Parents at the Cole Arts and Sciences Academy, a neighborhood school in northeast Denver, have dropped to a collective knee and proposed marriage to the high-performing Denver School of Science and Technology. Parents Friday formally asked DSST to open its third campus, grades 6-12, in the imposing Cole building in the fall of 2011. This would allow students in the under-served neighborhood to enroll in pre-kindergarten and stay in the same school through high school.
Although others — most recently Montbello High School — have discussed the idea of an in-school feeder pattern, this may be the first time in Denver that such a marriage has been formally put forward. And marrying a chatter school to a neighborhood public school would be the best kind of mixed marriage.
Parents and school officials say that this move is an organic one, growing out of parental desire to see better options for their children. Bill Kurtz, the CEO of DSST public schools, told me that “near northeast Denver wasn’t on our radar” until Cole parents approached him recently.
If this is, as it appears, an authentic parent initiative, it will be interesting to see how the anti-charter forces on the Denver school board will frame their opposition. Or might they decide that this represents the community involvement they’ve been advocating for, and vote in favor of this plan?
Something tells me there will be opposition on the board — but not enough to stop this intriguing partnership.
Popularity: 2% [?]
The Denver Green School Partnership wrote a proposal for a k-12 school but was approved to open a k-8. We plan to try again for our high school (the part of the RFP we thought we were responding to) in a couple of years so it will be very interesting to see how this plays out. If they succeed at Cole, it may make our proposal seem less out there. I wish them the best of luck. I think vertical integration of this kind is the best chance we have to stop the blame game (my high schoolers don’t know anything because of the middle school they went to, etc.) and for teachers to really know kids as people and as learners over time.
[...] Well … freedom and autonomy lend themselves not only to innovation but also toward groundbreaking partnerships not nearly as likely to take place in the traditional public K-12 school system. Determined to place their mostly poor students on a track of college success, Cole parents and leaders recently have reached out to the Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) charter school as a potential partner. [...]