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C
OMMUNITIES
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DUCATION
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BUILDING AN ANTI-RACIST SCHOOL SYSTEM
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The CURE is Powered by: Righteous Rage Institute
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May 4, 2020
SHOW US THE RECEIPTS:
DPS’s Corruption, Lies, and Failure to Fund Our Kids
It’s that time of year again, when DPS finance department tries to pull the sheet over our head and push budgets through that are in no way aligned with the district’s stated values and priorities, or what is best for our children. The district tries to misdirect us by putting out communications and plans speaking in platitudes about the commitment to equity and social emotional learning, but we want to see the receipts!
For the past 15 years, DPS has been led by administrations that believe deeply in the ideology of high stakes testing and choice systems. This means that most of the district budget and central staff attention is focused on mechanisms to test, oversee, and rank schools and educators, rather than on the resources and support that kids need to thrive. For all the spending and effort, all that our students get as a result is that they are shuffled around from one building to another as schools lose funding for essential programming and ultimately close. If the district leadership was really leading with an ideology of equity and justice we’d see a completely different budget - one that prioritizes more school staff, including support staff like mental health providers, social workers, tutors, and extracurricular instructors, with significantly lower central office staff.
There has been a growing movement of parents, students, and educators calling for a deep priority on equity and social emotional learning in DPS, and asking for counselors instead of cops, culturally relevant curriculum, restorative justice practices, and access more rigorous coursework for students of color, among other similar things. The majority of voters in November agreed with shifting DPS’s priorities to focus on supports for students and filled all three vacant seats with new school board members that ran on that platform. And still, whenever we advocate for those investments that our children and educators deserve, DPS pushes back, claiming we don’t have the budget to fulfill this demand from their constituents.
So where
is
the money going and does that spending align with our values and priorities? Margaret Bob, a long-time education activist in Denver and retired teacher who worked within DPS for 35 years, has done a deep dive into DPS’s records. She filed several CORA reports to look at the actual data behind the claims DPS administration made last year to explain budget spending. She found a clear pattern of the district leadership giving highly misleading information to the public and to the school board in order to access funds that they ultimately spent on more positions and raises for central office staff against the wishes of constituents and the platforms of the officials they elected.
Lies
vs.
Facts
: What you need to know
The following table outlines the lies or misleading information that have been told by Susana Cordova and/or others in her administration, and the real information that they are trying to conceal:
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- Cordova is quoted in the Denver Post as saying “265 of the district’s central admin positions were cut” with the administration touting an $18.1M savings; figures repeated by senior staff and school board treasurer Andrea Cobian.
- Cordova asked the board for $11M dollars from reserves to cover “unanticipated costs of teacher salaries”
- Cordova has not been transparent in talking about the level of salary raises and bonuses central office staff received, including her c-suite; all the while school positions are being cut or asked to take salary cuts
- Cordova said she would eliminate bonuses for herself and her top administrators
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- Only 154 positions were cut from central office, and those positions tended to be lower paying roles often in schools (e.g., Literacy fellows) with an average salary of $56,800.
- 94 of the central office positions that they say were cut were rehired with new titles, in many cases doing essentially the same job, and two thirds of these individuals got significant raises when rehired
- There were another 23 positions working in schools with students but paid for by the central office, and DPS shifted the cost burden to schools requiring them to pay for those positions themselves.
- Those positions and the savings from them are included in the 265/$18.1M figures from DPS even though they are still part of the overall district-wide budget.
- In total, there was only a $9.4M in savings from the overall budget and another ~$2M in costs that home office handed off to schools to bear the burden
- $xM of that $11M was needed to cover the cost of rehiring 94 of the 265 central office admin positions that Cordova said were cut (including the cost of raises given to most of those individuals upon their rehiring).
- Those funds are equivalent to the cost of hiring 110 mental health counselors for schools, highlighting that we could afford to give all students access to mental health providers if DPS had chosen to prioritize that over secretly hiring back central office positions that were supposed to be cut.
- Central office staffers who made over $115k annually collectively received a net of at least $770k in raises last year. 11 people got raises of $20k+, while another 22 got over $10k+ raises.
- While two thirds of the individuals that were fired and then rehired to central office positions received raises, two thirds of the individuals that were rehired to school-based positions had to take pay cuts.
- This gives a glimpse into the culture and values of the district administration, and how they view central office positions as more critical and worthy of higher pay than the school-based positions.
- Susana Cordova is making $48,000 more this year than last year (while getting promoted from Chief Schools Officer to Superintendent)
- The Chief Operating Officer (Mark Ferrandino) and Chief Financial Officer (Jim Carpenter) each received approximately $30,000 raises last year, and the new Chief Communications Officer (Michael Vaughn) was hired at a salary level $30,000 more than the previous CCO
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Actions The School Board Must Take:
This information has been laid out and presented to the school board, and we expect that they stand up to the corruption and lies.
Specifically, the school board should:
- Conduct an external evaluation of the budgeting and hiring process to weed out the bad actors responsible for misuse of funds and corruption. We have seen DPS use “misuse of funds” for very minor infractions to push out teachers of color on the ground of “setting a high bar for ethics”. Our administrators should be held to the same level of accountability as the people in schools that they oversee, especially given the magnitude of misuse outlined above.
- Engage the community in a participatory budgeting process, so we can decide how precious resources are prioritized, rather than giving DPS administrators carte blanche to spend funds in ways that are not aligned with the values and priorities of the community. Start the budgeting process from a place of deciding what resources and supports are needed at every school to make sure students and families have the support they need (i.e., fund the “baseline of supports” like mental health counselors, school nurses, music/PE, and extra curricular education). Once those needs are met, determine how to use resources remaining for overhead and oversight, rather than the other way around as we have been doing.
- Cover any immediate budget short-falls by instituting salary reductions for central office staff making over $100k, and additional central office staff cuts. We do not have room to cut school budgets to make up for revenue short-falls. In fact, our schools need MORE not less for the next school year to be able to support students in a trauma-informed way as they return to school. DPS has been laying the groundwork for messaging that there is not room for further staffing cuts in central office. This isn’t true, as we know there are still 94 individuals in central office right now whose positions were allegedly cut but who continue to receive a salary from central office. Our highest paid district employees, especially those in the C-Suite, should not continue to make even more money while telling our children that there isn’t budget to meet their educational learning needs.
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