Some state leaders treat square-state Colorado as their sandbox. It’s their place to build castles and kick sand in citizens’ eyes.

Two state leaders, Peter Groff and Terrance Carroll, recently objected to articles related to SB22-197, Innovation School Zones and Alternative Governance. From their perspective, innovation school zones in the Denver Public Schools (DPS) district have created amazing success stories, operated with impressive transparency and deserve to educate children unencumbered by nit-picky oversight from the elected DPS school board.

The legislation passed by Groff and Carroll created the concept of “innovation schools,” not innovation zones. DPS has many innovation schools, but only twelve are in zones. An innovation school operates with accountability to school boards. The innovation zones, through SB22-197 as it was originally written, would skirt or prevent that accountability through mandated arbitration that would delegate management decision-making to a third party. The bill’s impetus derived from recent actions by the DPS board to bring accountability and oversight to zone schools.

So based on the distinctions between innovation zones and innovation schools, let’s examine the assertions of the two former legislators.

Of 12 schools in the zones, nine have a significantly lower enrollment of students on free lunch and reduced lunch compared to DPS schools as a whole and non-zone innovation schools. All but one of these schools meet expectations by DPS assessment.

On the other hand, three schools in the zones with the highest percentage of free- and reduced-lunch students have seen deterioration in their performance results. As of 2019, the most current year for this data, one school is in turnaround status, one school is in priority improvement and one is on improvement-plan status. Another school, Northfield High, shows only 37% of students are on free lunch and reduced lunch. Its performance status has dropped from meeting expectations in 2017 to needing improvement in 2018 and 2019. Three schools with high percentages of free- and reduced-lunch students have seen declining enrollments.

This data indicate the challenges students on free lunch and reduced lunch face. Poverty is oppressive and it will take more than these zones are offering to overcome that oppression. It’s disingenuous to claim otherwise. It’s also disingenuous to state that these innovation schools in the zone are innovating their way to success.

In fact, part of the problem underlying the impetus for SB22-197 was that zone management wasn’t meeting its obligations under its innovation plan memorandum of understanding with DPS. DPS’s recent study of the NDIZ zone showed school leaders and teachers didn’t have good access to the zone board, zone management wasn’t providing oversight and coaching as promised, and there was a lack of transparency in how the board conducted business. Even to this day minutes to board meetings aren’t posted to school websites in the NDIZ zone.

Zone board members are not paid, just as DPS school board members aren’t paid. But zone board members do have strong connections to local foundations because that’s what the schools need to attract more money than state per-student funding and the extra money DPS provides to pay for non-district management services.

Dr. Ulcca Hansen is a board member for NDIZ in part because her children attend schools in that zone. But her presence is enhanced by the happy coincidence that her spouse, state Sen. Chris Hansen, just happens to be a chief Senate sponsor of SB22-197. The bill as he originally wrote it would give Dr. Ulcca Hansen more authority over school matters than any other parent in DPS except, perhaps, other zone board members with children in zone schools.

Another issue irks. These zones are supposed to bring “innovation” to schools. Several schools in the Denver zones promote their innovation as International Baccalaureate (IB) schools. The IB curriculum is rigorous. Students who successfully complete this curriculum earn college credit so they have a leg up when they move on to higher education. But to call the curriculum “innovative” is a stretch.

IB started in 1968. It was produced by diplomats reeling from the mess of the Vietnam war. The first set of baby boomers were just graduating from college in 1968 – Go Boomers! The IB curriculum has certainly matured in its fifty plus years of existence, but can we legitimately call it “innovative?”

And one more issue irks. A purpose of innovation schools is to innovate to create new best practices and to share those practices with other schools. Do Denver’s zones model this purpose? It’s difficult to proclaim to be “partners” to your school district when a bill sponsored by the legislator-spouse of a zone board member was originally designed to force publicly elected officials to accept the findings of an un-elected third party without recourse.

The amended bill reduces the arbitration mandate and appeal to the State Board of Education to recommended actions. Elected school boards thus hang on to their accountability authority by their fingernails. But as so often happens when bills become statute, new legislation may threaten elected school boards again. So the purpose of this article is to protect eyes from kicked sand in order to maintain vigilance.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.