By Stephen McKenna | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
The Cherry Creek School Board meeting in April featured a strategic plan update on special populations by Dr. Tony Poole. Those not steeped in the priorities of the school board and Superintendent Chris Smith might think it wise to fixate on “disproportionality” as Dr. Poole does; but that fixation does not seem to be improving proficiency in reading or math, where half the district’s students do not test at grade level. Or much else.
Dr. Poole and his team of seven special populations directors (each paid between $100,000 to $155,000 a year, while teachers make between $58,710 and $119,532) track disproportionality across the district’s special education (SPED) and gifted and talented (GT) programs. Disproportionalities are tracked against goals established by the district’s strategic plan and the Colorado Department of Education (CDE).
While disproportionality could be tracked in many ways – gender, socio-economic status, parental involvement, height, weight, IQ, etc. – Dr. Poole’s presentation focused on race and only race. Race is very much in focus in much of the school district’s work.
Dr. Poole reported that under the CCSD strategic plan, the district’s special education population is about 1% overrepresented in black students and 5% overrepresented in Hispanic students. Against CDE goals, which track special education against a number of indicators, CCSD is also overrepresented with special education black students who have an intellectual disability. This prompted Dr. Poole’s team to look at the identification problem because “this was very strange.”
Looking into the data, the special population directors found that 41% of the black students identified with a primary intellectual disability should have been identified as a multiple disability. So, according to Dr. Poole, this is an issue with training and misidentification of disability. To solve this problem, all severe needs special education teachers and school psychologists were trained in appropriate identification. Dr. Poole is also working to correct students previously misidentified with an intellectual disability, that is eliminate the disproportionality.
Dr. Poole then turned to Hispanic overrepresentation, stating that the CDE data shows higher numbers of district Hispanics were identified with a severe learning disability (SLD) and an intellectual disability. The problem with intellectual disability, according to Dr. Poole, was again misidentification which his group is correcting. The severe learning disability disproportionality is more complex. They initially thought it had to do with language barriers but they realized that was wron, so they are now digging through the data student by student and school by school to try to identify trends. That work is ongoing.
Looking at Gifted and Talented disproportionality is another goal in the district’s strategic plan. Before getting into the numbers, Dr. Poole said he was happy to announce that Superintendent Smith has approved a name change from “gifted and talented services” to the “office of neuro divergence” starting July 1. Dr. Poole and the administration feel that the new name “more accurately represents the students that they work with.”
Gifted and talented (soon to be neuro divergence) data shows 4% overrepresentation of Asians, 13% overrepresentation of whites, 5% underrepresentation of blacks, and 10% underrepresentation of Hispanics in programs. To identify the problem here, Dr. Poole noted that before 2022, gifted and talented identifications were done at the school level without district oversight, which led to differing identifications in different schools.
To correct this, the gifted and talented department has a weekly meeting every Monday that lasts all day where they analyze and approve or send back all proposed gifted and talented identifications. They have also taken the extra step of developing a gifted and talented data scorecard, an “original creation” of the district that shows disaggregated data by race, highlighting areas of over and under identification, with beginning and middle of the year updates on underrepresented categories. They also provide a launchpad list of students for potential identification in underrepresented categories.
Dr. Poole’s “problem solving” slide reflected that between Jan. 8 and Feb. 16, the gifted and talented director and liaisons met individually with 43 elementary and 12 middle school principals and their gifted and talented teachers to “ensure aligned focus on the strategic plan goals/initiatives, to goal set, and to outline progress to goal timelines.” The district also holds monthly gifted and talented professional development presentations aligned to disproportionality.
He next shared some gifted and talented data scorecards. He proudly proclaimed that Dry Creek Elementary’s card “was completely proportional in their gifted and talented identification.” Dr. Poole credited this complete proportionality to a gifted and talented teacher and principal who have gone to great lengths to identify and eliminate disproportionality.
The Challenge School is also perfectly proportional across racial categories, which Dr. Poole called an “excellent, excellent, accolade for the department because the GT department took over the admissions process and the testing process for Challenge School just three years ago, when it was not proportional.” As a different kind of example, he put up the card for Willow Creek, which is not proportional because it is overrepresented with American Indian, Asian, and African American students. He cautioned that we cannot think overrepresentation is bad in this instance and suggested: “We might want to think of overrepresentation for all,” channeling Garrison Keillor’s reference to Lake Wobegone, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Dr. Poole wrapped up the presentation by noting challenges the district’s Language Supports and Services (LSAS) department faces, as the district has absorbed 965 students new to the country since August of 2023, 788 who are non-English proficient. CCSD has 7,872 multi-language learners, surpassing special education as the highest Special Population. The highest numbers of “newcomers” have come to Overland, Prairie, the Hollys, Village East, Highline, Eastridge, West, and Cherry Creek High School. Funding gaps in this program, as well as universal preschool and SPED, also present challenges to the district. Nonetheless, Dr. Poole claimed that “Cherry Creek is once again a destination district for special education.”
Following the presentation, each of the board members thanked Dr. Poole for his excellent presentation. Director Anne Egan said also that she appreciated the idea of “overidentification for all as not such a bad thing,” and asked how Cherry Creek compares to the nation regarding disproportionality. Dr. Poole responded that disproportionality is a national problem and no school district in the country has solved the gifted and talented disproportionality question. However, he said he is “absolutely confident that we will be first.”
No one asked Dr. Poole how perfect proportionality across the dozens of races and mixes of those races in each of the 67 district schools is equitable, which means fair, or realistic. And who makes the racial classifications and why do they think classifying each student in this way is helpful? Is it up to the student, like gender is in Cherry Creek?
What if a student is the child of a black and Hispanic parent, how are they classified? What about a child that is part black, part white, and part Pacific islander? Are Dr. Poole and his highly paid team preordaining students to a status based on this racial classification?
The Cherry Creek school district, and many others, have taken our country’s founding principle that “all men are created equal,” and turned it into a system of racial quotas for equal outcomes for every student based upon their race. They do this not only by myopically focusing on disproportionality in special education and gifted and talented, but with respect to discipline (which is dangerous), advanced placement classes, innovation curricula and pretty much everything else. Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts had it right in 2007, when he wrote in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
This focus on students’ race is not limited to Cherry Creek, nor are Cherry Creek’s unacceptable test scores. According to the 2024 KIDS COUNT Data Book published by The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 62% of Colorado fourth graders weren’t proficient in reading in 2022, up 2% since 2019; and 72% of eighth graders were not proficient in math in 2022, a 9% increase in three years.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.