforts are also high on De La Rosa's list. She'd like to see increased pay for teachers, and the creation of a "grow your own" type of program where DPS makes clearer pathways for folks, such as paraprofessionals, to get their teaching certifications.
De La Rosa said she also prioritizes safety and wants to address that through preventative measures like mental health checks.
She added that she wants to make sure that SROs are actually keeping students safe. De La Rosa said DPS' new safety measure is already in place, so as a potential board member, it would be her job to make sure the parameters of their return are being adhered to, such as making sure SROs aren't disciplining students.
"Kids are going to learn if they feel comfortable and if they feel safe at school. If they don't feel that, it's another added challenge to teaching," De La Rosa said. "[With SROs] we need to make sure that piece of the safety plan is working. Making sure we aren't having a lot of students facing the racial disparity that was there before and citations. We need to be monitoring that and reviewing that all at the end of this school year."
De La Rosa also wants to increase transparency and communication between the board and the communities they serve. She points towards the school closure conversations in the past school year, which she doesn't believe were good enough.
"We have to think about how we work with the community well, well, in advance of that situation having to take place," De La Rosa said. "I know in the Fairview situation, there wasn't a lot of notice for families...What I'm really hoping for is to have some transparency and better communication between the community, the families, teachers, the district."
Adam Slutzker
Slutzker decided to put his name in the board race for two reasons: he's a parent and has an education background.
Slutzker has three children, one of whom goes to Columbian Elementary. So when the board was deciding whether to close Columbian due to low enrollment, Slutzker was at the forefront of those conversations and that propelled him to run.
The process surrounding school closures lacked clear communication and transparency, he said.
"Realistically, I felt like our community and many of the other communities I've spoken with were really not part of the conversation in a meaningful way," Slutzker said. "We had two evenings where they came to our school to meet with our community and that was the extent of what was supposed to be an eight or nine month process of 'working with the community' to come up with a path forward. It just didn't feel like there was a real collaboration with our community."
Creating true collaboration is one Slutzker's top priorities. He'd like the board and DPS to follow through on communication efforts and ensure that parents and guardians who can't make it to meetings are also listened to.
"We really need to be thinking about, are we giving a voice to the voiceless? Are we only listening to the 2% of people that are showing up at these meetings or are they actually speaking for the 90% of people that aren't able to make it to these sessions," Slutzker said.
Addressing low enrollment and future school closures is another priority for Slutzker.
He said ultimately DPS opened too many schools, including charters which spread the students too thinly, the current school choice system is "broken" and DPS, along with families, need to reconsider what they believe is a "good school."
Some immediate responses to low enrollment, Slutzker said, could be to put enrollment caps on schools. He'd like to see charter school applications properly reviewed and audited. He said he'd also love to see "lower income families as well as students with documented educational or social emotional needs" receive priority when it comes to picking schools they'd like to attend.
Long-term he'd like to look into how parents brand schools and what they consider to be "good." Choosing the "better" school, Slutzker said, often leads to skewed enrollment. That along with gentrification further leads to segregations in school.
"We're seeing self segregation in our schools and I don't think it's something that people are doing on purpose but I do think it's an issue that we need to put a lens on and try to figure out why is this happening and what can we do to help it," Slutzker said.
Slutzker is also running to improve teacher recruitment and retention. He worked as an elementary school teacher for five years in Jefferson County but decided to leave the classroom after having his first child. He said he left teaching because it wasn't financially viable.
"I left the classroom because I couldn't afford to be a teacher and a parent," Slutzker said.
He'd like to see DPS offer competitive wages to teachers and continue to invest in educators so that they are willing to stay in the field. Slutzker added that he would also like to see DPS work with nonprofit groups and Teach for America to recruit more diverse teachers, including bilingual ones.
Safety is also a priority for Slutzker. With the reinstatement of SROs, Slutzker said the DPS' central office will have to do a thorough job making sure that the officers are protecting the students and not racially profiling them.
But one of his main issues with SROs is budgetary concerns. Currently they are being funded by the city and, if that ends, he wouldn't want DPS to make them a top budget priority. Instead Slutzker said he'd like to see the money being spent on preventive measures such as an increase in mental health checks and social services.
Charmaine Lindsay
The past 17 months as director of District 5 simply wasn't enough for Lindsay, so she's running to keep her seat and continue serving DPS families.
Lindsay was appointed to the board in June 2022 to fill the vacancy left by former director Brad Laurvick. The voting session was contentious, according to Chalkbeat, but ultimately Lindsay was chosen because some board members appreciated her experience as a family lawyer and mediator but also because she stated she would not seek reelection.
But things change.
"Having learned a lot in the last year and having gotten to a point where I have a solid relationship with the other board members, most of them, not all of them, I got this momentum going and I don't want to see it stop," Lindsay said. "Now that I understand [the job], I didn't have enough time to do a lot of the stuff that I feel like needs to be done"
The relationships between board members has also been a concern among families, especially when disagreements are on display during important votes and on social media.
Lindsay said it's something the board is working to improve, through showing a unified front, increasing transparency and professionalism and making sure accurate information is getting out to families when it comes to media coverage on important topics, like with recent school closure votes.
She said there was "unnecessary controversy" that made the board look "chaotic" as they made the "tough decision" of closing schools. The focus, she said, should've been on community outreach.
But Lindsay said the board did the best it could considering the school consolidation plan was created before many of board members were elected. She added that the reality of the present-day situation in the city is that more schools may have to close and this board, having now had the time and experience, will have to do a better job at being equitable and fair.
"They didn't get enough input from the people that were actually affected which is why we didn't close the schools on that list when it came up for initial vote," Lindsay said. "I think we're trying to look at a better way to do it that's more equitable and not just taking into account numbers and not just punishing schools because they have 10 more kids than another school."
While Lindsay was not a part of the board cohort that created the school closure and consolidation plan, she was the representative community members looked to during the vote, especially Fairview family members, many of whom say Lindsay wasn't communicative.
Lindsay said she has spoken with residents in Sun Valley but only recently attended a neighborhood organization meeting. During the meeting, she said that she has committed to reopening Fairview "with better services" if families move back to the neighborhood. Lindsay told the Sun Valley Neighborhood Coalition that the school would need at least 30-40 children enrolled in kindergarten in order for the school to reopen and be viable.
"Most people want to go to a neighborhood school and if people do move into this neighborhood, they'll be able to walk to school. There's also the commitment from DPS to really fix up the school nice if it does reopen, is something we'll hold DPS accountable to," Lindsay told the Coalition.
On school safety, Lindsay is a proponent of SROs as long as they aren't overstepping their bounds. On their return to schools, she said the board also could have been more transparent and communicative.
She supports SROs in schools because of her grandson, who attends East High School, where two school administrators were shot and wounded on campus by a student, because he told her he feels safer with them around.
"In the past, the decision was made by the board to say that we're not going to have SROs in any school, so it's an effective ban of SROs. All we did was give the decision making process up to the people that are in the buildings and know what's best," Lindsay said. "We're giving schools choices....Talking to the students and talking to the teachers in the buildings and giving the schools the flexibility to make their own decisions."
Lindsay said she'd like to see the DPS spend more on mental health services to stop any issues before they become a problem.
Other top priorities for Lindsay include educational improvements such as increasing math and reading skills and making sure more students of color are placed in the gifted program. She noted that both issues are an equity issue and if not addressed can lead to dropouts. She said most students who get in trouble often are gifted children who are bored.
Lindsay is also concerned with teacher recruitment and retention, especially for bilingual teachers and teachers of color.
She said she's ready to hit the ground running if reelected to start making faster and smarter decisions. She understands not everyone will be happy with the hard choices the board will be making in the upcoming years but ultimately she said her main concern are the students.
"Every decision that I've made, I've been accused of all kinds of crazy things throughout the last year, has been independent," Lindsay said. "It's been looking at all of the facts. It's been well researched and it's been trying to do what's in the best interests of the students at DPS. I'm not taking any sides, not looking at anything but what is the best thing to do for the students in this situation. That's where I've tried to come from and that's where I will continue to come from if I get reelected."
Editor's note: Denverite was unable to schedule a portrait with Lindsay before time of publication.
Head to our full voter guide for more information about the upcoming school board race, profiles of the candidates and other local and state measures that will appear on Denver's November ballot.
