View Resource: Denver School Performance Compact
This is a Denver Board of Education adopted policy that came out of the Denver Plan 2020 work. It establishes principles to guide the identification of schools for school replacement, restart and/or closure. The policy applies across district-run and charter schools. The policy establishes the importance of community engagement throughout a process to intervene with a low performing school. It works in tandem with the Call for New Quality Schools process in Denver and related policies like Denver’s Facility Allocation Policy.
Outcomes and Lessons Learned: The initial policy was adopted in December 2015. The first official year of implementation will be the 2016-17 school year. To date, the policy helps the district narrow intensive supports to a subset of schools that are candidates for closure and/or restart. One of the lessons learned thus far is that the policy itself is a starting point and the implementation guidelines for the policy are more challenging to tease out. The adopted version of the policy does not articulate the screening criteria to designate a school as persistently low-performing, but the policy does create a requirement that such designation be made by November in the year preceding any potential intervention.