After two months of public forums and much handwringing and debate among members of the the school board, Denver Public Schools board President Mary Seawell alone will pick the next person to represent Northeast Denver on the board.
The board at a special meeting Thursday failed to come to consensus around three finalists for the board seat vacated in January when Nate Easley resigned. The finalists are urban teacher educator Antwan Jefferson, lawyer Taggart Hansen and head of the Denver Urban League Landri Taylor.
“It’s a disappointment,” Seawell told her colleagues. “I really did want our board to get there. I believe everyone who participated tonight tried very hard.”
Board members Andrea Merida and Jeannie Kaplan put their support behind Jefferson, while Anne Rowe, Seawell and Happy Haynes were supporting Taylor or Hansen. Ballots were secret, but Merida and Kaplan discussed their support for Jefferson.
Seawell pledged to make her choice by Tuesday at the latest so that the new member can be sworn in at Thursday’s regular board meeting.
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Board member Arturo Jimenez declined to participate Thursday in the process to fill the board seat.
He read a letter to the board in which he stated, “I absolutely remain firm in my belief that we have not provided a meaningful process for appointment of a qualified individual to fill the vacant Board of Education post for Director of District 4… and I refuse to be a part of this false presentation to the community.”
Jimenez urged Seawell to reopen the field “under a transparent and fair process” or appoint Barbara Medina as interim board member. Medina, former assistant commissioner for Innovation and Transformation at the Colorado Department of Education, was among 25 original applicants for the seat. She was not among early finalists selected by the six board members. And a review of voter tally sheets indicated that none of the board members, including Jimenez, selected Medina as their first, second or third choice.
Seawell pledged to stick with the current process in fairness to the three finalists – and the sitting board members who participated.
Echoing a similar refrain as Kaplan and the Denver branch of the Colorado Latino Forum, Jimenez also asked Seawell to name someone to the board who would not run for re-election in November – noting that incumbents have a leg up on lesser known candidates.
Arturo Jimenez
Jimenez also criticized the background of two of the finalists – Hansen and Taylor – because they live in the upscale Stapleton neighborhood.
He wrote that this board knew from the beginning that a candidate would be chosen “who lacks a larger context than the homogeneous, upper-income Stapleton neighborhood – not even large enough to represent Montbello, (Green Valley Ranch), Park Hill, Whittier, Curtis Park, Cole and all of the other neighborhoods in the Northeast.“
Board members Happy Haynes and Anne Rowe took issue with Jimenez’ criticism of people who live in Stapleton – and of the process in general.
“We spent long hours in community meetings hearing from people, interviewing candidates in a public forum at great length,” Haynes said. “To say that’s just politics and a political sham is a disservice to the time we’ve all spent in this process.”
Merida acknowledged being conflicted about the process. She also said she’s taken a lot of heat for not selecting one of the three Latino candidates who were in the original pool of 25.
“This weighs on me…because I feel like I’m being pigeonholed,” she said. “Just because I’m a Latina I’m the only one that has to be concerned about Latino issues.”
Merida said she wanted someone who was first and foremost highly engaged in community and sensitive to the needs of the Latino community, regardless of that person’s race or ethnicity.
Merida said the conflict on the board and in the community about the appointment highlights the “tenuous connection this district has historically had with the Latino community in this town.”
“We’re making great strides in this district,” Merida said, citing a DPS Spanish language radio station and ongoing work on a court decree ensuring that the academic needs of English language learners are met. “At the same time, this has popped up because we have not had good, genuine community ties. Maybe this is a wake-up call.”
The statement quoted in this story made by Happy Haynes that “We spent long hours in community meetings hearing from people, interviewing candidates in a public forum at great length. To say that’s just politics and a political sham is a disservice to the time we’ve all spent in this process,” seems like a contradiction to a process now to be determined by one lone DPS Board President. If indeed consensus can’t be reached; if there appears to be increased potential community divisiveness over ethnic representation (with a formal complaint filed with the Office of Civil Rights challenging the process), why not compromise to the reasonable requst by many in the community and some board members, that an interim District 4 BoE member be appointed who has no intention of running in the November elections? The point of Directors Jimenez, Kaplan and Merida’s request was to NOT politicize this selection process, or the remaining eight months this new member will serve. This is a suggestion also recently made by a few experienced, knowledgeable and committed leaders in this district who’ve served as past policy-makers at the City Council and Mayoral level (Susan Barnes-Gelt and Wellington Webb). Let’s seriously consider their wisdom and advice.
All DPS School Board candidates deserve an equal, level playing field, unencumbered and unobstructed by DPS influence. Give the power back to the community -the voters – the taxpayers in district 4 – to participate in a fair and genuine election in November. The current DPS selection process has only divided a large and diverse community even more than when Nate Easley was initially elected to represent his constituents. This is a community deserving of fairly determining their own BoE representative for the next four years.
What a total waste of time and money! I predict that Seawell will choose Stand for Children’s Holmes.
This could have been done months ago. I also wish that Jimenez, who refused to participate, would just take his marbles and go home. That would leave another vacancy and could keep the board busy until the summer recess.
Watching the deliberations was like being in an endless bad book club meeting without the wine and gossip, and in which nobody read the book.
This is why elected officials shouldn’t quit mid-term.
For me it was like watching a slow-motion train wreck from a repeating nightmare.
We should add a penalty clause to the statutes whereby Board members can’t just walk away and leave the public with the expense of finding their replacement.
In what may be too nuanced of a clarification, I need to point out that I did not ask for my colleagues to consider an interim appointment; I merely tried to give air to the request. I don’t believe that any of us have the right to ask anyone viable not to run, and it’s an unfair request to make of someone who, at the end of a term, may have a completely different perspective of how the sausage gets made. However, I respect my colleagues’ differing opinion and wanted to make sure their request was considered fairly.
Hi I just read this today! Taggart Hansen has dropped out of application for vacancy.
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2013/0316/20130316_010633_HansenDPS2013.pdf
I don’t believe that it is possible to extract from a candidate a promise that he or she will not run in the general election. I think that democracy works. It is not “politics,” it is democracy and the best way to insure accountability in our elective officials. Such a promise means that a candidate would have to repudiate the voters before he or she was selected.
Finally, it would have placed Mary Seawell in an untenable position. The candidate is applying for the 4th District, but can also decide to run for the seat-at-large in November. If Seawell had decided to chose the candidate who vowed not to run in November, she would have been open to the charge that she was trying to eliminate her own competition.