The Boardhawk Podcast

Episode 1: The John Youngquist flap and revamped superintendent evaluation criteria

• Alan Gottlieb

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Alan Gottlieb:

This is the BoardHawk Podcast. I'm Alan Gottlieb.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

And I'm Alexis Menachal Harrigan.

Alan Gottlieb:

Greetings everyone and happy new year. Happy new year to you, Alexis. I hope you had a good holiday break.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

It was great. It was very low key. I just stayed in Denver. How was your break?

Alan Gottlieb:

It was good. Traveled a little bit, very relaxing and really happy to be back and delving into the issues of the day, of which of course there are many. That seems to always be the case. On today's podcast, which is our inaugural non introductory podcast, we're going to talk about a couple of things that we think are timely and important. One is the pending board meeting this Thursday. Today we're recording this on Tuesday, January 7th. On Thursday, January 9th, the board is going to. One of the issues they're taking up is alleged policy violations by board member John Youngquist. The other thing we're going to talk about is the evaluation criteria for the superintendent, Alex Marrero, that were toughened up a little bit and the board approved back in December, but we'll start with the Youngquist situation and I'll get, should I give it, I'll give a quick introduction and then and then you please fill in anything. So it's a bit of a tangled story, but the board, certain board members and their holdovers from the old board rather than any of the new board members are accusing John Youngquist, who's a longtime educator in DPS. He's been a principal. He's been an assistant superintendent. He was Probably best known for being, for many years, in two stints, the principal of Denver's flagship high school, East High School. He was the chief academic officer in Aurora for a time. I think he was superintendent in Breckenridge or Summit County. I think it was Summit County. So he's a very experienced educator. He's being accused of things that are not at all clear what the policy violations are, but they seem to stem from an effort John made to get A debate among the board about the retirement benefits for people who are on the state para retirement plan John is being penalized for working too many hours and getting paid as a board member. And he wanted some compensation, which isn't going to happen in which he's actually stopped pursuing. But in the act of that pursuit of that. Getting that compensation, the board held an executive session, which he wanted to be in an open session, but they did it in executive session anyway. And they also removed him, told him he couldn't be in the meeting or the Aaron Thompson, the legal counsel told him he couldn't be in the meeting, which upset him. He wrote a letter to the board president, Carrie Olson saying it was a violation of the law which is apparently one of the issues that they're saying was a violation of board policy that he said that I don't understand if that's how that would be the case or if it's actually true. Okay. Allegedly, some of the other stuff is the way he's treated staff and the way he's talked to staff, and that's some of the other alleged policy violations. Just, personal note, I've known John for a really long time, and he is not somebody who tends to berate people in an aggressive way, unlike some of the other board members who I won't name at the moment. Any other takes on what's going on here, Alexis?

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Yeah, I think, The fact that you already have this controversy around executive session, you would think that some of these board members who had been around during the debacle that was the March 2023 public comment issue would know better and really tread lightly when it comes to executive session, when it's appropriate and if it's ever appropriate to remove an elected Official from an executive session meeting or to request that, that's my first question is it even allowed to request that a board member not be present for an executive session, even if the topic is about that that board member. And I would say, especially if the topic is about that board member. So that's one. And then two, when I look at the actual policy that they're claiming, That he's violating. It's GP 13. 2. When we actually review the policy, I don't know if that means B if that's A. So when we actually look at the policy, it says that there is a process, which is good to know. I didn't realize this, that board members who have an issue or think that there's an issue that board members are violating a policy, that there's a process to address that, and I won't read the whole thing to you, but it is pretty short Essentially there's three steps. First, you have to have a conversation in private between the specific board member, in this case, Secretary Youngquist in a private setting and talk about what they have alleged to have violated, how they've alleged to have violated board policy and then with the board president, so Youngquist and President Olson in no event more than two board members, so again, I'm assuming it has to just be two people, then The second piece is if the alleged violation continues, which I'm assuming it is because this issue has not yet been resolved, then there's a discussion in a work session between the board member and the full board. I don't know if the December meeting where this was briefly brought up counts for that discussion in a work session or if that's what we're expecting to happen this Thursday. And then finally, if a board determines that there's a substantial violation, then a public censure of that board member may occur. I don't think we're there. I have a feeling that we're at Kind of this B point. Second there's a violation and then they're going to discussion, discuss it in executive session. But what's really concerning is that Youngquist doesn't know what he's being accused of yet. And that we as taxpayers don't know what he's being accused of. A lot to, hopefully to be uncovered at this Thursday meeting.

Alan Gottlieb:

I would expect and that's a really good summation. Thank you. I would expect John Youngquist to ask that this not be in an executive session that it be open. So we'll see what happens. I am not convinced that they're not going to try and censure him at this meeting. I don't know. I don't know that for a fact. I have no idea. But I just have a feeling that might be the case. And, it's just it's unfortunate because it You know, if the board's been criticized for anything in the past year, it's that the new members haven't been seen as being quite assertive enough in terms of pushing back on the old majority of people who are holdovers from the previous board. But the positive side of this is that they've been acting like grownups, which they weren't for the two years preceding. This kind of blows all of that up with the old guard, once again, rearing it's dysfunctional confrontational head and making this just It seems unnecessarily ugly unless there's something going on with John Youngquist that none of us know about. And again, I'd be surprised because I know him pretty well but anything's possible, but it's going to be very interesting, and we'll be watching Thursday to see what happens. Again as Alex as Alexis said a minute ago after all of the craziness around the illegal executive session in March of 2020, 2023 after the shooting, the tragic shooting at East High School that ultimately resulted in the student who did the shooting's death, suicide you would think that the board would be a little more cautious about about this stuff but they're

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

We'll

Alan Gottlieb:

just see what happens. And

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

the other thing I'll just say, the last comment on this is, I think it's very telling that you have the board member that's being accused of violation asking for this to be coming out in the light in public meeting, but then if it seems or it feels like some of the board members and potentially staff, I don't know if this is true, but potentially staff are wanting to keep this behind closed doors. Will be really interesting what's happening behind the scenes and if that gets revealed later. But I, I definitely commend Youngquist for trying to keep all of this in the public light as much as possible, even if it may not be in his best interest.

Alan Gottlieb:

No I agree. So we will see what happens. It's Thursday evening. Today's Tuesday. This should be posted before that, and if it's dramatic enough, we may come back with a special edition of the podcast. Generally, we're going to do this every other week, if something major happens at any time, we can jump in and do something on a one off basis.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Emergency, emergency ad hoc podcast. Exactly.

Alan Gottlieb:

Exactly. The other issue that I think is bears talking about in this first podcast of the new year is the criteria for the evaluation of the superintendent Alex Marrero that was unanimously approved by the board in December. This sounds boring and dry, but the reason it's not is because the previous evaluation of the superintendent was so really staggeringly weak and meaningless that that the fact that they've toughened it up even a little bit is significant. Now, using the guise of policy governance, which is the method that the board uses to make decisions and work with the staff they would claim that the previous evaluation was just. Following the orthodoxy of policy governance. And this was the way they had to do things. But there were 230 metrics, which is absurd that the superintendent was measured by, and they really didn't distinguish much in terms of waiting between things like how much produce was harvested from DPS greenhouses. And what percentage of students of color were proficient on reading and math and grades three through. 10, it's just lunacy. So they, and in the part that was focused on student performance on standardized tests, only it was seeking Morero would meet his criteria would meet the goals if he, if there was a one percentage point improvement on all these measures in the previous evaluation. The other, I think piece of context here that's important is the three new board members who were elected in November of 2023, the very first meeting in December of. Of that year that they were in, they were asked to approve all the criteria for the superintendent's evaluation, which they had not seen more than a few hours or maybe a day in advance of the meeting. It was just a ream of information. They asked that the vote be postponed for a month and the majority of the board, the old guard basically said, no, we need to get this approved now. So it was approved without any input basically from the new members, all of whom voted against it. So this time the new board members had a chance to weigh in. And this is really Marrero's own under policy governance. He basically gets to set the, this, his own evaluation criteria, the board has to approve it. And so he did come back around and toughen it up a little bit. Not enough at all. I don't think but better than it was. And it's now this is what he's going to be evaluated on next fall.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Yeah, and it's great that we go from 230 individual metrics down to 27. I really appreciated the Chalkbeat article and a little bit of the comment around last year's performance specific, had a very specific target of Yeah. harvesting 8, 160 pounds of tomatoes. That, the fact that's on the list along with how to improve student test scores and reading at third grade level, and nothing is weighted higher than the others is quite alarming. So I do appreciate that we have fewer metrics. We are, now over indexed or more indexed, I should say, on student achievement, which is not something we saw before. And when you use policy governance, certainly when you have a corporation or you have a CEO and they're being evaluated across all of these different things and really focused on the bottom line, that's one thing. But when you are the superintendent of a school district where your primary beneficiary are students. You really need to have academic performance be at the forefront. And I think we're getting there. We're getting close. Alan, curious to get your thoughts, not only do we have the metrics, but we also have the change from what it will be in one year, but then what that changes over time. So do you want to provide an update on that and what your take is there?

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah, here's my slightly cynical snarky take, which is that if you look at the evaluation criteria for student performance in particular, they're now going from a one percentage point increase on a lot of these measures in the next year to a two percentage point increase, which might be realistic and on some level, but it's not ambitious. And goals I think should be ambitious. Now what's interesting to me is that the goals get way more ambitious for the following year. They've set goals out for a second year and, whether they change those next year or not, who knows, but they're much more ambitious so that you're seeing like seven or nine percentage point increases over two years, but it's only two percentage points in the first year. The cynic in me says I guess Alex Marrero thinks he's going to be gone by then and he won't have to be accountable for those measures. Let the next person deal with that. That might not be a fair take, but it just strikes me as strange they did it that way. And two percentage points, given the way the district has performed since the pandemic, may not even be attainable because in a fair number of cases last year, he didn't even get the one percentage point.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

So that's my thing. Thanks Alan. And I can't let you get away with being the only cynic and person providing a hot take here. Speaking of having more ambitious goals, I teased during the introductory podcast that I would share what the superintendent's response to my public comment about this very issue was. So I provided a public comment in December About this very topic about the superintendent's evaluation requesting that it be more ambitious, that we focus more on student achievement and really expressing to the board, which clearly they are now aware that They have the authority and the power to hold him more accountable. I think before it felt certainly that the superintendent was really driving this. Whereas now I do think you see more of the board's input in this current version. So I gave that critique or and I gave that public comment. After the board meeting the superintendent, Dr. Marrero, actually approached me and had some interesting things to say he said to me, essentially, I appreciate the advocacy but then made his own snarky comment of, but where was the advocacy when Boasberg was in office and he had essentially unattain, these goals that he didn't achieve and I, coming out of that meeting was in some ways a little shocked that you would have A superintendent approaching somebody after public comment and then critiquing that very public comment part of me. And I think the egotistical part of me wants to say it's just me. And he knows that I'm very much a critic of him and, obviously write a monthly column half the time criticizing him and that he doesn't do this to the average person. But also given what I've heard behind the scenes in so many conversations of how he does speak to people, particularly women it, It's a little alarming that that he had the audacity to come up and critique me and critique Boasberg, so it felt like a little bit of a chip on the shoulder too but as I reflected on it and Alan would love your your comment on this too, he asked where the advocacy was, and I actually did respond to him as he was walking away from me, and I said that's a great point, and certainly there should have been advocacy for Boasberg, but I was working for him at the time, and then as I reflected it after the meeting, I was actually in public I was a public servant for all of the time during Boasberg's administration, most of the time, I should say, so I wasn't in a place to, to To be able to do direct advocacy, given I was working for elected officials. But if I recall correctly, there was actually quite a bit of criticism for Boasberg that his goals were too ambitious. They were too high. The Denver plan is, as many of our listeners may know about, had incredibly ambitious targets. To achieve. But Alan, you were certainly around then and following the Boasberg administration. What were the criticisms of Boasberg at the time? And then how did they contrast with what we see with Marrero and maybe even what we see with Susana or what we saw with the former superintendent Córdova?

Alan Gottlieb:

In an interesting way, I think it was almost like The criticisms were that you alluded to it, but the mirror image of what the criticisms of this evaluation, this superintendent are, which is, come on, nobody's going to hit the goals you guys are setting. And so it's like why shoot for pie in the sky? When you know, you can't do it. Let's like, like slow and steady is good, but I don't think by slow, anybody meant one percentage point a year, because at that rate, a kid who's in kindergarten now and behind is never going to, is still, is going to graduate from high school and still be so far behind that their future. Trajectory, is. But I do think that was the criticism, I think it's worth mentioning really quickly that the superintendent appears to be a fairly thin skinned individual. He doesn't when they, he does a annual or DPS has for a long time done an annual evaluation, like internal evaluation where people get to give feedback on their superiors. It's a survey called collaborate and I

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

remember it.

Alan Gottlieb:

Having been a former

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

DPS employee.

Alan Gottlieb:

Boatsberg, Tom Boatsberg, the superintendent before Susana Cordova, who came before Alex Marrero, he used to publish his, his results. He used to put together a slide presentation and like basically show it to, I think pretty much the whole staff showing where he was strong, where he was weak, and then talk about where he was going to improve. Marrero has slowly squeezed that thing down to the point where only the people who directly Report to him fill out the collaborate survey. It used to be that like principals, anybody could fill out the survey. They fill out. So a teacher would, so a principal, a teacher will fill out a a collaborate survey about their principal, but they could also fill out a survey probably about their like area superintendent or whatever the titles are nowadays. And the superintendent about their performance.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Right. And district culture as well. District culture. Not just your individual supervisor, but also broader critique of DPS or Feedback on DPS.

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah, I don't know about whether some of that's been shut down, but certainly any ability for a school principal or a teacher to weigh in on The superintendent and the collaborate survey has been eliminated under this regime. So I think that's notable. The other thing I think is notable is the language in Last year's evaluation, and to a certain extent, but a little less this year's evaluation is so deferential and polite and laudatory in general of the superintendent. And if you contrast that to the evaluation in 2020 that the board did of Susana Cordova.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Oh, man.

Alan Gottlieb:

It was a nasty, condescending, snarky. And to the, he, everybody is very hung up in DPS and I have no problem with this just to be clear on titles, everybody's doctor, this or director, this as the board members throughout that entire evaluation, they referred to the superintendent as Susanna. Yeah. That's just a little telling little detail that I think is interesting. So anyway, I, it's just a situation where the evaluation needs to be tougher. It needs to be transparent. It needs to be released to everyone and the collaborate stuff should be as well. People should know what employees of the district think of the superintendent and that should be public information. But that's just not the, where we are in DPS these days. Anyway, that's all I have for today. I don't know if you had anything else you wanted to bring up, but

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

two, two big topics that we saw in December and we'll continue on. Obviously with the YoungQuest piece in this coming Thursday's meeting, but we shall see throughout the year how Marrero is doing against his new performance metrics that he's, he will be held accountable to.

Alan Gottlieb:

It's going to be interesting to watch anyway, and it will be back in two weeks, unless we're back in a couple of days, depending on what happens with the board meeting this Thursday. And until then so long, everybody, it's been nice talking at you.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Stay warm out there, Denverites.

Alan Gottlieb:

Yeah.

Alexis Menocal Harrigan:

Take care.

Alan Gottlieb:

Okay. Bye bye.