Denver’s unified school enrollments may offer Boston a lesson
DENVER — A few years ago, parents here faced a bewildering array of options when selecting their children’s schools. There were more than 60 enrollment systems within Denver Public Schools alone, and another set for the city’s charter schools, each with distinct timelines and applications.
The confusion discouraged many low-income families from choosing at all, while parents with greater resources took advantage of the complexity to “game the system” in their favor, residents said.
“It did not promote equity with families,” said Karen Mortimer, a Denver public education advocate. “If you were in the know, you got the better schools.”
But four years after the Mile-High City adopted a common enrollment system that provides one-stop shopping for traditional, charter, magnet, and innovation schools, parents praise the ease and convenience of finding the right match.
Interviews with Denver parents, educators, and community groups suggest that the city’s largely controversy-free adoption of unified enrollment offers lessons for Boston, where a similar proposal by Mayor Martin J. Walsh and school leaders has met with vehement opposition from some parents.
In Denver, the unified enrollment effort began with education advocates — not politicians. And the push included community organizations that helped win early support from parents, especially among the Latino and black communities that include most Denver students.
“I think it helped a lot,” Mike Kromrey, executive director of Together Colorado, a nonpartisan, multifaith community organization, said of parental engagement on the issue. “We ended up having parents speak on radio shows, testify, do [public relations], and bring a voice of ‘we see this as an equity issue.’ ”
In Boston, there has not been a comparable effort to build parent support, and attempts to involve parents before going public with the proposal may have backfired. Members of the Citywide Parent Council who were among the first to learn of the unified-enrollment proposal quickly became some of its most vocal critics.
Some of these parents oppose charter school expansion and have tied the enrollment plan to ongoing, separate efforts to raise the state’s cap on the independently run public schools. Supporters of the plan deny there is any connection.
“This is really a proposal to make more obvious the schools that we have available to us,” Rahn Dorsey, Walsh’s chief of education, said in a recent interview. “This proposal does nothing to create a school or eliminate a school.”
Dorsey and other unified-enrollment proponents say the purpose of combining enrollment systems is to make it easier for all families, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, to come to informed Denver’s unified school enrollments may offer Boston a lesson - The Boston Globe:
