Janel Highfill lives in Northwest Denver. She is a parent of two students at Brown Elementary and a member of Stand for Children.

I was filled with nervous excitement Wednesday night as I pulled up to Edison Elementary, where I was part of a small group of parents leading a community discussion about Northwest Denver schools. We first had the vision for this last February after joining Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization that has been supporting our efforts to gather parents, community members, and teachers to share concerns and priorities for our schools.

As I stepped out of the car, I thought of North High School, just a five minute drive from Edison, with a remediation rate of 75 percent. That means that out of the 189 students who graduated in 2009, only 47 left with the skills needed to dive into college-level work. I also thought about the impact of recent budget cuts on schools like Brown Elementary, which has been successfully transformed and is now on the road to success.  Northwest parents and community members like me are frustrated by these issues, but this meeting wasn’t about complaining, it was about finding solutions.

Given our excitement at the thought of coming together to discuss these pressing needs, I was surprised by what I saw in front of Edison: DPS Board members Andrea Merida and Jeannie Kaplan standing in front of building trying to silence the dialogue.

Yes, you read that right. Two elected board members were passing out fliers with inaccurate, anti-Stand for Children propaganda. With DPS’s recent focus on Northwest Denver and the forthcoming Northwest Community Committee, which will create a feeder pattern plan for schools in our quadrant, you’d think that Kaplan and Merida would welcome and encourage parents and teachers to roll up their sleeves and brainstorm solutions. But instead, their goal seemed to be to discourage us from having a conversation.

Several of us invited Kaplan and Merida inside to our meeting, which, despite their efforts, was a great success. Perhaps if they had come in to hear our ideas, Kaplan and Merida would have gleaned valuable insight into what matters to parents and teachers. Perhaps they could have used our input to lead the district to provide the quality education that all kids deserve. Clearly, these aren’t their top priorities.

DPS is facing a number of struggles, including an intense debate around the Far Northeast turnaround plan. I’m surprised that Kaplan’s and Merida’s top priority last night was to stand outside Edison Elementary and attempt to stop parents from coming together. Is this really how our elected school board officials should be spending their time?

Most of us who are committed to education issues, no matter which “side” we fall on, agree on the values of parent and community engagement and focusing on children’s need first. Those of us who met last night passionately embrace those principles.  Those who stood outside, clearly don’t.

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Earlier this week I wrote a blog post asking readers to weigh in on whether I should allow anonymous comments on this blog. I banned pseudonyms for bloggers more than a year ago, but have allowed people to comment anonymously, though few have chosen to do so.

My question was prompted in part by an unfortunate incident last weekend when an anonymous commenter turned out to be one of my regular bloggers, who, unbeknownst to me, decided to take on a harsher persona and a pseudonym to make some points he felt he couldn’t make under his real name. Sunday, with an assist from me, Janine Vanderburg discovered the commenter’s identity. To Alexander Ooms’ credit, he immediately owned up, and explained his actions.

Janine discusses this incident in a new post on her Save Lake IB Blog. While she has the outlines of the story right, there are inaccuracies I would like to correct. First of all, she takes a swipe at me for my “grandmotherly admonition to ‘be nice’”  while allowing comments like some of “Horse With No Name’s” harsher missives. Perhaps she missed the play on KIPP’s slogan, “Work Hard. Be Nice.” But no matter. While Janine hints at hypocrisy, she has the chronology backwards. It was those same harsh, anonymous comments and my uneasiness about my decision to run them that prompted me to start thinking about banning anonymous comments, and to ask people to ‘be nice.’

Second, Janine refers to HWNN’s last comment, about her blog, as particularly virulent. Actually, it wasn’t. It was an aggressive critique of the role Janine’s Save Lake IB Blog has played in the Lake issue. There was one clause in one sentence that Janine objected to, and which I removed at her request. I thought the rest of the comment was a valid critique of the blog, well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. I removed the rest of the comment, and all of HWWN’s comments, after his identity was revealed, and after talking to him about it. Subsequently, he reposted his final comment, minus the offending clause, under his own name. Janine again asked me to remove it, which I told her I would not do.

One question that has troubled me from the start is that the Save Lake IB Blog has itself been penned anonymously. Only in the last day has Janine begun signing her posts, at the bottom, with a lowercase jv. Until then, only those in the know had any idea who was writing the posts. Perhaps other people wrote some of them, but Janine was the main person behind the blog. And it’s impossible to tell if others contributed, since all were unsigned. Some of the Save Lake posts were pretty harsh, certainly as harsh as anything written under the moniker Horse With No Name.

It’s also interesting to note that at least one post on the blog has been removed. That’s the one that featured photos of purported classrooms in the Lake Middle School basement. The photos of tiny, windowless spaces raised questions about the wisdom of DPS filling the building by moving a second school in there.

Then, at the Nov. 30 school board meeting, Superintendent Tom Boasberg discredited that blog post and its photos by presenting a brief slideshow of photos of the actual “basement” classrooms. Big windows, plenty of light. Ample room. He admonished the person or people who posted the photos for irresponsibly spreading false information. Shortly thereafter, the post came down, with nary an explanation, refutation or apology.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that people who live in glass houses, etc., etc.

Janine and I have worked together closely on issues over the years. I respect her as a tireless and passionate advocate and watchdog. She and I disagree on some aspects of the Lake issue, as well as tactics employed by both sides in the debate. I would hope that when the dust settles from the current flap, we will find ourselves once again agreeing more often than not.

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I got into a heated discussion with some close friends of mine over the weekend. We were at a party for my wife’s birthday, when the Lake Middle School/school board meeting came up.

The discussion ended poorly and I felt bad that we had ended the discussion curtly and abruptly. We’ve communicated since then and all is well. My friends and I share common beliefs and values, we just happened to disagree. Friends can do this—they can hug and move on, knowing that they still share and value their friendship.

What about communities who have been fractured by disagreements? They can’t shake hands and move on unless they make a concerted effort to do so. The school board just ended its“counseling” therapy session. It’s important for them to work together; after all they are the ones who make the decisions—but what about the community? The school board is divided because the community is divided.

We have some work to do–some hard conversations to take place. I’d like to see someone who is well respected by the entire community come in and facilitate a series of conversations in the community about the direction of our schools and how that process can be better structured.

I’ve also learned a thing or two about the power of blogging. What I have recently learned is that while blogging can put ideas out there, blogging cannot take the place of good, honest, face-to-face dialogue. Let’s remember the power and limits of blogging as “conversation.”

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I too grew up in Chicago during the Richard J. Daley Administration. I saw many a political maneuver used by those who were fighting the Boss’s Machine.

They were fighting because they were marginalized and disenfranchised from city politics. They used these ploys as a way to bring attention to their plight.

I am not comparing the machine politics of Chicago to the Denver school board. I am trying to reframe the issue with the recent school board hearing and Lake Middle School voting, from one that focuses on the intended results from the political maneuver to what I see as the more important issue: a lack of community voice in the reform movement in Denver.

Let’s use the recent events not as a moment to cry foul, but to look at the reason why people felt that they had to prematurely remove Michelle Moss from her seat. The issue is access to the process.

DPS knows it has work to do in bringing the community into the various conversations about reform. But what concerns me is that there is no formalized effort to monitor or set benchmarks to ensure that the community is involved.

DPS has established the Office of Community Engagement. Good step in the right direction. That Moss was unceremoniously removed from her seat should not cloud the real failure here. It truly was a failure to constructively engage the community.

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