Personal backgrounds but few policy differences separate 3 APS superintendent finalists

AURORA | The APS school board will begin deliberations to select the district’s next superintendent Wednesday after conducting final interviews of the three candidates on Monday.

Deliberations will take place in closed session, and the board will take “as long as it needs to make this important decision” without unnecessarily prolonging the process, board President Debbie Gerkin said Monday.

The selection will be announced either at one of the board’s regularly scheduled meetings or at a special board meeting depending on when a decision is reached, Gerkin said.

In a four-hour special meeting on Monday, board members heard presentations and asked questions of final candidates Andre Wright, Michael Giles and Nia Campbell. Each candidate had the opportunity to present to the board for 20 minutes, as well as to ask their own questions of board members and deliver brief closing remarks.

The candidates were each asked a preselected set of the same eight questions by the board members, which included how they would boost student achievement, how they approached decision-making, their familiarity with Blueprint APS, their view of the role of school resources officers and how they would manage the district’s budget.

There were no significant differences among the candidates throughout the relatively academic discussions of how they viewed leadership and teaching pedagogy. Each candidate said they valued the district’s diversity, wanted to improve retention and recruitment of teachers, particularly teachers of color and saw school resource officers as one component of a multifaceted school safety plan that should also include mental health and social-emotional supports.

Candidates did not go into significant detail about changes they would like to make as superintendent. Giles said that he would like to create a safety task force similar to one that exists at Cherry Creek and to evaluate Blueprint APS to determine if it is still accomplishing the same things that it was intended for when it was created.

Campbell has similar comments regarding Blueprint and said that if hired one of the first things she would do would be to hire a consulting firm to conduct a thorough analysis of the entire APS system. She also said she would like the district to implement seals of biliteracy, an official recognition for students who graduate high school with fluency in two or more languages. 

The preselected questions meant that there was little discussion of news about Gateway High School that became public after the final candidates were selected. According to an Aurora police report, former Gateway principal Ron Fay and his secretary embezzled more than $100,000 from the district during his time at the school.

Fay also faced accusations that he had pressured teachers to improperly change students’ grades, an internal investigation of which was led by Wright during his time as APS chief academic officer.

The results of the investigation have not been made public. An external audit said that several people involved believed that it was not as thorough as it could have been, something that Wright has said is not accurate.

At Monday’s meeting, Wright provided the board members with documents related to the investigation and said that part of why he left APS in 2021 was because “things were happening in this district that I could not change regardless of my position.”

“The district entrusted me for seven years with over $1 billion of its money,” he told the board. “If I were not fiscally responsible, they wouldn’t have allowed me to continue.”

Gerkin said after the meeting that asking each candidate the same set of questions is a best practice for this type of search, and that asking questions about the Gateway scandal “was not our purpose tonight.”

“The police report speaks for itself,” she said.

More details about the special meeting are available from the Sentinel’s education liveblog.