Littleton has a good school district, one of the top districts in the state. I want to help make our district excellent.  How? Through leadership with a focus on high expectations, accountability, continuous improvement, and collaboration. 

LPS can be better. There is no silver bullet to improvement, instead improvement comes from the steady focus on excellence and continuous improvement. As a school board member, I will use the district's strategic plan to set high expectations for all students, set measurable goals for district activities, and link these goals to the resources invested to reach those goals.  The key question for improvement is “Are we getting a high return on our investments?”  I have the experience needed to make this strategy work. For the past several years I have been working on issues around school accountability and outcomes, particularly through my work as primary researcher on Colorado School Grades.  I have also been measuring teacher/staff resource use in schools since the late 1990s.

High expectations and accountability without collaboration will not get LPS to the next level.  The key to improving student outcomes is improving what occurs in classrooms.  Collaboration is essential for improving what happens in classrooms.  We have to work together with parents, our community, and the professionals working in our district to achieve excellence.  Working together does not mean we always agree, or that we don’t push for change.  But it does mean we treat each other with dignity and respect. 

I have blogged about many policy issues facing Colorado on the Ed News Colorado website.  You can see my blogs by clicking here.    

Tell me about our schools' successes and challenges.

I taught as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon, West Africa.  Here I am with one of my students, Aloysius.

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