Participate in the Education Symposium
On Thursday, January 22, 2009, I will be hosting an Education Symposium for the residents of District 5. Please join Mayor Hickenlooper, DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet, members of the DPS Board of Education and me at 6 p.m. in the Hill Middle School auditorium, to discuss your questions and concerns about the education system in Denver.
Prior to the Education Symposium, I am touring District 5’s elementary schools. Since I last visited these schools during my first term in office, several new principals have come on board, including Liz Trujillo at Mayfair’s Palmer Elementary. Ms. Trujillo was recruited back into service by DPS, after retiring from the Pueblo school system as an elementary principal. I commend DPS in scanning the environment for talent, and am pleased that Ms. Trujillo answered their call. Her reason was the right reason: “I want to be with children.”
In these tours, I bring my experience from being on the DPS Board of Education for six years and for having trained to be a teacher. I look for student engagement, the works on the walls and in the halls, eye contact and smiles, the indefinable rapport between staff and the principal. I listen for the goals of the principal in the environment they are working. I liked what I saw and heard at Palmer.
Upcoming opportunity
Every Easter egg hunt at Mayfair Park is an explosion of preschoolers and young children. I would urge Mayfair to invite Ms. Trujillo to this event so that she can see the potential in enrollment for Palmer. Ms. Trujillo would like to see even more neighborhood children attending Palmer in the years ahead. This is your neighborhood school, and I hope parents are giving Palmer a good look. The community of children and parents that unite to strengthen their neighborhood schools brings a lasting sense of belonging, easily rekindled for years into the future.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me anytime at 303-355-4615 or marcia.johnson@denvergov.org.
Unlocking Taxpayer Dollars to Provide Services
The November election is over and Denver voters did not always agree with the statewide results. To me, the most important disagreement between Denver and their county neighbors was over Amendment 59 that would have addressed many roadblocks in the Colorado Constitution to rational fiscal management, education funding and the statewide demand for services.
Among those roadblocks is the 1992 Constitutional amendment known as TABOR. TABOR was a complicated initiative designed to cut spending. The initiative was attractive because it gave power to voters to make decisions about tax increases, but it also had other provisions that forced Colorado to cut schools, road maintenance, human services, health care and economic development. Denver voters did not support the initiative back in 1992 but the rest of the state did.
To address a few of the problems created by TABOR, voters passed an amendment in 2005 that provided temporary adjustments to TABOR and allowed the state to retain and spend excess revenues on important services. Amendment 59 would have provided a permanent adjustment. Denver voters said yes to Amendment 59 by a 20-percent margin but the rest of the state voted against it and the proposal failed.
With the United States facing an economic meltdown, what steps can Colorado take to prepare?
I believe one small but important step to consider is a change to TABOR that could be referred to the voters by the 2009 General Assembly. TABOR has a requirement for local governments to add a 3 percent natural disaster reserve onto its other reserve funds. Local governments haven’t used this fund because the funds are very restrictive and must be repaid within 12 months.
In Denver, the TABOR reserve increases our total reserve funds to 20 percent or higher, with the TABOR reserve withholding $30+ million in services from Denver voters. I welcomed a proposal to allow the City to use real estate instead of cash for some of its TABOR requirement. The state has never used real money, and many school districts, fire districts and counties have explored other ways to meet the TABOR requirement without using cash.
I have seen counties and school districts all over Colorado cut services while holding TABOR reserve funds that they cannot use. I believe there is support for a bill that would let local governments ask voters for permission to end the TABOR reserve. Come January, I hope to work with a broad coalition to have the General Assembly introduce such a measure.
More Appropriate Consequences for Kids
I was saddened to see that Mayfair leader Nancy Jackson has passed away. Nancy always had a warm smile for everyone she came across. She spent much of her life helping young people, as a teacher, mentor and community activist. My condolences go out to her friends and family.
In other events, our city and school district are exploring new ways to deal with kids who misbehave. While in the past, juveniles causing minor problems have been treated like criminals, we are now using other means to not only make the punishment fit the crime, but also correct the behavior.
Last year 7,675 kids appeared in the city’s juvenile court, with most kids being cited for minor city violations. Kids committing crimes that are more serious, a much fewer number, go to the District Juvenile Court.
Of the violations bringing kids to the city’s juvenile court, dubbed “191J,” curfew violations are by far the most numerous, at over 2,000 for the year 2007, followed by “unlawful acts around schools,” at just over 1,100 last year.
The Rules
Curfew violations are given for kids under 18 staying out past 11:00 p.m. on weekdays or midnight on weekends. Most of the violations are during the summer, with the highest number of violations occurring on Sunday nights and the location with the most violations being outside the Pavilions Movie Theaters downtown. One group of kids received tickets while waiting for the opening of “SNIAGRAB” ski sale at The Sports Authority.
My office had a call a while ago from a father whose daughter was ticketed for a curfew violation while waiting for him to pick her up after a movie downtown. Having never received a ticket before, she was traumatized, missed a full day of school for court, missed another three days of school to help clean up trash with a juvenile work crew, and then had to pay court costs.
Fortunately, the city is starting to revisit its use of the courts for processing curfew and other minor violations. For a period in the 1990s, we used centers around town to hold the kids for parents to pick them up. Perhaps we should even look at simply issuing a fine or changing the curfew law altogether.
Misbehavior
Similar changes are needed for the other main category of misbehavior, unlawful acts around school. These include things like a fight in a school hallway, a kid being at a school where they don’t belong and damaging school property. Many of these violations are found by school resource officers, who write tickets indicating when a kid must appear in court. Punishments again range from court fines to working in a cleanup crew.
Many schools are beginning to use “restorative justice” programs instead of issuing tickets for these kinds of violations. This is where the school brings in the parents of the kid causing trouble and the victim if there is one to resolve the underlying issue and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
The new approach to problems in schools is much like the way we dealt with these activities “back in the day.” Maybe we could do the same thing for kids staying out too late by simply calling their parents or taking them home. Both approaches would save a lot of time and money for the city, families and, ultimately the criminal justice system.
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