AURORA | Michael Giles’ first career choice solidified his second one.
After college, he started working as a counselor in juvenile corrections facilities. He was drawn to helping underserved and at-risk kids, but he felt frustrated that he was only reaching them after their lives had been so dramatically derailed.
He decided to move into public education, where he felt like he could help prevent student problems instead of work later to resolve them.
Decades later, Giles has now been named as superintendent of Aurora Public Schools, a place where he will have ample opportunity to serve students who need support. Nearly 75% of the district’s 38,000 students qualify for free and reduced lunch, a marker of poverty, and over 40% speak English as a second language. Meeting the needs of such a diverse student body was identified as one of the district’s top priorities when searching for a new leader.
“I believe education is the equalizer; it’s the key to success,” Giles said in an interview with the Sentinel about what drew him to the field.
Giles was tabbed the school district’s sole superintendent candidate finalist April 27 by a unanimous board vote.
Giles has spent his entire educational career in the neighboring Cherry Creek School District, starting at the school level in 2002 and joining the district cabinet in 2018. He said he plans to draw on many of the things he’s learned over his time in the district, but he won’t be attempting to make the two districts try to look the same.
“I don’t want anyone to think I’m trying to make APS Cherry Creek,” he said.
But there are some ways he’d like the district to more resemble its neighbor. During candidate interviews with the board in April, Giles said he wants APS to be the “destination district” for families in Aurora, a position he acknowledged that Cherry Creek currently serves for the region.
“Right now we have a lot of people who are moving to Aurora but when they move to Aurora they’re choosing to come to Cherry Creek as opposed to APS,” Giles said. “I don’t want that to be the case.”
He believes that strengthening the district’s partnerships with the many organizations and companies in the city — CU Anschutz, Buckley Space Force Base, DIA, Amazon, etc. — to give students more opportunities to explore different career paths is one way that APS could stand out. He also spoke about the importance of highlighting the good work already going on in the district, something APS has attempted to be more intentional about in recent years.
Giles also said there are more opportunities for the two districts to work collaboratively, something he said he and Cherry Creek Superintendent Chris Smith have spoken about at length. He highlighted CCSD’s summer leadership academy, a program created last summer to help address youth violence, as something that could potentially be expanded to APS.
“We’re serving the same community, so it would behoove us to partner more collaboratively,” he said.
Giles was up front about the challenges facing APS, including lagging academic performance that took a hit during the pandemic. He was hesitant to go into detail about his plans to improve academics, saying his first responsibility when coming on board will be to understand the work that’s currently being done and how curriculum is being taught at the classroom level.
“Once I understand what is going on, then I’m equipped to make some decisions,” he said.
Giles has talked repeatedly about the importance of recruiting and retaining teachers and staff, noting that if teachers feel supported and valued, they will become the district’s best recruiters.
Something that came up in CCSD’s ongoing work to diversify its staff was finding out that many teachers of color didn’t see a pathway to grow in their roles, he said. Mapping out different ways that educators can grow, either as a teacher or progressing into administration, is something he said is critical.
Along with academics, Giles said that his first priorities will include creating opportunities for the community to get to know him and looking into the district’s safety measures, a significant topic of community concern during the selection process, which took place shortly after several shootings outside a Denver high school that sparked renewed concern about youth violence across the metro area.
Giles said he intends to convene a safety task force, something he was involved in the creation of in Cherry Creek several years ago. The task force will invite administrative and building-level employees, teachers, students, parents and community members including police and mental health providers to share their perspectives on what is needed. He said CCSD’s task force gave the district valuable insight, and helped it create better parameters for the role of school resource officers.
“What was happening was that in some buildings we were having SROs involved in discipline where it really should have been an administrators’ job,” he said.
Over the past several years, APS has navigated how to manage its finances as the district’s enrollment is decreasing. That has included the implementation of Blueprint APS, a facilities plan that has included closing and repurposing a number of schools over community objections.
Giles said he is familiar with the plan and would like to assess it when he takes office to determine whether it’s still working as intended. Unlike other metro districts, Cherry Creek has so far not had to face the possibility of closing schools, but it’s an issue Giles said he’s prepared to address.
“As superintendent you have to make decisions that are in the best interest of students that we serve and are fiscally responsible,” he said, acknowledging that closing schools is always incredibly difficult for communities.
Overall, he said the district community needs to make sure that it understands what its priorities are and is budgeting responsibly in alignment. There are several opportunities he’d like to pursue to increase funding, including continuing to lobby at the state level for more overall education funding, exploring potential grants and expanding partnerships at the city level.
During the candidate interview in April, Giles asked board members how he could help restore trust in leadership as superintendent. A survey conducted by the superintendent search firm found that a lack of trust with district leadership and issues with board dysfunction were two of the district’s biggest challenges identified by community members.
Giles said he appreciated that the board acknowledged the findings and hopes that they can have a good working relationship centered on their shared goal to help students.
“The focus on students’ welfare was pretty clear to me, that all of them believe their purpose is to provide opportunities for students,” he said. “I think that can be our grounding place.”
Negotiations for Giles’ contract are ongoing, after which the board will take a vote. His first day as superintendent is slated for July 1.
Things will only get worse unless something is being done to address the failures of parents at home. Creating a system where the desired outcome is a broken family only leads to worse outcomes.
We can only wish him well with the few tools APS can provide for him.
Not to mention that for only sixty years most east Denver area parents, who have a choice, have selected to live in the Cherry Creek Schools district rather than APS.
Now with the Colorado Teachers Union, coming out with a statement that Capitalism is the root of all evil, just like the Socialist Party, I believe, that will excite many parents in our multi-nationalist and culturist City and revolt many other parents to leave APS.
I wonder why this Sentinel Blog hasn’t picked up on this socialist situation as newsworthy. Especially since it was ram rodded by Byron Lindstrom of Aurora.