Kirk C. Watkins, Peak to Peak. On August 18, 2020, the District Accountability Committee (DAC), had a special virtual meeting to discuss the district’s effort to address equity among students. This was in response to the discrepancy in accessing resources between different segments of the student population.

Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), under the guidance of superintendent Dr. Rob Anderson, is working to follow through on its commitment to increase student equity in the new school year, and across the district. Inequity has historically been a prevalent condition in the district, with a wide gap between economic conditions for minorities and the underprivileged. 

Dr. Anderson, who was appointed superintendent in 2018 after serving in the Fulton County School District in Georgia, has aggressively approached the issue of inequity in the Boulder Valley School District. This year is no different as he has spearheaded the creation of a new strategic plan, which will be implemented over the course of the next five years. More information on the new strategic plan can be found at https://www.bvsd.org/about/strategic-plan. 

For the special meeting on August 18, the newly formed committees gave updates on their respective projects. The newly appointed DAC Chairperson, Ralph Frid, called the virtual meeting to order at 12 p.m. 

Nicole Rajpal, the vice chairperson spoke next, giving an overview of the expected structure for the days meeting. Rajpal broke down the way the meeting would be held and gave protocols for virtual meetings for DAC.

The first presentation was delivered by a group made up of Brendan Sullivan director of safety and security for BVSD, Jonathan Dings executive director of assessment and program evaluation, Rob Price assistant superintendent operations, and Mike Gradoz the assistant superintendent for human resources at Boulder Valley. Mr. Gradoz spoke about the strategic plan and “creating an oversight committee which would be made up of community members, students, and staff, that would oversee the strategic plan around all of our equity topics and activities throughout the district.” He stated that the Colorado Education Initiative, or CEI, a non-profit developed to support and assist public education in areas such as equity, would be solicited to fill the role. A representative from CEI, Landon Mascaranez, vice president for community partnership, gave a presentation on developing equity councils. He began with a brief background on the CEI initiatives, and some history of the racial justice effort in relation to equity on a large scale. Part of CEI’s mission would be to address the subject of SRO’s, or School Resource Officers. He highlighted the recent experience that CEI had while working with the state of New Mexico over the last six months, and during Covid 19 restrictions. Mascaranez’s work included designing equity councils which have led to creating access for the powerless to sit at the governance table. 

Brendan Sullivan, Officer Ruben Rojas of the Lafayette Police Department, and Jonathan Dings were next with a presentation regarding SRO, or School Resource Officers. Their presentation gave an overview of SRO’s in BVSD, and responsibilities of the campus safety officers, who are employed by BVSD. Sullivan started the segment with a breakdown of the strategies designed to maintain safety in the schools. 

Following that, the floor was given to Rojas, who along with being a police officer is the SRO for Centaurus High School. Officer Rojas spoke about the job that he performs, including a breakdown of his daily experience, mentorship of students, and dealing with student and family relations. He also oversees issues with driving training, drug use, and crisis response for emergency events. His main purpose as an SRO, however, is to try to solve problems by building relationships and deescalating situations before they become untenable. Part of his duty involves assisting with mental health issues for students, as he is often the first person that stressed students will approach. Other issues that he deals with include sexual assaults, abuse and neglect. Rojas stated that he participates in ongoing professional development training.  

Following that was a question and answer with the DAC members. More information can be found on the BVSD website under the DAC subheading.

Brendan Sullivan, BVSD head of security gave the next presentation, which was an overview of the SRO and the Campus Safety Officer (CSO) programs. There are seventeen Campus Safety Officers currently hired and trained by BVSD and are only in the high schools. He noted that the CSO’s were tasked with “site security and student supervision,” while SRO’s have “advanced training and legal authority to investigate and enforce state and local laws.” In contrast to CSO’s, SRO’s are employees of local law enforcement agencies. 

Jonathan Dings was next with a presentation on crime reports for BVSD over the past three years. It showed a disproportionate amount of arrests for Black and Latino students over that time. Also were the SRO summons data which had a similar result. He shared arrest statistics and SRO summonses. These also showed disproportionate racial numbers. He then showed caller numbers, which showed that staff were the most frequent callers. The focus seems to be transparency in sharing these numbers in order to identify patterns and to set policies in order to level the numbers.

This was followed by a question and answer period. Questions about how the online shift would affect the roles of School Resource Officers and Campus Security Officers, and how to navigate these resources without in person contact due to Covid 19. SRO’s will still be available and are able to be contacted. Also discussed were personnel numbers and other logistics. 

Jorge Chavez, the newly elected secretary of the DAC Executive Committee was the next to present. Chavez, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, has a background in criminal justice and sociology. He has been given the task of forming a sub-committee which will study the historic roles of SRO’s in the district and draft a recommendation to the board of education in October. 

Again, it was emphasized that there were no directions that were eliminated at this point because this was a step one meeting in a five-year, multistep process, that is still in its infancy.

Ralph Frid updated the attendees on the summer meetings with Alicia Sanchez Elementary, which was able to successfully engage a wider array of voices and representation.

Nicole Rajpal showed a video from the Student Accountability Committee (SAC) section of the BVSD website, which showed the new training media available. Frid and Rajpal gave a quick walkthrough of the materials including an interactive guide with a link to the Colorado Department of Education website with further resources.

While Dr. Rob Andersen, the superintendent of BVSD, did not give a formal address, he was in attendance and provided answers and responded to inquiries. 

The meeting was adjourned at 1:22 p.m.

General meetings are scheduled from 6:15 - 8:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of the month unless otherwise noted and are open to the public.

The following is a link to the current BVSD DAC meeting schedule at https://www.bvsd.org/about/district-accountability-committee/dac-meeting-schedule

(Originally published in the August 27, 2020, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)