Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Melanie Asmar on April 22, 2016
Denver Public Schools Acting Superintendent Susana Cordova apologized Friday for the failure of her staff to thoroughly vet applicants for a vacant school board seat before the board appointed parent activist MiDian Holmes last week.
“We definitely knew the board wanted us to do background checks on all the applicants,” Cordova said in an interview. “That was really clear. We did do background checks. We did not do thorough background checks. That’s a problem. That’s why we are where we are.”
Holmes was appointed April 12 but announced two days later she wouldn’t accept the position after it came to light she hadn’t been truthful about the circumstances of a 2006 misdemeanor child abuse conviction.
She told the district it stemmed from the police being called after her 2-year-old daughter wandered out of their apartment. But records obtained by Chalkbeat after Holmes was appointed revealed it was actually related to police finding her three young children home alone.
When board members voted to appoint her, they had only her version of events.
Board president Anne Rowe said Friday that it was “unfortunate that despite the board’s request to do the appropriate level of background checks, it did not happen and the board was not aware of this until after we voted.”
Holmes — a school reform advocate, DPS alumna and parent of three students — was chosen from an initial field of 22 applicants to represent northeast Denver on the seven-member board after the previous representative, Landri Taylor, resigned in February.
On March 15, the district began conducting background checks on the finalists for the position, Cordova said. DPS safety and security staff, the district’s general counsel and members of the chief of staff’s office were involved in doing the checks, she said.
By March 25, the district had arrest records, district spokeswoman Nancy Mitchell said. But that information was not immediately shared with board members, she said. Instead, Mitchell said, the board learned about Holmes’s conviction sometime between March 25 and when they appointed her on April 12. She did not provide a specific date.
The district has yet to release documents that might shed light on the sequence of events.
With the deadline passed for the board to appoint a new member, the task now falls to Rowe.
Cordova said the district is in the process of more thoroughly checking into the backgrounds of the other finalists. That should be completed Monday, she said.
The district did not have a documented process for vetting candidates to fill a board vacancy because the situation happens infrequently, Cordova said.
But now, she said, the district is “thoroughly and thoughtfully reviewing what happened to make sure it does not happen again.” In the future, she said the district will ask candidates to submit to a more rigorous fingerprint background check. If anything comes up, Cordova said, “we will review the full case file, including the disposition and details.”
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Photo credit: Oteo, Creative Commons, Flickr.
