Months-long negotiations between Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association (DCTA) concluded on September 1, ending the possibility that teachers would be left without workers’ rights just weeks into the 2017-2018 school year.
“A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes himself to light the way for others.” I remember reading that quote on a syllabus back around 2008, in one of my teacher-education classes at the University of Colorado Denver. I remember considering the slight hint of morbidity in that quote, and deep down in my gut I knew it was a foretelling of what was to follow.
After Colorado legislators passed House Bill 15-1170, which changed the measurement for high school success to include any post-secondary schooling, districts around the state began laying the groundwork to make big changes. Many are now shifting from a college-preparation model to a career-preparation model, asking individual students what they’d eventually like to do and then tailoring their courseloads to those goals.
Five oil and gas companies lent staff, resources, and donated educational materials for use in the classroom in a partnership with the Poudre Learning Center, which builds workshops for students and teachers in northern Colorado. Among the companies were Noble Energy, the second largest producer of oil and natural gas in the state, as well as Anadarko Petroleum — the company responsible for the home explosion that killed two in Firestone last May.
The students at ACRES aren’t just growing vegetables; they’re growing their career portfolios and reaping college credit in the process. And at the same time, Jefferson County is cultivating a model for future high school programs across the state.
Steve Myers changed his name to Steve Swarup Jackson and taught English for four and a half years at Yeshiva Toras Chaim, an orthodox Jewish school on West Colfax.
In Colorado, which has an extremely healthy economy but ranks 42nd in educational funding per pupil, teachers such as Stuart Sanks are increasingly turning to online crowdsourcing and benefit events to pay for school supplies or student extracurricular activities. And that’s not to mention how often they’re reaching into their own pockets to make sure the kids they teach are getting the scholastic opportunities they deserve, whether they’re part of a comparatively wealthy demographic or not.
A former first-year University of Denver student is suing over what his complaint describes as “false allegations of non-consensual sexual contact” with a fellow DU freshman that led to his expulsion. The suit is at least the second of its type filed against the university in the past two years, and the attorney handling both cases accuses the school of using a procedure that is patently unfair to those accused of such offenses and gives them little opportunity to defend themselves.
In the lawsuit between the Thompson family and the 18th District Attorney’s office, a deputy district attorney compared the child to the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, who killed twenty children and six adults at a Connecticut school in 2012 — the second deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.
Over much of the past decade, several inmates in a Colorado prison developed a series of revolutionary programs that challenged the way most correctional facilities handle gang violence. Their approach was so successful that Colorado Department of Corrections administrators are now using some of their ideas for their own new prison-gang program.
The firing of philosophy instructor Nate Bork is a startling lesson on the plight of adjunct teachers and a window into a much larger issue: the crusade at community colleges across the nation to revamp curriculum and teaching methods to boost grades and retention rates.
A settlement has been reached in the case of Grant Neal, a CSU Pueblo student and football player who was suspended for what a witness believed was a non-consensual sexual encounter with a female athletic trainer. But as part of the pact, neither the university nor Neal’s legal representatives will say how the matter was resolved or if any money changed hands.
The new superintendent of the Jefferson County school district has hit the ground running. Only ten days into the job, Dr. Jason Glass is on the road today, July 10th for an eight-stop “listening tour” around Jeffco that is intended to allow teachers, parents and residents to speak up about what the school district needs to do next.
Approximately 3,200 school counselors from across the country and the globe are expected to descend on Denver for the annual conference of the Virginia-based American School Counselor Association, which gets underway on Saturday, July 8. And while ASCA assistant director Eric Sparks expects the event to be a lot of fun, plenty of serious topics will be discussed, and that’s appropriate. Sparks enumerates ten of the biggest challenges facing school counselors in 2017, and his run-down collectively illustrates how these educators are on the front lines of major societal changes whose impacts will be felt on young people for many years to come.
On Wednesday, June 28, parents at Educare Denver at Clayton Early Learning were informed that come August 18, their children would no longer be able to attend the school, leaving some thirty families scrambling to find childcare in six weeks.
Contract negotiations stalled last week between Denver Public Schools (DPS) and the Denver Classroom Teacher’s Association (DCTA), a major union that represents almost 6,000 Denver educators, when DPS announced that it will ask a federal third-party mediator to take over the bargaining process.
The Fifth Annual Colorado REACH (Respecting Ethnic and Cultural Heritage) Conference opens today, June 22, at the University of Denver. For the past five years, the conference has offered training and insight on multicultural education and provided participants with tools for teaching in diverse classrooms. Michelle Campbell, chair of the conference,…
Editor’s note: The author is a junior at the University of Colorado Boulder and the multimedia managing editor at the CU Independent. The names of the subjects in this story have been changed to protect their identities. Loose, blood-red vomit poured from Demetri’s mouth, his half-digested noodles swimming down the…
The Colorado faction of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation announced on Tuesday, June 7, that it will spend $200,000 on a school choice “Issue Education Effort” in June and July.
A Boulder-based program that brings performances of Shakespeare plays into Colorado schools as part of an anti-bullying program has received a $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest.
The fifth-graders in Michael Diaz-Rivera’s classroom are anxious for summer. The boys in the front fidget under rows of fluorescent lights, and a few students have their heads on their desks. But everyone perks up when the 31-year-old teacher clears his throat and begins class. “As you can see, today…
Roosevelt High School in Johnstown will be open for classes today, May 9, following yesterday’s closure. In an announcement from the Weld RE-5J School District, Dr. Martin Foster, the district’s superintendent, writes that local police say a possible threat over a Roosevelt Spanish teacher’s use of a President Donald Trump piñata has been discredited. Apparently, the whole thing was fueled by rumor.
