The Fight for North High
1,200 signatures. Seven hours of testimony. A 4-3 vote that ignored them all.
November 2012: The Vote
In November 2012, the DPS board voted 4-3 to place STRIVE Prep Charter High School on the North High School campus — a co-location that the community overwhelmingly opposed.
A petition signed by 1,200 people opposed the plan. Parents, teachers, and students packed the meeting. The testimony ran for hours. The community's message was unambiguous: we do not want this.
"The message you're sending tonight is, 'We don't care. ...You're not good enough.'"
— Teacher Tom Bergen, addressing the DPS board
Seawell defended the decision: "It didn't work. We couldn't figure out another way."
Board members Arturo Jimenez, Jeannie Kaplan, and Andrea Merida voted against. They stood with the community. The reform majority — Seawell among them — overruled 1,200 signatures and the weight of public testimony.
What North High Meant to the Community
North High School is the heart of Northwest Denver. Generations of families — from the Highlands to Sunnyside to Berkeley — sent their children there. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez met her husband there. Amy Beatie attended events at 4586 Tennyson, blocks away. Rick Garcia fought for the neighborhoods that feed North High.
The co-location wasn't just a policy decision. It was a message to North Denver families that their neighborhood school wasn't good enough — and that a charter school, run by outsiders with different priorities, deserved space in their building.
Walk down Tennyson Street. Walk along 32nd Avenue through the Highlands. Talk to the families in West Highland. North High is not an abstraction to them. It is their school. It belongs to the community — not to the reform board, not to Stand for Children, and not to STRIVE Prep.
The Pattern
North High was not an isolated incident. Across Denver, the reform board forced charter schools into neighborhood school buildings, splitting communities and resources. Each co-location weakened the host school further — reducing enrollment, draining funding, and creating a competitive dynamic inside the same building that benefited the charter and punished the traditional school.
The logic was circular and devastating: declare a school "failing," install a charter in the same building, watch enrollment drain from the traditional school to the charter, then point to declining enrollment as proof the traditional school should be closed entirely.
Co-location was not collaboration. It was conquest by inches — a slow-motion takeover designed to look like reform.
The charter school movement depended on this pattern. Without access to existing school buildings — buildings that taxpayers had already paid for — charters would have faced the full cost of their expansion. Instead, they got free real estate, courtesy of the reform board, while the working families whose taxes built those buildings watched their children's schools hollowed out from within.
North Denver Fought Back
The 1,200-signature petition against the North High co-location was one of the largest community organizing efforts in recent Denver education history. While it failed to stop the 4-3 vote, it planted the seeds of the resistance that would eventually flip the board.
In 2019, union-backed candidates swept all three open seats on the DPS board, ending the reform majority for good. The organizing that started at North High — parents knocking on doors, teachers speaking out, neighborhood leaders demanding accountability — was a critical piece of that victory.
The student walkouts of September 2021 — when 200+ North High students walked out demanding Tay Anderson's resignation — showed that North High's tradition of activism endured. These were students who understood that adults in power must be held accountable, whether those adults sit on the reform board or the post-reform board.
North High taught its students well. Not just in the classroom — but in the lesson that power concedes nothing without demand.
Continue Reading
- School Closures — 48+ schools closed, the Montbello catastrophe, community devastation
- Corporate Education Reform — Stand for Children, DFER, and the billionaire pipeline
- The Charter School Problem — How the charter-first approach gutted neighborhood schools
- Resources — Denver education advocacy and North Denver community links