Cherry Creek School District

Cherry Creek School District Introduces Major Changes This School Year

With school underway, it is time for Cherry Creek residents to sit back and assess some of the major changes that have taken place for this school year.

One of the biggest changes to affect students and parents was the change in starting time, with the elementary schools now starting an hour later than the middle schools in an effort to address bussing issues. In addition to changing starting times, a larger number of parents are now having to transport their children to and from school because the walking distances for middle school and high school students have been increased by half a mile.

While the increase in walking distance is certainly far more inconvenient for parents, most agree that they would rather see the school system saving money in this way rather than cutting back on classroom teachers. In fact, by rearranging the schedule and increasing the walking distance, the district stands to save more than $1.8 million this school year as well as $5 million over the next three to five years. After seeing a $17.7 million cut in state aid, the district found itself needing to make cuts in all departments.

Despite the increase in walking distance, Cherry Creek students are still walking far less than those who attend Denver Public Schools. In fact, Cherry Creek middle school students are only walking up to 1.5 miles and high school students are walking up to 2 miles, while middle school students attending Denver Public School must walk up to 2.5 miles and high school students must walk up to 3.5 miles to get to school.

Meanwhile, 19 schools within the Cherry Creek School District also underwent infrastructure improvements during this past summer thanks to funds provided by a bond issue that was passed by voters back in 2008. The construction resulted in larger classrooms while also streamlining the overall layout of the schools in order to improve classroom instruction while also providing teachers and students with improved access to the school and its facilities. Parking lots, irrigation systems and landscaping were also improved at the schools affected by the bond issue.

Census shows education gaps by district

Interestingly, the construction projects that were funded through the 2008 bound issue helped to reduce some of the effects of the $17.7 million budget cuts. Furthermore, the bond issue made it possible for the district to open Pine Ridge Elementary School for this school year, as crews were able to complete improvements on wiring, protection equipment, plumbing systems and heat and air conditioning during the summer.



In the Adams 14 school district that includes Commerce City, nearly one in five adult residents – or 17 percent – have less than a 9^th-grade education. Altogether, 40 percent of adults over the age of 25 living in the district on Denver’s northeastern edge have yet to achieve a high school degree.
In contrast, more than half of the adults living in the Douglas County School District have graduated from a four-year college or university, including 17 percent with advanced degrees such as doctorates.
Data showing the estimated education levels of adults in each Colorado school district was released last month by the Census Bureau, part of its five-year survey of residents between January 2005 and December 2009.

It provides a rare, if incomplete, district-by-district look at a factor linked by researchers to student performance – higher parent education levels tend to produce higher academic achievement. But the data should be interpreted with caution since the Census Bureau did not break out parents separately.
Still, Education News Colorado found adult education levels appear to track closely with other factors, such as poverty, correlated to achievement and may deepen the picture of the challenges facing some school districts.
Adams 14, for example, had the lowest level of adults aged 25 and over with bachelor’s degrees – 7 percent – among school districts statewide. It also has the highest poverty rate of any sizable Colorado school district with 8 of 10 students qualifying for federal lunch aid, 10 percent of its students are classified as homeless and 45 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home.
“Yes, we believe it impacts student achievement,” John Albright, the district’s communications director, said of the education levels data. “I think the challenge is trying to isolate those statistics versus all the other statistics.
“What we find is you’ve got the majority of families in our district in what could be considered survival mode. We certainly can’t be in the business of saying it’s the family’s fault but when families are in survival mode, often the first priority is not developing language with your child – it’s putting food on the table, paying rent, finding a place they can live next month.”

Highs, lows in education levels

Not surprisingly, the district with the highest level of adult education attainment is Boulder Valley, home to the University of Colorado’s main campus. Just 4 percent of adults aged 25 or older have less than a high school degree.
Boulder has the highest percentage of adults with four-year college degrees – 62 percent – and 28 percent of those degrees are advanced, meaning master’s, doctorate or professional diplomas.
Story continues after graphic.

Colorado districts with highest, lowest % of bachelor’s degrees among adults

	Adams 14 School District	Boulder Valley School District
Less than 9th grade	17.1%	2%
9th to 12th grade, no diploma	23.2%	2.2%
High school graduate, GED	32.7%	11.7%
Some college, no degree	14.9%	16.5%
Associate's degree	4.8%	5.4%
Bachelor's degree	5.8%	34.4%
Graduate or professional degree	1.5%	27.8%
Total high school graduate or higher	59.7%	95.8%
Total bachelor's degree or higher	7.3%	62.2%

Cheyenne Mountain District 12, location of the pricey Broadmoor resort and the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD, has the state’s second highest level of advanced college degrees at 27 percent. Academy School District 20, home of the Air Force Academy, is third with 24 percent of adults with advanced degrees.
All three districts – Boulder, Cheyenne Mountain and Academy – are powerhouses on the state’s annual exams. They fall to the bottom on rankings for poverty rates, however, with Boulder’s 17 percent the highest of the trio but still well below the statewide average of 31 percent.
Walt Cooper was head of the Ellicott School District, where fewer than 15 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, before being hired as Cheyenne Mountain’s superintendent ten years ago. Both scenarios present challenges, he said.
“We don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to motivate students or stress either to students or our community the importance of learning, the importance of achievement. Our community culture and our school culture does that,” he said of Cheyenne Mountain. “That wasn’t the case in Ellicott. We had a supportive community but the culture around the importance of student achievement is something we really had to work to try to develop.”
On the other hand, “Typically when we talk about at-risk students, we think of students from poverty or students from disadvantaged backgrounds which result in their being at-risk of not succeeding. I always challenge that notion,” he said. “Many of our brightest and our most talented students, if we don’t rise to the level of being able to meet their needs, to challenge them, to move them forward, they’re equally at risk.
“Our challenges are still great. They’re just great on another part of the spectrum.”
A tiny district in southwestern Colorado may be the more surprising entry on the highest education list.
Hinsdale County, which occupies 1,100 square miles south of Gunnison, was once named the most remote county in the lower 48 states, said Diane Bruce, who sits on the county’s Chamber of Commerce board.
It also has the state’s highest percentage of adult residents with high school degrees – 98 percent.
“People don’t relocate here for normal reasons,” Bruce said, noting 96 percent of the county is public land. “They come for peace and quiet.”
Hinsdale’s school district, which serves 100 students on a four-day-a-week schedule, was one of 14 districts statewide to earn the state’s top rating of “distinction” in November.

Metro area education levels

Adams 14 came out near the bottom of the state’s list, as one of seven districts to receive the lowest rating of “turnaround.” That means district leaders have until Jan. 15 to submit an improvement plan to state education officials for their approval.
Albright, the district spokesman, said the lower adult education attainment levels, combined with other factors such as poverty, language and mobility, show up across the spectrum:
Students may arrive behind in language development as youngsters, may lose newly learned skills during the summer months and may not see the importance of education as they reach middle and high school.
“If parents don’t necessarily have a high level of educational attainment, then students may not see the connection to their current life of having a high level of educational attainment,” he said.
The district has reached out to families by placing a part-time parent liaison in every school this fall. And it operates an intergenerational learning center at Adams City High School that provided basic adult education classes to 800 in 2009-10.
But the key emphasis for Adams 14 – while some other struggling Adams County districts have implemented dramatic structural reforms such as Mapleton’s small schools and Westminster’s standards-based system – is improving teacher quality in a traditional setting.
“We believe, regardless of where our students start on the achievement level, they will still realize growth over time if we have highly effective teachers in our classrooms,” Albright said. “We’ve built all of our work around that.”

Education levels of adults aged 25 and over in Colorado’s six largest school districts

Jefferson County

• Less than 9th grade: 2.2%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 5.2%
• High school graduate, including GED: 22.8%
• Some college, no degree: 23.4%
• Associate’s degree: 7.9%
• Bachelor’s degree: 25.3%
• Graduate or professional degree: 13.1%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 92.6%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 38.4%

Denver

• Less than 9th grade: 7.5%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 9.2%
• High school graduate, including GED: 21%
• Some college, no degree: 18%
• Associate’s degree: 5%
• Bachelor’s degree: 23.9%
• Graduate or professional degree: 15.3%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 83.3%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 39.3%

Douglas County

• Less than 9th grade: .8%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 1.9%
• High school graduate, including GED: 13.9%
• Some college, no degree: 21.5%
• Associate’s degree: 8.5%
• Bachelor’s degree: 36.3%
• Graduate or professional degree: 17.1%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 97.3%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 53.4%

Cherry Creek

• Less than 9th grade: 2.4%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 3.6%
• High school graduate, including GED: 17.3%
• Some college, no degree: 22%
• Associate’s degree: 7.7%
• Bachelor’s degree: 29.7%
• Graduate or professional degree: 17.3%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 94%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 47%

Adams 12 Five Star

• Less than 9th grade: 4.1%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 7.8%
• High school graduate, including GED: 27.5%
• Some college, no degree: 23.6%
• Associate’s degree: 9.4%
• Bachelor’s degree: 19.2%
• Graduate or professional degree: 8.4%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 88.1%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 27.6%

Aurora

• Less than 9th grade: 9.7%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 11.3%
• High school graduate, including GED: 30.2%
• Some college, no degree: 22.2%
• Associate’s degree: 7.8%
• Bachelor’s degree: 13.9%
• Graduate or professional degree: 4.9%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 79%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 18.8%

Statewide figures

• Less than 9th grade: 4.5%
• 9th to 12th grade, no diploma: 6.7%
• High school graduate, including GED: 23.7%
• Some college, no degree: 22.1%
• Associate’s degree: 7.6%
• Bachelor’s degree: 22.9%
• Graduate or professional degree: 12.6%
• Total high school graduate or higher: 88.9%
• Total bachelor’s degree or higher: 35.5%

Colorado Senator Accused of Causing Wreck and Putting Grandson Back Into Car Seat After Being Ejected

Colorado Senator Suzanne Williams (Dem. Aurora) is being accused of an extraordinary act in Amarillo, Texas. Police allege that, after her 3-year-old grandson was ejected in a head-on accident, Williams placed him back into a seat in her SUV after the wreck.


Police allege that her two grandchildren were lying down in the back of the vehicle while Williams was driving. Her son was also ejected in the wreck.

The wreck resulted in the death of Brianna Gomez, a pregnant woman who was a passenger in the other vehicle. Doctors were unable to save her unborn son. Gomez and her husband were wearing seat belts and their two children were secured in safety seats.

Making matters worse for Williams, she is accused of drifting into oncoming traffic in her Honda CRV before colliding into the Gomez vehicle. Notably, Williams has called for stricter child child restraint laws in Colorado.

At a minimum, she is looking at a wrongful death action and could be charged with obstruction if the grand jury believes that she placed the child back in the seat to hide culpability. She could obviously argue that she was acting instinctively in putting the child back in the car. The question is whether Williams will seek the opportunity to speak to the grand jury. Usually defense lawyers strongly discourage clients from appearing before grand juries where they are not allowed defense counsel and the rules of evidence do not apply. However, in a defense based on motivation, she may not want to risk leaving the matter to the jurors — and the prosecutors.

Her Senate bio states:

Senator Suzanne Williams (South Aurora) is serving her second 4-year term in the State Senate after serving eight years in the Colorado House of Representatives. Senator Williams is the only registered American Indian state legislator in Colorado. Currently, she serves as the Democratic Caucus chair. Senator Williams worked for 22 years as a special education teacher in the Cherry Creek School District. She is a champion for children and Native American issues.