Storming Denver

Padres Unidos Battles for Better Education

In Denver, a fiery group of Spanish-speaking moms have school administrators quaking in fear. Patrisia Macias Rojas talks to the women of Padres Unidos.

The night of the Columbine massacre, Lupe Lopez, a 37-year-old mother of five, switches on an old color TV to the Spanish news broadcast in the storefront office of Padres Unidos in a barrio in North Denver. Lupe and other Mexican and Chicano parents listen intently as news reporters repeatedly announce that such tragic violence is expected at inner-city public schools like North High-a predominantly Latino high school in North Denver-but not at suburban schools like Columbine.

Claudia Lopez, Lupe’s daughter and a student at North High, looks at her mother in dismay. “Mami, pero porque andan diciendo eso de la North? Why are they saying that about North High?”

Her frustration triggers nods, worried sighs, and more commentary from the others. “So, if our kids were shot down at school one day, it would be OK because it’s expected of our kids?” says Rosalinda Aguirre, the owner of a neighborhood Mexican restaurant and mother of five.

That night, the parents seem more determined than ever to take on the Denver Public School system. “It’s expected that our schools will go from bad to worse, but we won’t let it happen,” says Lupe. “We’ll do what it takes because no one else is going to do it for us.”

Organizing the Unorganized

These Chicana and Mexican parents, many of whom immigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1980s, first challenged school officials in 1989 at Valverde Elementary School. Outraged that Spanish-speaking students were being forced to eat their lunch on the cafeteria floor as a form of school discipline, they launched a series of petition drives, pickets, and press conferences that finally forced the principal to resign. It was the first time in Denver history that recently immigrated, low-income, monolingual parents collectively mobilized on behalf of their children.

After the victory at Valverde, the parents agreed to form Padres Unidos (Parents United), a volunteer-based organization to confront racial inequity in the Denver public schools. According to founding member Pam Martinez, “That victory taught us that the schools belong to us they are part of our community. Our taxes pay for teachers’ and administrators’ salaries, buy the books and the supplies, and pay for school buildings. They work for us and should be held accountable to us and our children.”

Since its inception, Padres Unidos has challenged Denver Public Schools (DPS) officials over the racial disparities impacting Latino students, who make up over 50 percent of all Denver public school students. The facts, parents say, speak for themselves. Between 1997 and 1998, the Latino drop-out rate was twice that of whites, and the percentage of expelled students who were Latino jumped from 40 percent to 60 percent.

Last year, the Denver Post reported that only one student at Lincoln High School, which is 90 percent Latino, took the SAT entrance exam required by most colleges and universities. According to Rosalinda Aguirre, an active member and mother of five, the Denver public schools aren’t preparing Chicano/Latino students for the high-level, white-collar, skilled jobs produced by Denver’s rapidly growing high-tech industry, but are “training them to be low-wage workers and prisoners.”

>From Bake Sales to Protests

On some nights, Lupe, Pam, Rosalinda, and dozens of other parent members can be found raising funds with bake sales and raffles. Other nights they’re busy answering calls for a bilingual hotline designed to help parents deal with racial incidents, facilitating workshops to inform parents of their rights within schools, or protesting outside the district office.

“Like so many others, I used to feel uncomfortable about standing up to a teacher or principal. I thought they were the educated ones who knew best. Since I got involved with Padres, I realized that I know what’s best for my children,” recalls Dolores Obregon, a soft-spoken, middle-aged mother of five.

Padres Unidos has emerged as an organization that gives monolingual Spanish-speaking parents tools to speak for themselves and their children. The parents have developed an organizing strategy-the “Padres Approach”-designed to empower other parents. The “Padres Approach” consists of documenting a problem at a given school, doing an analysis of root causes, and determining solutions. According to Pam Martinez, Padres never goes into a school without first going through all three steps and having clear demands.

“We don’t humbly ask for fairness,” she says. “We demand educational equity and justice for all children and their families.” This approach has earned them a 95 percent success rate in achieving demands that range from removing principals to establishing a new dual-language school in a North Denver barrio.

Relentless, Respected

Padres Unidos has become one of the most respected and feared community activist groups in Denver. In 1994, Padres Unidos sued the Denver Public School system over poor bilingual education services. After two years, the courts sided with Padres Unidos and charged the DPS with discrimination based on “national origin” in bilingual education and special education.

Former school superintendent Irv Moskowitz and school board president Rita Montero vehemently rejected the Padres Unidos bilingual plan. They successfully lobbied for an English immersion plan in Denver similar to that of California’s Proposition 227, in which monolingual students are taught in “English only” after a limited amount of instruction in their first language. “We took a hit,” admits Rosalinda Aguirre. “We proposed a progressive bilingual plan in a time of anti-immigrant hysteria and got ‘English Only’ instead.”

In a more recent victory, Padres organized to establish a new elementary school in Northwest Denver. Fed up with the abysmally low academic performance in their neighborhood schools, parents decided to take matters into their own hands. They organized field trips that enabled over 80 mothers to visit schools such as Escuela Bilingue Washington in Boulder and Dennison Montessori in Denver, where low-income Latino students are excelling academically.

“There are those who would have us believe that our children are inferior and incapable of academic excellence. But we have seen with our own eyes that there are majority Latino schools out there that have far better success rates than our schools,” says Obregon.

Parents relentlessly lobbied until their proposal for the school was approved. Despite opposition from Latina board member Montero, who advocated a traditional “reading, writing, and arithmetic” model for the new school, the New Dual Language/Montessori School is scheduled to open in 2001.

Former superintendent Moskowitz calls Padres a group of rowdy parents who do nothing but “scream, yell, and protest.” In 1998, Moskowitz sent letters to some of Padres Unidos’ funders, urging them to cut financial assistance to the organization because of “its disruptive behavior and unwillingness to sit at the table.”

But for the parents of children attending Denver public schools, Padres is an organization that gives Latina immigrants and Chicanas power over their children’s education. The organization has developed strong leadership among monolingual Spanish-speaking Mexican women: women make up 90 percent of its leadership and 70 percent are Mexican. Says Obregon, “Since I got involved, I realize that we have a right to demand a quality education for our children.”

According to Pam Martinez, the conditions that Chicano and Mexican students confront on a daily basis in the Denver public schools border on violence. “When the system denies students a quality education for no apparent reason other than that they are working class and Mexican, when the system punishes them unjustly or simply expects the worst of them-that is racial inequity that can be classified as none other than violent because it denies students basic social, economic, and political rights.” The violence at Columbine High School in Littleton ended tragically. But in Denver, Padres Unidos is working hard to transform daily violence into new possibilities and visions of a brighter future for their children.

Patrisia Macias Rojas is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the ColorLines editorial staff.



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