Students sit out CSAP over principal's suspension

COMMERCE CITY - About a quarter of the students at one elementary school refused to take the CSAP test. It was their parents' idea.

The group of parents are protesting possible changes to the bilingual education policy at the school and protesting the suspension of the school's principal, Judy Jaramillo.

"I didn't take the test," Manny Gonzales, a 9-year-old at Hanson Elementary School, said.

He and 66 other classmates at Hanson in Adams County opted out of the CSAP test.

Claudia Infante has a first grader and a fourth grader at the school.

"We feel as parents right now that this is the only way that we are going to get the board to listen to us," she said.

Infante and other parents want Jaramillo re-instated, saying she was unfairly targeted because she wants to keep the bilingual program as it is now.

The Adams 14 School District says she was suspended with pay indefinitely over a personnel issue and won't elaborate.

John Albright, the public information officer for Adams 14, said as it stands now, "The bilingual policy says that they will become fluent in Spanish first before we start to transition them into English and what we know is that we are not actually being successful in transitioning kids into English."

He says the district needs to re-evaluate the policies to serve its students better. Albright says that only one in four students is successfully becoming fluent in English under the current policy.

He says Hanson is the lowest performing elementary school in the district.

Some parents disagree.

"The transitional process at Hanson has been successful. We have information that tells us the students are doing well," Mark Gonzales, Manny's father, said.

He says some parents are worried that a change in policy will mean an English-only program in the classrooms.

"More than 70 percent of Hanson's students are learning English as a second language. They need to have support in that in the classroom. We know the demographics and the impact of them. All we are asking is to have some representation that fits the community's needs," Gonzales said.

He believes the CSAP tests are unfair to Latino students since Colorado stopped offering them in Spanish in 2006. He hopes the fact that his son and many other students did not take the test will put some pressure on the district to take their concerns into consideration.

The district says that the big group of students refusing to take the tests only hurts the kids and the school.

"It is really a concern for Hanson as a community that the students wouldn't take the test," Albright said.

He says the CSAP score is used to measure how the school is doing. When 67 of about 250 students take a zero score, the average of the school plummets. That could ultimately impact the resources the school gets and if the school survives at all.

If a school gets a failing grade three years in a row, it can be turned over to the state and become a charter school.

Albright says the district wants the students to be set up to succeed. The parents say they want that too.

The district and some of the parents have very different ideas how to make that happen. The district has scheduled two open meetings to talk about these issues and get input from parents.

The meetings will be on March 25 and March 26 at Kearney Middle School. The school board will hear from staff from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. and will open the floor to parents from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.