The Boardhawk Podcast

Episode 1: Inaugural Boardhawk podcast

• Alan Gottlieb

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Alan Gottlieb:

Hi, this is Alan Gottlieb, and this is the BoardHawk Podcast.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Hi, my name is Alexis Minooka Harrigan. Nice to be here.

Alan Gottlieb:

We are introducing this new podcast as part of BoardHawk's offerings because we feel that people love to listen to stuff when they're driving around in their car or elsewhere, and this is a new way of getting information to people who are interested in Denver Public Schools and education in Colorado. I am going to introduce myself briefly and then Alexis will introduce herself and we'll talk about why and how we are planning to do this. I am a longtime education writer in Denver and education advocate. I started out covering Denver Public Schools for the Denver Post in 1995, moved on to the Peton Foundation for 10 years where I did education programming, then launched an education news service called Education News Colorado that eventually merged with a similar outfit in New York City to become Chalkbeat. I left Chalkbeat about a decade ago to start my own communications consulting and writing business and launched BoardHawk as part of that in 2019. I'll go into that a little more in a moment after Alexis introduces herself.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Thanks, Alan. I'm a DPS mom. I have two kids in DPS right now. Most of my career has been in the education policy space. I have I worked at DPS in a public affairs position in a couple of different roles there. I previously served as the education and human services policy advisor to former governor, now U. S. Senator Hickenlooper. I worked in education, immigration, and Latino outreach work within U. S. Senator Michael Bennett's office. The last seven or so, eight years, I've been at the national level. Working for a national ed tech nonprofits, but for the last year, I've been working freelance writing a monthly column for BoardHawk where I provide commentary on both the school board, the superintendent, and just interesting things that are happening either with me as a mom and DPS or just other interesting DPS happenings. I'm excited to talk more about the podcast.

Alan Gottlieb:

Great. Thanks, Alexis. So what is BoardHawk? As I mentioned a minute ago, BoardHawk launched in 2019 or early 2020 after the 2019 school board election. When I started Ed News Colorado back in 2007, part of what we offered was an op ed blog that was attached to the news website. Ed News Colorado merged to become part of Chalkbeat. We took out that op ed commentary section because we felt Chalkbeat wanted to be a straight down the middle news organization. We didn't want to have the perception of being biased one way or another or favoring one side, quote unquote, over the other. I have felt ever since then That kind of an offering was missing in this space. It made perfect sense that it shouldn't be part of Chalkbeat, but I felt a new sense of urgency to bring it back when the school board flipped in 2019 from being a divided board or earlier completely in support of the Chalkbeat. Reforms of the Michael Bennett, Tom Boasberg era to a board that in 2019 suddenly became the majority opposed to those and really wanting to change course in ways that I felt from my years of experience was not going to benefit the kids of Denver. So I was able to raise some modest funding and launch BoardHawk as primarily. An opinion and commentary site fact based reporting based commentary and opinion about Denver Public Schools and its board. This became even more urgent after the election of 2021 when the board became 7 0 and was fortunately in some ways highly ineffective at enacting its agenda because there was so much infighting and bickering. And although the board members hate this word, it's absolutely true dysfunction on that board. So BoardHawk has acted. somewhat as a thorn in the side of the current board and administration. But I think we're fair and if pointed in our criticism and we think this podcast will just further the conversation about Denver public schools, that seems to be missing as the news media continues to contract. The local news media in this area. Alexis, do you want to talk a little bit about the podcast and kind of what we're thinking about doing with it?

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Sure. Happy to. So with the upcoming 2025 year, there's going to be several topics of discussion amongst the ed policy wonks and folks in the Denver education community. Chief among them being the upcoming board election. This upcoming year is an election year for the Board of Education one seat that is currently held by Dr. Kerry Olson. She is term limited, will be an open seat. The other seats that are open are actually going to be, the incumbent is running for re election in those positions as well so we'll be certainly talking about that. One thing that I forgot to mention in my introduction is I actually ran for the school board in 2019, an unsuccessful campaign, which I often say is one of the best things that could have happened to me And since then have really been paying attention to what the board has been doing, and it's been nice to look at it both from the perspective of a parent and a former staff member, but also as a former candidate myself, so really excited to talk to the candidates to hear who the candidates are and hopefully have a couple of them, if not all of them on this podcast. And it will certainly invite them all. I'm not sure they'll all accept, but they're all welcome. Welcome to join. So that'll be one that I think will really pick up the second half of the year, probably after May. The other piece earlier in the year, however we actually, as of the recording of this podcast, right before we, we logged in and recording this board docs just dropped the new reasonable interpretations for the agenda item coming up for a meeting this Thursday, we're recording this podcast on a Tuesday, the week before Christmas, so Alan and I have not had a chance to dig quite into the reasonable interpretations or the progress roadmap, but I'm certain that'll be probably, if not the first episode, one of the very first episodes, we'll be talking about what the superintendent evaluation looks like it'll be the last time he has a chance to provide input on what his evaluation will look like ahead of his contract renegotiation in 2026. And actually the fun, funny timing on this last night, I actually just provided public comment on the The superintendent evaluation and I'm excited to share in the new year and during the new podcast episode what Dr Marito's comments and feedback was directly after my public comment, he came up to me and had a few things to say to me. So happy to share more. It'll just require you all to tune in to the first full podcast episode.

Alan Gottlieb:

way to plug it and leave people hanging so that they want to join the next one. Yeah, absolutely. I think just to be clear about what reasonable interpretations are, it's part of policy governance, which is way too complicated to go into, but essentially the board is, or Dr. Marrero is proposing revamped criteria for how he's evaluated. And the quick look that Alexis and I were able to take at this before recording was that they are There are more ambitious goals for student achievement improvements than had been the case in previous evaluations, which were a joke of a one percentage point improvement across a lot of categories. Now it's much higher than that, it appears. So that's encouraging. One other point really quickly on the school board elections is that the reason these are especially significant is because the four seats that are up for real are for election. One is, as Alexis mentioned, is going to be. No incumbent, but the other three where there are incumbents are all people who have been part of the so called pro union majority for the past several years. And so there's a real potential that the board could flip back in a different direction from where it's been over the last four years, which would be highly significant.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Yeah, and then the other thing I would mention that I hope we will be able to cover more in the new year and maybe bring on some experts who certainly know more about this topic than Alan and I do with the new Trump administration and some of the attacks happening particularly on so called sanctuary cities where cities like Denver and Aurora are really standing up and protecting the migrant and undocumented populations. It'll be really interesting to see what threats come forward and how DPS and the board work to protect students and families, but also how they collaborate with local and state officials to make sure that students and families are protected. And that's, to leave it on a positive note, at least for some of the things we'll cover, I will say DPS has been pretty bold and very courageous and how they've been taking positions and positioning themselves to be protective of migrant students and families.

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah, I agree. They made a fairly strong public statement the last day or two about how they will do everything in their power to protect those communities and those, their students and the families that are part of DPS. So kudos to them for that. Okay we will be back soon. We will, our goal is to have this be a bi weekly every other week podcast. Sometimes just the two of us, probably even more often a guest or two. We are going to be very much focused on what the news is. As we decide what we're going to be focused on in every given podcast episode there's always a lot going on and that will only increase as the, we get closer to the election in November. So we really look forward to seeing you all building an audience and hearing your feedback about how we're doing. We do not pretend to be experts at the technical side of podcasting. So if there are stumbled. Which is et cetera. We actually recorded an earlier version of this and the attempting to edit it, it was a mess. All of the content was great, but it was a disaster. So I'm not gonna, I would rather have stumbles and imperfections in what you hear, then Voices out of sync with video and all of that, because I tried in my bumbling way to edit it. So you're, what is what you get. And, if you don't like it, we're really sorry, but we hope it sounds okay. And at least looks decent. And we're human beings who are just trying to do something that we think will be good for everybody. And it may not be technically perfect. So

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

take it or leave it. Throughout this process, you can give us some tips, any podcast aficionados out there and maybe we can get other folks to convince Alan to unblur his background because when I did see it unblurred, it was a classic journalist basement with the bricks. So maybe if we're really lucky, we'll be able to to get a, even a more sneak peek into the making of this podcast.

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah, I'll have to like, just straighten it up a little bit, get rid of the dead cat. Do things like that. We look forward to this everybody and we would love your feedback as we get going. Take care and have nice holidays, whatever holidays you celebrate.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Thanks.