Denver Public Schools moved quickly Friday to try to placate families upset by a vote to close a long-struggling Montessori school in near northeast Denver, announcing the launch this fall of a Montessori program at a higher-performing elementary school nearby.
In a letter to Gilpin Montessori School families, deputy superintendent Susana Cordova said the new Montessori program at Garden Place Elementary would run alongside the school’s traditional program. A similar setup exists at Lincoln Elementary School in the West Washington Park neighborhood.
Gilpin students who live in the area’s enrollment zone — a boundary that includes several schools in near northeast Denver — will be provided free bus transportation, with a stop at Gilpin.
Garden Place scored “green” — the second highest mark — on DPS’s most recent color-coded school performance framework. Gilpin scored in the red — the lowest category.
Current Gilpin students also will be given priority status at other DPS schools with Montessori programs — Monarch, Denison, Lincoln and Academia Ana Marie Sandoval. Seats can be hard to come by at at least some of those schools, however, and transportation may be a barrier to many families.
The district had little time to waste in putting together the option because DPS’s school choice window — when families fill out forms listing their top choices for the 2017-18 school year — opened last week and closes Jan. 31.
The letter to parents Friday did not come as a surprise. At a meeting at Gilpin earlier this week, three DPS board members pledged to push the district to think about making another Montessori option available in the area.
The school board unanimously voted Dec. 15 to close Gilpin and two other low-performing elementary schools under a new district policy known as the School Performance Compact.
Since then, however, Gilpin parents and teachers have mobilized to try to save the school. Citing emails obtained through an open records request, they have questioned whether Gilpin’s score on a recent quality review was “willfully altered” to meet the criteria for closure because the district wanted to repurpose the building for office space or to house a charter school.
District officials disputed that, saying the review was conducted by an independent party and that no decisions have been made about the building. The board members who attended the meeting defended the new school closure policy. None indicated they would heed Gilpin supporters’ call to put the issue of potentially reversing the closure vote on the board’s Thursday meeting agenda.