In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education ordered institutions not to discriminate against transgendered students and staff members. However, schools were allowed to request an exemption from that ban, typically for religious reasons. Now, the Education Department has released the names of schools that asked to continue policies the feds…
Tim Gianulis has been inviting kids with special needs into his art classes since he started teaching 25 years ago at Godsman Elementary School in Denver, bringing students from the special-education classroom across the hall into his own room to give their teacher a planning break. Over the years, as…
We wouldn’t advise messing with Grace Davis. Sixteen-year-old Davis recently helped organize a protest at Ponderosa High School, which she attends, and afterward, her claim of being bullied by two members of the Douglas County School Board — board president Meghann Silverthorn and director Judy Reynolds — has led to an…
Editor’s note: Last week, we reported about the resignation of newly appointed Denver school board member MiDian Holmes after revelations surfaced about a past child-abuse conviction. The following report about a meeting last night to deal with the vacancy was written by former Westword reporter Melanie Asmar and appears courtesy of Chalkbeat…
Denver Public Schools is in damage control mode in the wake of revelations that newly appointed board member MiDian Holmes has a past conviction for child abuse. Making the case even more interesting are reports that board members knew about this aspect of Holmes’s past before appointing her. DPS certainly seems…
Last year, as we’ve reported, a sexting scandal at Canon City High School was deemed so serious that a football game was cancelled out of fear that there wouldn’t have been enough uninvolved players to field a full squad — and the school’s administration floated threats of felony allegations against…
April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month — and that’s no joke. According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, there were more than 15,300 distracted driving crashes in the state last year — a number that has grown by 16 percent in the last four years. And 69 people were killed…
Students in Delta County high schools and middle schools will get some new reading material on April 1., including the Satanic Coloring Book. And that’s no joke: The Western Colorado Atheists and Freethinkers are working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to provide the kids with everything from guides to…
The controversy that led a Denver tenth-grader to request her drawing of a police officer in a KKK hood pointing a gun at a child of color be removed last week from public display has raised several thorny but perennial questions: Should students be given full artistic freedom? Or are…
We seem to remember a saying that goes like this: Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. But apparently the folks at Denver Public Schools can’t. In February 2015, we reported about criticism of DPS for the lateness of a snow-day call — a delay that prompted…
Yesterday, we told you about controversy stirred by a painting of a KKK-hood-wearing cop pointing a gun at an African American child that had been displayed as part of a student art show at the Wellington Webb Municipal Office Building. After the National Latino Peace Officers Association branded the image “hate…
The image, part of a Denver Public Schools student art show displayed at the Wellington Webb Municipal Office Building in Denver, is obviously meant to provoke. After all, it features a police officer in a KKK hood holding a gun on an African American child in a white hoodie against…
A lawsuit brought by seven current and former teachers against Denver Public Schools will be taken up by the Colorado Supreme Court, the state’s highest court announced Monday. As reported in the April 2014 Westword cover story “Wrong Answers,” the teachers allege that DPS is misusing a part of the…
Colorado colleges often fail to score great grades on national surveys. Last year, just two Colorado institutions made the top thirty in an NPR roster of premier U.S. colleges. And in recent weeks, we noted that a ranking of America’s best public colleges featured just one Colorado school in the top…
In recent years, we’ve noted that Colorado colleges haven’t placed especially well in national rankings. In 2014, for example, Forbes listed only two Colorado colleges among the 100 best in the country: the Air Force Academy and Colorado College. Neither of these schools is included in a new report Buffalo Business First, a sister…
The ACLU of Colorado has filed a lawsuit against Adams State University on behalf of a former professor who started a website critical of hiring practices and was then banned from campus — and subsequently accused of posing a public safety risk by the university’s president. As we first reported last…
The tweet — in which a teacher is compared to a penis prior to the use of the hashtag #douchebag — seems like the kind of thing a pissed-off student might send. But it went out into cyberspace from the (now-deleted) Twitter account of a teachers union, the Douglas County…
In a part-timer economy, fast-food workers and janitors aren’t the only ones feeling the pinch. Skimpy wages, long hours and a lack of benefits can also be found in the white-collar sweat shops operated by the Colorado Community College System. Last night, a group of CCCS instructors gathered at the…
It’s not often that an academic study gets coverage on a website such as Bustle, whose main home page items at this writing includes “What Happens When You Use Tinder in the 1950s” and “How Different Does the ‘Fuller House’ Look?” But the site — like more expected sources, such as Inside…
We tend to think of snow days as being universally beloved by students of all ages. But that wasn’t the case for everyone impacted by the decision by the University of Colorado Boulder to close the campus yesterday. That’s because the closure took place during finals week — and students…
“Abortion, sex — these are all forbidden topics. The good news about this organization is that because these are forbidden topics, you don’t usually expect to have a pro and affirming religious voice, and that’s what we want to be,” says Reverend Valerie Jackson, the new president of the Colorado Religious…
Earlier this year, we interviewed Amy Hasinoff, a CU Denver communications professor and the author of Sexting Panic, a book highly critical of the way our society deals with the sexting phenomenon — often by criminalizing teens who take part in the activity. “One of the reasons we have such terrible…
