DENVER — East High School parents will hold a news conference Monday to demand more answers from the Denver Public Schools Board of Education after the district sent an email to parents over the weekend addressing safety questions following the shooting at the school last month.
The news conference, scheduled to happen at 10:20 a.m. Monday, is in response to an email from East High School Principal Terita Walker, which tried to provide answers to concerns brought up by parents last week about lack of transparency on school safety plans from the district and its board of education.
In Saturday’s email to parents, Walker provided an explanation from district leaders as to why students who are on a pat-down procedure are allowed to attend classes. It also tried to address why schools can’t publicly share safety plans in schools.
Parents who read the email over the weekend were not satisfied with the answers it provided.
“We are tired of circular logic and finger pointing. We the Parents are taking agency because we suffer the most when our children are harmed or killed due to Denver’s failing education leadership,” said a spokesman for the Parent Safety Advocacy Group, or P-SAG, in a a news release Sunday.
The group – made up of more than 500 parents from East High and other schools in the Denver metro area – said they’ve seen no formal policy changes made after students returned to school following the spring break holiday, and added that following an April 3 meeting “DPS continued to mandate that local employees continue the very same practices which caused Dean Mason and Dean Sinclair to be shot on March 22.”
“No formal changes to the comprehensive safety plan were provided to educators or parents. No additional measures were created to give local principals or deans agency or empowerment to determine or scale a safety risk that might occur locally by a student known best to them. Board members were not invited to, and therefore did not attend the East HS Community meeting on April 3, 2023,” the spokesperson said. “The BOE and the Superintendent are blaming each other which resulted in Superintendent Marrero presenting the collective refusal to discuss changes in enrollment practices or safety assessment.”
Among their requests, P-SAG is demanding:
- The creation of a data-driven, common sense, comprehensive safety plan built with community input
- The creation o an objective and independent third-party managed process for all DPS employees to report DPS mismanagement and safety concerns without retaliation (such as a whistleblower hotline) and that the resulting in-school intelligence be transparently accessible to the community
- Replacing the current ineffective and confusing discipline matrix for a new tool which serves the safety needs of a large, diverse and vibrant population. This new tool should enable the deans and principals to make local decisions.
- The empowerment of local teachers, deans, and principals to make school-level safety informed decisions. These professionals know our children, can recognize/assess and appropriately address safety risks. Bottom line: The practice of top-down leadership and the district policy that enables it is broken–a hard reset is the only go-forward
- BoE agrees to immediately stop its practice of holding meetings about safety and district policy in executive session
During a secretive five-hour executive session held during a special meeting a day after the shooting of two school administrators by a 17-year-old student suspect at East High, the Denver Public School Board of Education not only suspended a controversial policy that removed SROs from all Denver high schools in 2020, but also directed the district’s superintendent, Dr. Alex Marrero, to come up with a long-term safety plan by the end of the summer.
The plan relies on community feedback from students, families, other school leaders and lawmakers before it is reviewed and voted on by the Board. If passed, the plan would go into effect prior to the start of the 2023-24 school year.
