Preparing for DPS’ response
As we said in our last update, DPS requested a significant extension of time to respond to Mamás’ motion for preliminary injunction designed to stop the 2025-26 school closures. Unfortunately, the Court gave DPS this massive extension of time, over our objection that it would basically allow DPS to run out the clock on the school closures. As we get ready to read DPS’ response to both the preliminary injunction motion and Mamás’ complaint, both of which are now due today, Friday, March 14, 2025, Mamás reflects on how we got here, and where we should be headed.
This lawsuit began about as organically as it gets. A few moms with public school kids got together for one of their kids’ birthday parties, and while the kids jumped and flipped and ran circles around the ninja warrior course in the background, the moms got to talking about the school closures Marrero had announced just days earlier. With two lawyers in the group, talks naturally turned to whether there was anything to do, legally, about the closures. The group consensus became that it was important to do what was possible to stop the closures, but it wasn’t worth doing unless we could get at the underlying causes of DPS’ constant opening and closing of schools. And so, these public school moms decided to figure out what exactly is going on in DPS.
Over the following weeks, there were meetings and interviews and public records requests and archives research. These moms—some of whom have been advocating for public schools and fighting school closures in DPS for years—pored over charter school income tax returns and Secretary of State business records and Denver property transactions. Many sleepless nights later, Mamás filed its complaint on December 19, 2024, documenting financial misconduct and abysmal school conditions that even these naturally suspicious moms couldn’t have conjured in their wildest dreams.
As a historical matter, what the record in this case reflects is that DPS has essentially never been able to conduct itself constitutionally without direct court supervision. Even when under court supervision, Colorado’s largest school district is often in breach of court directives to ensure equal access to education for all students, regardless of identity or ability or language or class. DPS is the subject of frequent, validated complaints of discrimination or disability accommodation violations. And, the school district is at least as racially segregated as it was in 1968, the year before the groundbreaking litigation in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver’s racial desegregation lawsuit.
The moms behind Mamás’ lawsuit had a lot of conversations about what to sue about and what to ask for. As the complaint reflects, it was important to Mamás not to sue DPS for money damages—even though that is the primary metric of civil justice in this country—in order to clearly signal that what this family-led organization wants is for the educational situation in DPS to improve so that every kid can get access to a healthy and thorough education, in their own neighborhood. Mamás figured out that one reason that the conditions in DPS are so abysmal for children is that the school district is hemorrhaging money while financially supporting the private corporations that run charter schools and to pay the billions of dollars of debt owed on bond money and “certificates of participation” issued off of corporate-enriching real estate transactions using taxpayer owned Denver school buildings. (We are almost certainly never getting our school buildings back.) It won’t help, obviously, to demand that DPS pay more money to resolve a lawsuit.
In developing a strategy that centered around equitable relief, i.e., court orders to comply with the law, Mamás had remained optimistic that DPS would demonstrate some semblance of accountability for its decades of misconduct and choose to transparently discuss legally enforceable ways to get the district out of the mess that it is in. In a fair world, Mamás believes that DPS would make an agreement to place itself under some sort of supervision—whether with the court, or a trustee or receiver or special master or the like—that would lead to a comprehensive and detailed plan to unravel the system we have now, which prioritizes corporate profit over children and their families, and to put in place a true system of neighborhood schools.
Unfortunately, Mamás’ hopes in this regard were not well-placed. Rather than show remorse and immediately come to the negotiating table, DPS hired a sitting elected official, Elliott Hood (CU Regent At-Large) to defend its conduct. Last week, Mr. Hood notified Mamás that DPS will oppose its motion seeking to stop the school closures and ask the court to dismiss the entire lawsuit.
To begin with, Mr. Hood says that all of the DPS defendants are going to argue that Mamás does not have legal standing to sue DPS. It is important to remember that these defendants include each individual Board of Education member, all of whom were elected by voters who live in this school district, along with DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero, and the school district and Board of Education themselves. Today, these public officials will file a motion arguing to the court that moms and their children—some of whom have been advocating for good neighborhood public schools, and fighting DPS school closures, for years—have no legal right to complain about how their own school district is run. Under the direction of their lawyer—an elected official himself—DPS will argue that not even moms of children who attend closing schools have the right to sue over those closures.
Beyond that, DPS is going to argue that even if every single one of the 501 facts that Mamás alleges in its Complaint is true, DPS has not and is not violating the law. For instance, DPS will argue that Board of Education policies setting forth what the Superintendent and Board “shall not fail” to do are not actually legally enforceable. It will also say that Board of Education votes are not subject to judicial oversight. DPS will argue that it is the State’s fault, not its own, that DPS schools are not “thorough and uniform” because they are grossly racially and class segregated. It will contend that it owes no duty to taxpayers, nor families and children, to manage public money responsibly. And, DPS will argue that despite the Colorado Constitution’s hard and fast prohibitions on using public money for private schools and other private interests, its system of running DPS schools as an “investment portfolio” that has created extraordinary wealth for corporate executives, developers, bankers, and lawyers while the education system has been run into the ground is not plausibly illegal.
As Mamás’ Complaint explains, one of the reasons that we’re here is because in the early 1970s, a group of people who included then-President Richard Nixon, Milton Friedman (Nixon and Reagan’s economic advisor), and Lewis Powell (a United States Supreme Court justice) got together and crafted a scheme whereby corporate interests can pilfer the public coffers, built up by working class tax dollars, while being insulated themselves from virtually any tax liability whatsoever. While this scheme has been perpetuated by a whole host of wealthy elite interests over the past few decades, one of its key backers has been the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC), which consists of executives from industries like tobacco, big Pharma, insurance, and bail bonds. This is not a group of interests well-known for protecting families and children. Integral to the corporate takeover of America that Nixon, Friedman, Powell, and ALEC orchestrated was an outright occupation of the federal courts of this country. In a word, that occupation has been effective.
So, Mamás filed its complaint in Colorado district court, which is the first level of the Colorado state court system. Because most of the work to protect education rights has been done in the federal courts (including all the desegregation litigation of the 50s, 60s, and 70s), we are in almost completely uncharted territory. That makes it very difficult to predict what could happen here. But, we promise we will continue fighting for Denver’s families and children, and for democracy itself, whether that is in the courts, at the ballot box, and everywhere in between.
We will post DPS’ requests for dismissal as soon as we have them.
Sincerely,
The Moms Behind Mamás, and their mom lawyer