Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of Voces Unidas de las Montañas, speaks at the Roaring Fork School District Board of Education meeting on Wednesday. Voces Unidas says the district hasn’t done enough to help its Latino students progress academically.
Voces Unidas de las Montañas, a local Latino advocacy group, has called out the Roaring Fork School District and first-year Superintendent Anna Cole for what it perceives as inaction toward addressing inequity for Latino students.
Frustrated after a calendar year of regular meetings with Cole, the organization publicly announced it would stop doing so until it believes that tangible progress on three plans it has requested to improve the district’s ability to serve Latino students is being made.
“We neglect them, we continue to teach kids the same way. Yet some kids are not learning,” Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of Voces Unidas de las Montañas, said in an interview with the Aspen Daily News. “Some kids are getting a great education, others are in the middle of the road and then students of color — in this case Latinos — clearly are not hitting the mark and now we have this huge achievement gap.
“What we believe is that this school district has yet to be honest with itself, do the reflection that it needs to do to, once and for all, identify all of the big, bold transformational work that will be required,” he added.
Since Cole’s naming as superintendent in May 2024, Voces Unidas has met monthly with her to address the community’s needs. The organization had similar meetings with Cole’s predecessors Jesús Rodríguez and Rob Stein in the last three years, and Sánchez expressed similar dissatisfaction with the results of those meetings as well.
The issue at the forefront is student performance disparities between white and Latino students — the latter of which makes up a majority of the district’s student enrollment, at 55% for the 2024-25 school year, according to the district’s data dashboard.
Most numbers for this school year are not yet available, but Latino/Hispanic students underperform compared to their white peers significantly. In last year’s standardized Colorado Measures of Academic Success testing, only 11% of Latino/Hispanic students tested proficient in math vs. 45% of white students. In English/language arts, the figures are 16% to 57% respectively. Students of color also lagged behind in growth percentile, 45 to 53 in ELA and 50 to 61 in math.
For this year’s in-year measures, Latino/Hispanic students reached literacy benchmarks at a rate around 25% lower than white students, but Cole noted that both groups improved at a similar rate from the beginning to the end of the year, around 20%.
Latino/Hispanic students also drop out at a much higher rate and see less participation in clubs than their white peers.
Voces Unidas’ position is that significant, radical change is needed immediately and that while the district is aware of the issues and has measures to address them in its strategic plan, those fall short in urgency and scope.
It wants to see three concrete and public plans from the district to eliminate the achievement gap between Latino and white students; reinforce human capital of individuals that are qualified to teach and representative of the community; and involve parents and the community in meaningful ways in decision-making, oversight and accountability.
“Voces Unidas has been working in good faith with the new superintendent to get to a place where the superintendent would announce a timeline for the creation of three different plans that we have been requesting time and time again, month after month, meeting after meeting,” Sánchez said. “She would acknowledge our request and would indicate that she and her team were working on that timeline, working on a public announcement.”
Voces endorsed Rodríguez when three superintendent finalists were named in 2022. It did not endorse Cole when she was named the lone finalist to be his replacement last spring.
Progress on those three plan concepts in Cole’s first year is still to be determined. Testing data is not finalized, especially for standardized testing like CMAS and the SAT suite. Cole noted that staffing faced challenges this year because of financial strain brought on by health insurance increases, federal uncertainty and general rising costs. She said her communication with Latino parents has improved some via the equity advisory council.
In her response to the criticism in an interview with the Aspen Daily News, Cole was apologetic for the sense of frustration and said the source has been a lack of clear understanding on her part on what the exact requests are.
Cole said she felt the meetings covered many topics and had successes, especially in refining the district’s strategic plan and communicating with the public. She noted that even in the past couple of weeks — Voces Unidas first publicly announced it would stop meeting with Cole directly in the May 14 school board meeting — she has gained more clarity on what the ask is, and the next step is finding those misalignments with the strategic plan.
“What’s important for me is to understand what they’re asking for and how that’s different than the strategic plan we just implemented, because I believe that the current strategic plan that we are just about to wrap up year one of is different in so many significant ways from anything that’s ever come before in the district in terms of transparency and accountability and using real metrics that are going to have very real changes for the populations we need to serve better,” Cole said.
“I think this plan is so different from the [2019] one, but what I hear them saying is, ‘But not enough,’” she added. “I believe we’re trying to achieve what Voces wants.”
Cole pointed to the district’s “Diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism” policy adopted in February 2024 as the district’s “North Star” for equity. Language in the policy is similar to that which Sánchez used: “Raise the achievement of all students while narrowing the difference in the academic achievement between student subgroups;” professional development for employees to better work with a diverse group of students; and tracking racial demographics of employees promoted and retained in the district.
“If Dr. Cole has a different path that gets us to the same outcome … I’m all for it,” Sánchez said. “We are open to having that debate, but the status quo and sticking to, ‘This is a strategic plan, it’s already in play,’ and we have to now waste another five years, is unacceptable.”
Cole said part of the current strategic plan is implementing systems to better track where the district is falling short. RFSD has already made some improvements to its data systems under third-year Chief Academic Officer Stacey Park and Cole said interviews underway for a director of data and assessment have centered on disaggregating and interpreting that information in more meaningful ways, rather than “just lumping kids into a group called Latino students or Hispanic students.”
Both Cole and Sánchez acknowledged that the current strategic plan is not the finish line for these goals. The disconnect, in the view of Voces, is that RFSD is not adequately looking at the long-term vision enough.
“It took us decades and decades to get here. It’s going to take decades and decades to get out,” Sánchez said. “But if we cannot even visualize what that ending looks like and then work backward to see how many decades, how many future strategic plans must this body of work inform, so that you know what kind of investments you need to be making. We believe we need to frontload the investments because it’s about changing the systems, investing in some of the infrastructure, in the human capital, in the big sort of changes so that we can set ourselves up for success in future years.”
Cole said discussions with Voces are ongoing to get back on the same page. Classes ended for students this week. They will return in August, the same month in which standardized testing data is anticipated to be ready for presentation to the board and the public.