The turmoil continues at the Ricardo Flores Magon Academy charter school in Westminster, the subject of our recent cover story, “A Hard Line.” Facing two lawsuits and many more complaints, the school has now (at least temporarily) lost its leader, about whom many of the complaints were made. While principal…
Regan Benson isn’t afraid to speak her mind, and neither are her kids, including son Blake, who made news for sporting a “Nobama” banner during Michelle Obama’s visit to Dakota Ridge High School, and Bryce, who ex-guv candidate Tom Tancredo backed in a controversy over wearing a “Border Patrol” T-shirt…
Ethan Hemming, charter school whiz and former interim executive director of the Charter School Institute, is no longer interim. The institute’s board of directors has made him the official executive director and head of an organization in the process of righting itself after several things went wrong, as explained in…
More Colorado college students are taking remedial courses once they arrive on campus, according to a report released today. In the 2010-11 school year, 31.8 percent of recent high school graduates were placed into a remedial course, as opposed to 28.6 percent in 2009-10. The remediation rate for students over…
Is Marcos Martinez, principal at the Ricardo Flores Magon Academy and the subject of our recent feature “A Hard Line,” on his way out as head of the Westminster charter school? Westword just received word that Martinez, chess instructor Dominic Martinez and director of curriculum and instruction Gabriela Guzman are…
I’m three weeks an intern for Westword, and with each day, I’m made more aware of the strengths (and the pitfalls) of my journalism education at CU-Boulder. Nothing scares me more than joining my older brother in his misery caused by the mania surrounding this economic downturn. “Good luck finding…
What does a minter look like? Despite a recent Google search, we at the Latest Word are still unsure how to picture one. But we could find out soon, because minters are among the choices offered by the student government at CU Denver as a new mascot for the school’s…
Nancy Werkmeister, a former assistant principal at North High School involved with the problem-ridden credit recovery program, is now working at Montbello High School. Denver Public Schools spokesman Mike Vaughn says Werkmeister “has a part-time contract to help with scheduling to make sure students are matched with the right classes,…
Five years ago, teachers at the Emily Griffith Technical College Language Learning Center, which offers free English classes to refugees, recognized a problem: Even when refugees landed jobs, they had trouble holding onto them. “We noticed that they were lacking in American workplace skills,” says dean of instruction Slavica Park…
A group of parents associated with the Ricardo Flores Magon Academy is airing its concerns about the charter school, which was the subject of our recent feature story, “A Hard Line.” They’re circulating a petition to remove the school’s leader, Marcos Martinez, and have sent a list of concerns to…
The school children shall melt no more! Or if they do, they’ll do it later in the summer. The Denver Public School board of education has voted to push back the school start-date this coming fall, after a mid-August heat wave caused students to sweat and their parents to petition…
Denver’s graduation rate is on the rise. Statistics released today show that 56.1 percent of seniors graduated “on time” in the spring of 2011, as opposed to 51.8 percent in 2010. “On time” means they graduated four years after entering high school as freshmen. Meanwhile, the dropout rate stayed the…
Colorado is seventh in the nation when it comes to the quality of its charter school laws, according to a ranking released today by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That’s actually a downgrade from last year, when Colorado ranked fourth in the country. Why the slip? The folks…
Update: The State Board of Education has approved new standards for charter school authorizers — the school districts and one quasi-state agency that approve new charter schools. But the standards aren’t mandatory. As the Colorado Department of Education’s Amy Anderson tell us, state board members classified them as “guiding principles”…
The Charter School Institute board is once again complete. Last week, Governor John Hickenlooper appointed a ninth member: Liz Aybar, who once served as principal of the now-shuttered P.S. 1 Charter School in Denver. Aybar and the other eight board members have their work cut out for them, as explained…
The amount of money Colorado spends on children is shrinking at a time when the number of children — and the number of children in poverty — is rising, according to a report released today by the Colorado Children’s Campaign. President Chris Watney says it’s disheartening to watch the safety…
Back in May, the governor signed a bill to increase efforts to stop bullying, adding that students who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender should be protected — especially after a number of gay teen suicides. One Colorado, a statewide LGBT advocacy group, took the ball and ran with it,…
ColoradoSchoolGrades.com, a new website developed by a coalition education advocacy groups, attempts to simplify the process of figuring out whether a school is a gem or a lemon. Using the same data used by the state to label schools on a scale from “performance” to “turnaround,” the easy-to-use website gives…
Yesterday marked the death, for now, of a Colorado Board of Education rule mandating that school districts tell parents when staffers are busted for sex and drug crimes, among other offenses. That’s good news to Troy Lowrie, a strip-club owner who lost a side job coaching high school tennis after…
Applications were due yesterday for schools wishing to continue under the banner of the Charter School Institute, a quasi-state agency created in 2004 to approve charter schools rejected by districts with an ax to grind. The Ricardo Flores Magon Academy — the subject of our cover story, “A Hard Line”…
Earlier this fall, we told you about a parent-led crusade to delay the start of public school in Denver until September to avoid the heat that plagued August. This agitating led to the creation of a task force to survey the community about its start-date preferences. The results are in…
Enrollment in charter schools is growing nationwide, as well as here in Colorado. More than two million students now attend charter schools in the U.S., a 13 percent increase from last year, according to numbers released today by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Colorado contributed to that growth…
