What will happen to Pueblo City Schools?
An embattled school district loses its superintendent
The resignation of Pueblo City School superintendent Constance Jones in mid-July came as a surprise to nearly everyone in the Pueblo education community. Up until a special school board meeting announcing her resignation, not even the district’s communications director knew.
And as the struggling district nears the end of its time on a Colorado Department of Education accountability clock, intervention from the state could become a reality.
At the July meeting, Pueblo Academy of Arts principal Karen Ortiz told PULP she drove to the meeting just to hear the news.
As she waited for the announcement, she said, “It’s scary. It’s very scary.”
As of this printing, no official reason for Jones’ resignation has been issued to the community, despite the efforts of local media and a recently formed coalition of residents calling for transparency from the school board.
Jones hasn’t responded to PULP’s phone calls or requests for comment. The school board has also declined to comment. In a statement, Communications Director Dalton Sprouse said the district wouldn’t comment on the issue because of privacy rights.
“As with all personnel matters, the board is obligated to protect individual privacy rights that prohibit speaking further about Dr. Jones’ resignation or any other employee’s personal decisions,” he wrote.
The superintendent resigned, and outside of speculation, no one in the public knows why.
But last school year, that wasn’t on anyone’s mind. As PULP printed a series about school choice, educators expressed the successes they’d been experiencing with changes over the last few years. Though test scores haven’t improved significantly, educators felt their schools were moving in the right direction.
And when Jones accepted the superintendent position in 2014, board members told the Pueblo Chieftain they thought Jones was the person who would turn things around.
“This is a very important time for the district. I personally was looking for someone who had experience in taking schools out of the turnaround status into the priority improvement and then on to the next level,” Kathy DeNiro, the board’s former president, told the paper in 2014.
Right now, the district is in priority improvement status. But the latest student test scores could determine the future of the district, especially as it nears the end of the clock.
Three months before Jones resigned, administrators at Risley International Academy of Innovation told PULP their school was about to turn around.
The school, which has fluctuated between turnaround and priority improvement status for the past five years, had just lost their principal, Charlotte Macaluso, to an administrative position. Then, they asked assistant principal, Amy Hausman to take over for the remainder of the year.
Today, Macaluso is the acting superintendent of Pueblo City Schools.
“We’ve got enough programs in place, I feel very confident we will continue to thrive,” Hausman said in May.
“We’ve been a turnaround school for awhile, so we’ve got everything in place now, I feel, we’re right at that precipice to have our scores start going up,” Hausman said. “We’re seeing small growth and I think we’re just at that place where we’re going to see it.”
Hausman attributed the school’s success, in part, to its status as an innovation school. With more autonomy from the district, Risley had the power to come up with its own schedule and introduce new programs, including International Baccalaureate.
Ortiz, who also leads an innovation school, said that while Jones wasn’t in district when initial innovation school plans started, she was always supportive. When the district wanted to create an innovation zone with multiple schools, it was Jones who led the effort.
“She’s been very important with the innovation zone,” Ortiz said.
In March, she told PULP that PAA’s success was owed to its status as an innovation school, too.
For Risley, educators felt the independence granted by innovation helped the school create
“The autonomy to decide our own needs based on the data has been probably one of the most important things,” Hausman said.
Dawn Johnson, coordinator for the school’s IB program, added that they found success in “the fact that we can tailor things for our kids and our staff.”
Jones was also instrumental in helping the district obtain accreditation from AdvancED, an independent school district accreditation agency. The process, which took nearly two years, required the district to conduct a self-evaluation and receive an external review.
Receiving the accreditation was good news for the district — at a special board meeting in March, the announcement was met with applause from a packed audience.
While the AdvancED process is separate from state accreditation, it was a gold star for a struggling district trying to prevent a state takeover.
And at the center of that, and other turnaround efforts, was Jones.
“This is just the first step in a long journey of continuous improvement,” Jones said at the March meeting.
But while that leader will no longer be part of that continuous improvement, Sprouse said the district will moved forward as planned.
“I don’t think we’re going to lose any forward momentum on any specific programs that have been initiated,” he said.
“I think Dr. Jones played an instrumental role in every aspect of the school district, just as a superintendent should and as they mentioned in the board meeting, we’re eternally grateful for her leadership,” Sprouse said. “We wish her the best.”
