Superintendent Susana Cordova is leaving Denver Public Schools

By Melanie Asmar, updated Nov 13.

Less than two years after being appointed superintendent of the school district where she was once a student, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Susana Cordova announced she is leaving the district and her home city to take a job in Texas.

She will be the deputy superintendent of leading and learning in the Dallas Independent School District, according to an email sent to district families Friday afternoon.

“As the child of Mexican-American parents and a first-generation college graduate, I know that I owe a debt of gratitude to DPS, and I have been honored to spend the past 31 years as a member of Team DPS,” said Cordova, who started as a teacher in the district in 1989.

“I am sad to be leaving Denver, but I will be eternally grateful to everyone I have worked with and learned from over the past decades,” she said. “I will work with the board and the senior leadership team over the coming weeks to ensure a smooth transition, and I want you to know that Denver will forever be home to me.”

The past two years in Denver Public Schools have been tumultuous, partly due to long-simmering disputes. About a month after Cordova took the helm in January 2019, the teachers union went on strike. Cordova was at the bargaining table for every session and took part in an all-night negotiation that ended the strike after three days.

Last November saw a contentious school board election in which control of the seven-member board “flipped” for the first time to members backed by the teachers union.

The union had long opposed the education reforms shepherded by Cordova’s predecessor, Tom Boasberg, including the expansion of independent charter schools. Cordova served as a deputy superintendent under Boasberg, overseeing district-run schools.

For the past eight months, Cordova has led the 92,000-student district through the COVID-19 pandemic. In consultation with public health officials, she decided to close schools, then partially reopen them. As schools have experienced staffing shortages, Cordova herself has been helping to fill in at a district elementary school one day a week.

Van Schoales of the advocacy group A Plus Colorado, a longtime observer of the district, described Cordova’s departure as “tragic” for the district.
But he also pointed to her complicated relationship with the new union-backed board.

Cordova’s evaluation earlier this fall was decidedly mixed. On a whole range of issues, from budgeting to police in schools to the district’s controversial school rating system to support for learning pods, board members seemed to speak directly to the community and not support Cordova’s role as superintendent, Schoales said.

In that sense, despite the pandemic struggles that are racking the district, now is a good time for Cordova to leave, he said.

“The board should have a superintendent and a superintendent should have a board that are on the same page,” Schoales said. “Some people are going to say she’s leaving in a pandemic, and I don’t think people realize all the challenges she’s had to manage.”

Even the process by which Cordova became superintendent was controversial, with some community members objecting to the selection of a single finalist and concerned she would lead in the same manner as Boasberg. Advocates for education reform, meanwhile, worried she would not be as supportive of charter schools or school accountability.

Cordova strived to build bridges and find common ground. She leveraged her long history in the district and her classroom experience to build connections, often beginning anecdotes with “When I was a teacher ...” and she converted some critics into allies.

Cordova made equity her top priority, and she cited the concept frequently, especially as she guided the district through constantly changing re-opening plans.

Vernon Jones, executive director of the Northeast Denver Innovation Zone and an education activist, said in an emailed statement that Cordova “represented us” and that the district should have tried harder to learn from her lived experience. Instead, he said, she paid the price for unresolved tensions from the Boasberg era.

“She took the job in the shadow of a previous superintendent that had lost all credibility with and connection to community,” Jones said. “I believe she paid the price for him.”