The Boulder Valley School District, largely attended by white, non-Hispanic students from middle- and upper-class families, has long struggled to support low-income and minority students.
“We just have to have the will to do this,” said Superintendent Rob Anderson. “We have to have that collective will as a community to push forward and do this.”
Enihs Medrano is a good example of the kind of student Anderson wants the system to more effectively engage and support. Enihs graduated from Centaurus High School in the spring of 2019 and was heading to the University of Colorado Boulder in the fall. She’s on a great trajectory now, thanks to support she received from outside the system.
Enihs was smart, but had acted up and skipped class to get attention, she said. She felt peer pressure not to do well in school or take advanced classes with the white students.
Her turning point came during her sophomore year in high school on a trip to meet her extended family in Mexico. Her older cousins were mostly well-educated professionals. Their family was proud of who they were becoming and of how dedicated they were to their work.
That experience, along with the positive influence of a mentor outside the classroom, helped her push through the weight she felt all around her. Enihs started expecting more of herself and began pulling some of her Latino friends up with her.
She credits McKensie Heald, a leader with Young Life, for affirming her talents and her strengths. Heald made her feel known and cared for. She helped her understand what she was capable of.
“In Enihs, I have observed astounding hope,” Heald said.
Enihs holds fast to hope for personal growth, for her family’s well being, for increased opportunities for her classmates, for systemic change and for justice, Heald said.
Once she decided to focus intently on her own academic success, Enihs started working to ensure more of her Latino friends enrolled in advanced placement courses with her. “I think changing the system is an outcome of building relationships with people,” she said.
Supt. Anderson agreed. He said that growing up poor himself has helped him understand some of the issues students face. He looks for teachers who know how to connect with their students.
“We could go to any building today, and I could tell you by talking to a few kids, who has that gift of relatability,” Anderson said. “You could tell. They’re the ones the kids love. And they’re the ones that can be tougher on the kids and hold them to a higher standard than anyone else.
”Anderson spent much of his first year on the job visiting schools and listening to the community, keeping a close ear out to the Latino community. “I hear issues. We have failed in many ways in earning their trust,” he said. “Not intentionally. It’s just the fact. And because of that, when outcomes occur — something bad happens — it comes to me in a way where it’s just obvious to me we have work to do. More work to do. And it’s important to me, to have our parents trust us with our kids, and trust we’re doing the right things.”
The right things include adopting a strategic plan, with metrics, that holds the system accountable for outcomes, Anderson said. He wants to increase minority and low-income enrollment in AP and other advanced classes, and in concurrent enrollment, so more high schoolers receive college credits. He wants to hire more teachers of color.
Already, he has restructured the administration by carving the district into three regions so that resources can be better tailored to the unique needs of individual schools. He says a series of equity summits hosted by the district in recent years “weren’t just for show,” and will inform the strategic plan.
This isn’t the first time BVSD has talked about improving equitable outcomes for students. Anderson said the difference is that he’s an action-oriented person.
“I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: I’m students first,” Anderson said. “This school district will be students first and it will be all students. And if there’s a subpopulation we’re not serving, then we’re not doing our job. Simple as that.”
