Manual High School- Denver, CO

Rob Stein leaving Denver’s Manual High School

Written by Nancy Mitchell on Apr 9th, 2010. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org

Manual High School, where students are known as Thunderbolts, is one of Denver's oldest high schools.

Rob Stein, who took over Manual High School after it was shut down for poor performance, is leaving after three years at the helm of the historic school in near northeast Denver.

Stein, 50, left a comfortable job running one of the city’s most prestigous private schools to take on the re-opening of his alma mater in August 2007. He told his staff Thursday that it was time for him to move on.

Under Stein’s tenure, student proficiency rates on state exams have more than doubled and Manual now ranks third of Denver’s ten comprehensive high schools.

Rob Stein

As a public-school principal, Stein has frequently chafed at district and union rules and regulations. Manual is one of three schools gaining more freedoms under the state’s Innovation Schools Act but Stein said progress toward greater autonomy has been slow.

Thursday, the three innovation school principals met with Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg to discuss their concerns.

“I am entirely committed to the innovation schools,” Boasberg said Friday, “and look forward to working closely with the principals to resolve the concerns they have.”

Boasberg also praised Stein’s work and pledged community involvement in identifying his successor.

“The new Manual is off to a terrific start and will be a very, very attractive place for a talented principal,” he said.

Jorge Merida, a community advocate, said Stein “has done as good of a job as he can possibly do under the circumstances.”

“To me, it means that he was promised a lot of resources and they never materialized,” Merida said. “He’s a very dynamic person and I’m sure he was fighting for a lot of resources but they didn’t come.”

Merida gave a “qualified yes” to the question of whether the new Manual is better preparing students for college, qualified because he said it no longer serves all neighborhood kids. Denver high school students who are learning English and who want classroom instruction in their native language now receive transportation to either South or Lincoln high schools.

Susana Cordova, DPS’ executive director of curriculum and instruction, said the change was made because all high schools didn’t have enough English language learners wanting native-language instruction to build strong programs. The instructional model in the district’s federal court order governing language acquisition is built on 200 students, she said, but most high schools had fewer than 100.

Cordova said students who are learning English who want to attend their neighborhood high schools are taught by teachers trained in English language acquisition and have access to native-language tutors.

Many in the Manual community were worried that the re-opened school would turn neighborhood kids away. But Stein said teachers have gone door-to-door to recruit students to fill seats. About 60 percent of Manual’s 300 students live within school boundaries and many of the others come because they live along convenient city bus routes.

“Very few kids actually choice in from far away but a very significant and interesting handful do and they’re here because of the program, because of the personal attention, because of the academic rigor,” he said. “So I think that is becoming more and more of our brand and I think we’ll see more kids choicing in for positive reasons rather than because we’re on the RTD route.”

Thursday, after his staff meeting, Stein sat down with Education News Colorado to talk about his decision to leave:

EdNews: Why are you leaving?

Stein: I’ve had 28 straight years by the academic calendar doing lunch duty, running faculty meetings … the last 14 years as a school principal. I admit there’s a certain amount of fatigue that comes with it but it’s a fatigue that I think I’ve earned after three decades, not a burnout.

This is really just more of my recognition that I need a change. When I took this job, I knew it wasn’t a long-term thing. It’s a startup. It was a project to open the school … I don’t think I perceived it as to run the school, I perceived it as to open the school. And before I leave, my first goal is that we have the fourth-year program fully planned out, the staff hired … and this is a four-year school so that work will have been done.

That’s not to say everything is tied up neatly because nothing is ever done and certainly not in schools and school reform.

EdNews: You’ve voiced concerns about your ability to run the school the way you’d like to. How much does that play into this decision?

Stein: It’s hard to tease out a single factor but a source of fatigue in this role is the district context and the bureaucratic context… but that’s what this job is. So saying the water is part of what makes swimming harder is a bit like – well, that’s the context. But were I treading air instead of water, yeah, I think there would be less resistance so of course it’s a factor. But I can’t just point my finger and say there’s blame somewhere.

Very early in this job I changed my views on the value of large centrally-managed school districts and have come much more strongly to believe that if we’re going to have successful schools in urban environments in the future, the district is going to have to play less of a management role and more of a regulatory role. That is, we – school districts – will dispense the funding, we’ll make sure we hold schools accountable for results but we’re going to get out of the daily management of schools.

I think this whole centralized infrastructure that districts have created as they’ve evolved needs to be dismantled or abandoned. So for me to continue to work in this infrastructure, where I don’t believe in it, would be strange.

EdNews: Can you give me an idea what that new infrastructure would look like?

Stein: Charters are a good example. I’m not saying charters are good and neighborhood schools are bad. I’m saying as a management structure, you have a charter school that puts together a very thorough plan. Then if the plan is approved by the board, that’s a regulatory function that a district fulfills, then they get their funding, they find their students and they educate their kids.

And then they’re accountable for results. And if they don’t get their results, then they don’t get their funding and they can’t continue to exist. And so to me, that’s a better model.

Denver's 5280 magazine was among those profiling Stein's challenges at Manual. Scroll down for story link.

If the charter school says, hey, we want a lunch service and they want to purchase lunch service back from the district, great. But if they want to go outside the district and purchase lunch service from somewhere else, that’s ok too.

I think the district needs to see itself less as a centralized service provider. If there’s a service like that that makes sense, great, but frankly, if the whole food service thing dried up in Denver Public Schools, there are other service providers that would fill the void just fine. But when the district says we’re forcing this service on you, it’s a monopoly, we’re the only provider, and you have to take it … that doesn’t work, it needs to go away.

EdNews: But Manual was one of the state’s first innovation schools – aren’t you supposed to have those freedoms?

At this point, the three existing Colorado innovation schools, which are all in DPS, met with the superintendent today (Thursday) and we had a very healthy, constructive discussion about how the rate of implementation of the innovation plans has been slower than we had hoped.

I’m not going to point fingers and say it’s the district’s fault … but it’s been really challenging to navigate through a large bureaucracy and through a lot of resistance or simply inertia to implement the innovation plans. There are fundamental terms of the plan that I don’t think have been upheld.

EdNews: Can you provide an example?

Stein: To me, almost everything comes back to budget because the three key areas are people, programs and money, right? But programs and people are dependent on money. So, for example, I am allowed to offer my own programs and I say I want to offer a different math program than the district. I can go ahead and do that.

But if the district is purchasing a math curriculum and providing professional development services for all teachers to teach that math curriculum and I say, ok, I don’t want to teach that math program, give me my share of money for the textbooks and the training – that doesn’t happen. As long as they hold the purse strings, they’re kind of holding me captive and they’re not implementing the plan.

So where I don’t need money, I’ve had latitude. Where I need resources from the district, i.e. finances from the district, those funds haven’t flowed.

Our implementation plan is very clear – the district will provide a list of services and a list of costs and we can either purchase them from the district at that price or we can purchase them outside. As of now, more than a year after approving the plan, we don’t have that price list. I think we might be close … but it’s been really slow.

EdNews: What is the resistance to that model?

Stein: Partly they’re just not set up that way. You go into Wal-Mart and say I want to have this special product. They say, well, we don’t do it that way and we don’t do that product here. It’s a huge bureaucracy and they’re designed to do things one way. They’re designed for centralization and standardization.

Part of it is culture. And I guess there’s a positive and negative way to look at it. There’s a defensiveness that says, how dare you tell me you don’t value what I offer? I don’t want to give you what you’re asking for.

But there’s also a genuine concern for kids. Like, my job in this district is to make sure that every kid is safe so I don’t want to give you a slice of the pie for security dollars because I don’t know that you’re going to make kids as safe as I’m concerned they need to be.

So both those things are operating, it’s not just selfish people grabbing their resources.

But a third thing is the district is a jobs program. One of its primary purposes for existence is to keep people employed. And that’s operating too.

EdNews: Did you accomplish at Manual what you set out to accomplish?

Stein: Yes, I think so. The goal was to reopen Manual high school and when I leave, it will have been re-opened. We will have a full four-year program. We are the highest-performing Title I high school in the district. We are a high-growth and top-performing school, according to the School Performance Framework. We have higher growth and higher status – proficiency scores, and higher attendance rates – than the old Manual and the district.

Of the ten traditional comprehensive DPS high schools, we’re ranked third. So if you’d asked me before, do you think you will perform at this level in three years? I would have been overly ambitious to say yes. But when you see all the work we need to do, when you see that our kids are coming in several years below grade level and now that we’ve got our first senior class, it’s unlikely that they’re all going to be college ready according to ACT and Accuplacer (college entrance exams) …there’s a long way to go in terms of urban education. We have not been the alchemists that have figured out how to create that gold.

EdNews: The closure of Manual for a year was extremely difficult for many in the community. How are relations now between the school and community?

Stein: My first meeting at the Ministerial Alliance, my first meeting at the Northeast Community Congress for Education, was extremely tense and somewhat hostile. And the last meeting I went to at the Ministerial Alliance was downright boring and nothing could have been better. It was kind of like, How’s it going? Thanks for coming, Let’s move on to the next item on the agenda. So the tensions have subsided to the point where it feels very comfortable.

I don’t want to take that for granted …I feel very grateful that they worked with me as a partner and we’ve had ongoing, open conversations.

The most exciting thing I’ve been involved with over the past couple of years is the formation, still in its incipient stages, of the Near Northeast Denver Children’s Zone. We’ve got schools and non-profit organizations and foundations meeting right here at Manual High School every month … talking about how we create an entire network of support for kids from birth through college graduation. It’s just increased the level of communication like you wouldn’t believe.

EdNews: Are you worried people will think you’re bailing out on the school?

Stein: I would have worried about that a week ago but I’ve talked to a lot of people and people have been understanding and supportive and I really appreciate that. All I can say is I’m doing my best and I’m fallible and human. I have a lot of stamina and I have a lot of commitment and when I know that it’s time for me to make a change, it’s time to make a change.

EdNews: When is your last day?

Stein: I don’t know. I’m ready to go when we find a replacement and when the school is in good hands. (The superintendent) actually asked if I’m willing to stick around through a transition and help either orient and mentor somebody and I’m perfectly happy to do that. I also know when we hire somebody, he or she may very well say, take a hike, I don’t need you here and I respect that too.

But certainly I’m here through the end of the school year and the summer. We’ve got a lot of work to finish. Of the things I want to get done, no. 1 is the full four-year program and no. 2 is full implementation of the innovation plan. It’s a super important precedent and I think it offers a lot of promise, not just for Manual but for Colorado and the nation. I’ve heard from schools and organizations in other states looking at our innovation plans as something that might really hold promise.

Manual High School Students Head Back To Class
July 9, 2012 4:19 PM
Share on email 11
View Comments
The scene outside Manual High School on Monday (credit: CBS)

The scene outside Manual High School on Monday (credit: CBS)
Filed under
Local, News, Syndicated Local
Related tags
Civil Rights Movement, Colorado State University, Education, Harlem, Manual High School, Vernon Jones, West Generation Academy, West High School, West Leadership Academy

DENVER (CBS4) – Seven weeks before the rest of their peers, students at Manual High School headed back to class.

The school is the first in the district to try a new program adding 39 extra days to the school year, making it 210 days long.

What that means is summer vacation is over for the students after just three weeks. It was a bit tough Monday morning, but they also understand the goal.

“It’s kind of ridiculous but it will give us a chance to learn more,” said student Jordan Dawkins.

Most of the students agree with Dawkins’ assessment.

“At first I was kind of mad about it but now I’m all right about it,” Brendan Davis said.

Keith Patterson admitted he was still adjusting, “I’m still kind of mad because I was ready to enjoy the rest of my summer.”

But both boys conceded that in the long run, it’s what will help them academically that’s important.

“We have a lot more time to talk to the teachers now,” Davis said.

“This will help us a lot because we have extended classes and a longer day, it will help us a lot,” was Patterson’s final assessment.

But of those extra days, four weeks will be spent outside the classroom as part of a push to “Learn it and live it.”

“If they are learning about the Civil Rights Movement in their history class, they are then going to get on a bus and go to Memphis, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark., and they are going to live the Civil Rights Movement,” explained administrator Vernon Jones.

“Our sophomores are excited because they are going to learn about the Harlem Renaissance for a week then they are going to get on a plane and go to Harlem.”

Jordan said the school realized it needed to really think outside the box to inspire its students.

“Where we want to be is a very different place, that’s looking at proficiency and making sure our students when they graduate from here, they’re ready for success in college, careers and their life,” Jordan said. “We had to be intentionally innovative and say, ‘What more can we do?’ “

That difference doesn’t end with a start date of July 9. On July 10 the entire school heads to Colorado State University to live in dorms and get firsthand experience in what college life is like.

Grants and fundraising pay for the excursions.

Manual students aren’t the only ones who will have longer school years. West Generation Academy and West Leadership Academy open this year at the West High School campus. They will have a 200 day school year. Those students will start August 20 and go through the month of June.

Part of the PEBC Network: PEBC.org | BoettcherTeachers.org | EdNewsColorado.org
Manual expansion to 6-12 in works

Written by Charlie Brennan on Jul 25th, 2011. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org

A plan to expand northeast Denver’s venerable yet still struggling Manual High School to include grades 6 through 8 could be brought to the Denver Public Schools board as soon as October.

Manual High School logoThis means Manual, shuttered for low performance in 2006 and reborn the following year, could begin experiencing an attendance boom little more than a year from now.

“I strongly believe that a strong Manual 6-12 would be very good for that area of the town, for that region, and would complement well the feeder patterns in that area,” DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said.

The plan, still being fine-tuned by DPS staff, requires some other northeast Denver school reconfigurations as well:

Harrington Elementary and Columbine Elementary, both serving preschool through grade 6, would convert to preschool through grade 5 for 2012-13.
Fifth-graders in 2011-12 at Harrington and Columbine would become sixth-graders at Manual in 2012-13.
Manual would launch its 6-8 program with enrollment of up to 75 sixth-graders for the 2012-13 school year, with the full 6-12 program to be in place in fall 2014.

Manual to be part of NNE enrollment zone

The district, meanwhile, is also developing plans for implementation of a Near Northeast enrollment zone, which will include Manual, Bruce Randolph, Cole Arts and Science Academy, and the Denver School of Science and Technology.

Learn more

Read the Near Northeast Denver Pathways to Graduation report
See a timeline of changes at Manual since busing
Read the 2007 New Yorker article about Manual
Read Rob Stein’s interview with EdNews about his Manual departure in 2010

The area would be served by its own shuttle transportation network – similar to the one being instituted as part of the Far Northeast turnaround.

A rationale for Manual’s expansion is contained in the Near Northeast Denver Pathways to Graduation report, prepared by the Near Northeast Network of Schools, an advisory group comprised of DPS staff, Metro Organizations for People and The Civic Canopy, a Denver-based non-profit that promotes community-level collaboration.

“Currently, the boundary lines for Bruce Randolph and Manual lead to overcrowding at Bruce Randolph and difficulty in recruiting for Manual 9-12,” that report states.

“I think the planned expansion is going to offer the community three different but great programs to choose from – those being Manual, Bruce Randolph and DSST-Cole, and I think that’s going to be a huge benefit to the whole community,” said new Manual Principal Brian Dale.
Expanding grades a long-perceived need

Rob Stein, who served as Manual’s principal from its reopening in 2007 until the end of 2009-2010, said discussions about adding middle school years at Manual began during his tenure.

Stein said 17 different schools fed into Manual but no school gave it even 25 percent of its incoming students – the largest was Wyatt-Edison, a nearby charter school, which fed between 20 and 25 percent of its graduates to Manual.

“That was one set of issues,” Stein said, “the chaos of, where are our ninth-graders coming from?”

Vernon Jones, previously an assistant principal at Manual and now the school’s director of community engagement, said, “We’ve got the whole ball of wax here. They’re all learning differently, there’s been no consistency. It’s a nightmare.”

Nevertheless, the class of 2011 graduated 67 of its 80 students, a rate of 84 percent. Of those who graduated last month, 94 percent were accepted to college.

Under the DPS School Performance Framework, Manual in 2010 scored 48 percent, giving it “accredited on watch” status, meaning it was performing below district expectations and needs to show improvement. Its score put Manual just three points below the category of “meets expectations.”

The DPS performance framework breaks schools down into five ratings categories: distinguished, meets expectations, accredited on watch, accredited on priority watch and accredited on probation. In 2009, 37 percent were accredited on watch and 39 percent met expectations.
Officials anticipate an enrollment surge

Manual’s enrollment for the coming year stands at 367, which is already the largest student population since reopening. But the district expects it will reach 400 to 420 by fall. Should the change to a 6-12 school be approved, Jones believes expansion could ultimately swell the Manual population to as high as 1,000.
Vernon Jones, Manual's director of community engagement

Vernon Jones leads Manual High School's community engagement efforts.
During a recent tour of Manual’s grounds, Jones pointed out room after room where echoes, not education, have been the main product in recent years. Just off the band room, which has had no consistent use since Manual’s rebirth, dusty musical instruments sit idle in cabinets that have been tagged with graffiti.

Jones sees a rebirth of electives as one possible benefit of the planned expansion. But he emphasized that Manual’s own specific needs can’t be viewed outside the context of the health of the entire Near Northeast school network.

“You can’t do this just in isolation,” said Jones. “This is not just about Manual. It’s about fixing a bigger problem in the Near Northeast, to make sure all our schools have equitable feeder patterns.”

DPS staff outlined the Manual expansion in its regional recommendations recently presented to the school board, but the board didn’t vote on a Manual plan at its June 30 meeting.

“I think the board felt that we wanted to make sure that all the options were on the table in terms of what happens to the rest of that building, so that we have the best way forward to support the existing school,” said board president Nate Easley, whose district includes Manual.

“The question is, do we have the most coherent plan, and have we vetted it with the community, and is there buy-in to that plan, etc. I don’t think we were convinced that was happening.”

Dale, the new Manual principal, said the academic program for the added grades “is going to be a heavy emphasis on skills – reading, writing and math skills – that really support kids, to get them to grade level by the time they’re in eighth grade so that they’re really able to access the ninth grade curriculum, with a heavy emphasis on intervention programs to get them to grade level.”
Work needed to sell idea to the community

Karen Mortimer is on the education committee for Metro Organizations for People, a partner in the Near Northeast Network of Schools, as well as president of the Parent Teacher Association for Whittier K-8.

By Mortimer’s accounting, there is still work to be done in educating – and selling – Near Northeast community members on what’s in store for Manual, pending school board approval.

“I think the community is cautious because they don’t know yet what the school is going to look like,” Mortimer said. “Part of the challenge for Manual is, this is not a middle school coming into existence because the community has demanded it. It more bursts from within Manual itself.”

The Manual that is looking to expand is not the same school that took its first tentative steps into a new life when it reopened four years ago. According to Jones, there are only three faculty members on staff now who were part of that re-launch.

“It is an unfortunate dilemma that schools like this have, with really high turnover,” Dale acknowledged. “These schools … are considered hard-to-staff schools for a reason – because it’s very challenging work.

“Turnover is not good, there’s no question about that, and certainly we want to reduce the amount of turnover. I’m in no way excusing that, and we intend to try to change that.”

Manual, which was profiled in 2007 by The New Yorker magazine as a textbook example of the daunting challenges of school reform, has done just enough in recent years to create hope, yet not enough to alleviate deep concern about its future.

Mortimer said she sees Manual inching toward respectability. Many, she said, want to see it accelerate its improvement.

“I do honestly think that Manual’s bad reputation in the community is somewhat undeserved,” she said. “I think they’ve been doing some wonderful things, and I think anyone going to their graduation ceremony this year would be pretty inspired by some of the students at Manual.

“They have a lot of community relations work to do, and I think the more that they pull longtime community members as well as new people in the community into this process they’re embarking on, the better they’ll be in the long-term.”

Manual High School’s history since busing

Integration, 1973 – An expansion would mark a significant step in the evolution of Manual, which was integrated through busing after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that DPS had intentionally segregated schools and put in place a district busing plan.
End of busing, 1995 – The infusion of students from generally higher socio-economic backgrounds raised the average level of academic performance at Manual, though low-income student achievement remained abysmal. The busing order was lifted in 1995 by U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch.
Division into three, 2001 – The school board redrew the school’s boundaries so that virtually all students in the new attendance zone were low-income, and test scores plummeted. In 2001, DPS divided Manual into three high schools, one to each floor and each with its own principal. A $1.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped fund the transformation.
Closure, 2006 – But the experiment failed and achievement continued to decline, leading the school board and then-Superintendent Michael Bennet to close Manual after the 2005-06 school year. Bennet, now a U.S. Senator, promised that when Manual reopened it would be a “premiere high school.”
Reopening, 2007 – Manual started a new life with its reopening in August 2007, beginning a slow climb back toward greater respectability, adding one grade at a time, and winning approval as one of the first two DPS innovation schools in March 2009.
Changes, 2010 - Rob Stein – a busing-era Manual graduate, class of 1978 – was hired away from the prestigious Graland Country Day School to oversee Manual as principal at its rebirth. Stein held that job for two years and left at the end of the 2009-2010 school year, in part because he chafed at bureaucratic constraints imposed by district administration.
Today – DPS veteran Joe Sandoval served as interim principal in 2010-11, presiding over the school’s first graduating class since its reopening. Brian Dale, assistant principal for the past two years at Bruce Randolph School, took the helm July 1 for the next phase of Manual’s journey.