of that – we are seeing some progress in those districts.

CMF: Many in the Latino and African American communities feel they have been excluded in DPS discussions regarding various changes -- and historically they have -- what are your plans to create open dialogue with parents and the Latino community to include their input?

Boasberg: The Denver Plan focuses on three areas of focus: having a great teacher, having a strong principal in every school, and having strong community engagement. The short answer is that we have to do efforts at the school level to make sure that our schools are responsive, receptive and aggressive in getting input into their schools from their parent communities – again, those are their customers. As we move to decentralize and put greater authority and autonomy at the school level I think that you create the right incentives for schools and school leaders to reach out to their communities – and that’s part of it.

The second part of it is that we at the district level also need to be very aggressive on the communications level and the community relations level in both that making sure we are hearing from folks and communicating with them. For example, we have just launched a round of very lengthy community meetings. The most recent meetings were about four to five hour sessions where we tried to reach out to try to have a dialogue with the community. We reached out with the internet, with phone calls, through fliers home with the kids, so I think that it really is an effort to reach out to all parents – all the notices were bilingual, there was translation available at the meetings. There is absolutely a great desire to reach out ...