Building A School From The Heart On Up In Downtown Denver

When I was a kid (yes, it begins that way), I went to school in a small town with 20 people in an elementary school of about 100 students, and then our elementary combined with the other elementary school in the next town for middle and high school, and my graduating class was composed of 98 students. That was it. The end. There was no lotto, no good schools vs. bad schools, no charter schools, no choice options, no pre-K, no schools created by impassioned parents, and no waitlists four times the size of my graduating class.

But now, I am a grown-up with two little boys, one of which is all too quickly approaching four. And, I live in downtown Denver, and by downtown, I mean the 16th street mall. And apparently, it is just about the season for us to start the application process for pre-K. And apparently, the school that is considered our district elementary is not performing all that well these days, and by not well, I mean it is apparently listed as one of the top ten failing schools in Denver.

So last week, my wonderful little family and I ventured to The Children’s Museum for an open house for the proposed new charter elementary school for the downtown area, The Downtown Denver Expeditionary School (DDES). I had a lot to learn. I was only vaguely familiar with charter, only recently heard of the expeditionary approach, and I was more than intrigued by how a group begins a school.

DDES plans to open in August 2013. It is a community-based project to develop a K-5 elementary school, and it plans to first open as a K-2. Their goals are broad but still defined as they should be in this early stage. They hope to focus on an intergenerational approach to learning by embracing the retired citizens in the downtown area, utilize the city as campus, focus on diversity and economic integration, and design the curriculum around four facets of the child: social, emotional, physical, and academic.

The crowd was also surprisingly large for the early stages of building a school and the presentation went through at least two rounds in order to accommodate the growing crowd. During the presentation, I met with a group of enthusiastic and impassioned individuals and was able to talk with the head of school, Jennifer Arzberger, a resident of downtown with a small child, who is also a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Denver in curriculum design. Jon Mann, the regional director of expeditionary learning, was also in attendance, as was the school board representative running for re-election, Arturo Jimenez. The President and CEO of The Children’s Museum, Mike Yankovich, also attended the event and received a warm thank you for giving the community a temporary place to imagine a future school.

The immediate focus is to convince Denver Public Schools (DPS) and Denver residents that there is a need for a new school in the downtown Denver. They have a strong start by partnering with The Downtown Denver Partnership, a longstanding organization to promote and enhance Downtown Denver. The marketing strategy seems to be three-fold at this point. One aspect is to work on the retention of young families in the area before they move away because “the schools are bad”. A second strategy is to focus on commuters through the promotion of before and after school programs that will allow parents that work long hours downtown to commute from out of town with their child. And the third major focus and hopefully, draw, will be the expeditionary learning curriculum. Currently, one of the other expeditionary learning schools in the area, the Odyssey School, is a top performing school in Denver and had a waitlist of over 400 applicants for 20 spots last year. With those numbers, the organizers of DDES have defined a need for this award-winning curriculum.

The community members—mostly volunteers—my family and I met, have the heart and enthusiasm needed to proceed, but there are also some lofty challenges ahead. Once the charter is approved, there is funding through DPS to help with start-up costs. However, to get to that point next April, the community has been fundraising to employ Arzberger to prepare the detailed application. And then there is the building. There is no building that DPS can give the DDES. And the approximate cost for a downtown space for DDES is 5 million dollars, which all would need to be raised from the community once the charter is approved.

This open house is just a starting point for me. I need to learn more about charters, expeditionary learning, the arguments about the issues in DPS, and also define with my husband what we feel like we want from elementary education and what type of learner our child may be. Phew! It is a far cry from my educational experience when I had to walk a mile each way to school with no shoes in two feet of snow (yes, I have become not only my parents but my grandparents as well).

However, if all goes according to plan, the school would open right when my child begins kindergarten, which could be pleasantly convenient and perhaps prevent us from needing to commute out of town for a school or relocate in order to be close to a community with a curriculum we feel could be right for our child.

For more information on the DDES project visit http://www.mykiddo.org/.

Guest blogger Letia Frandina is a mother of 2 young boys and resides in Downtown Denver with her husband. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in communication studies. When she is not roaming the streets of Denver with her sons, she blogs at Downtown Digs in Diapers and teaches courses in media culture, public speaking, and urban rhetoric.

Author: Mile High Mamas