{"id":25293,"date":"2024-10-17T17:01:14","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T23:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montezuma-cortez-school-board-gives-updates-on-fired-teacher-boces-and-test-scores\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T23:14:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T05:14:13","slug":"montezuma-cortez-school-board-gives-updates-on-fired-teacher-boces-and-test-scores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montezuma-cortez-school-board-gives-updates-on-fired-teacher-boces-and-test-scores\/","title":{"rendered":"Montezuma-Cortez school board gives updates on fired teacher, BOCES and test scores"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
The Montezuma-Cortez school board heard about fall testing data in comparison to the spring data at their Tuesday meeting. (Screen Capture via Zoom)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, the Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 school board discussed test scores, BOCES and ESS. Superintendent Tom Burris announced that the district will withdraw their application to withdraw from BOCES this year.<\/p>\n

Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative<\/div>\n

The Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative aims to help students as they seek a job or head to college. About 150 students attended its Futures Fair where the group helped students set up job shadow opportunities and provide work-based learning, job opportunities and internships.<\/p>\n

They also have a shared equipment library housed at Pueblo Community Colleges that has $750,000 worth of equipment for medical fields that schools can utilize.<\/p>\n

The presentation shared that while it is OK for students to not know what they want to do yet, it isn\u2019t OK for them to have no direction. The presentation included a story of one Montezuma-Cortez High School student who attended the Drywall Summer Institute. Now, he knows what he wants to do postgraduation.<\/p>\n

She added that the group exists to help students find their passion. This summer, 22 MCHS students attended one of the three summer institutes.<\/p>\n

Superintendent\u2019s report<\/div>\n

Burris shared that the HVAC issue is \u201cprogressing\u201d and that there would be a walk-through Thursday with both lawyers and experts.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter this walk-through, I anticipate we will begin the negotiation phase,\u201d Burris said, inviting the board members to attend.<\/p>\n

Burris celebrated the final completion of the middle school\u2019s play set before telling the board that the district was withdrawing its application to pull out of BOCES this year, in part because the district could not find an accountant to do the required third-party analysis.<\/p>\n

Burris said they will reapply next year.<\/p>\n

Update on teacher\u2019s firing<\/div>\n

District attorney Brad Miller gave a report on a recently fired teacher.<\/p>\n

The teacher appealed the dismissal, but the appeal was overturned, according to Miller. Miller said the teacher was dismissed because of \u201cinsubordination, lack of professionalism, neglect of duty and under good and just cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teacher was reportedly allowing students to violate the cellphone policy, didn\u2019t answer emails from Principal Jennifer Boniface, neglected grading policies and failed to provide adequate assignments and assessments.<\/p>\n

He added that she also refused to create a \u201chigher standard\u201d for students, would not attend team meetings, used profanity in school and acted inappropriately at assemblies.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer anger made her unfit for duty,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n

Academic Services report<\/div>\n

Jim Parr provided the board with early data for STAR testing, comparing district averages for fall and spring.<\/p>\n

In reading, the district average was 39th percentile and 36th percentile for math.<\/p>\n

In spring, the average for reading was 29th percentile and the average for math was 41st percentile. Grade level is 50th percentile.<\/p>\n

He also explained that the recent \u201cRapid Response\u201d grant from the Colorado Department of Education \u2013 about $90,000 \u2013 will be used to support \u201cdistrict-wide professional development in the science of reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trainings will take place over the next two years, with in-person training and coaching for teachers from Grades 3-12.<\/p>\n

ESS report<\/div>\n

Executive Director of ESS Lisa Megel announced that incoming teachers have arrived and they now are determining which students need help to catch up on learning during the time they didn\u2019t have a teacher.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we have 111 students that were beyond their caseloads. There\u2019s a lot of services that were happening, but there\u2019s some that weren\u2019t happening the way we would have liked them to,\u201d Megel said. \u201cSo, we\u2019re trying to go back and capture all of that so that we can provide those services.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also gave information regarding threat assessments.<\/p>\n

Megel said that during a potential threat, a \u201cscreener\u201d will determine whether the school can handle the threat or if the district needs to handle it.<\/p>\n

The threat assessment team at the district, a counselor, school resource officer, administrator and social workers from BOCES are involved if the perceived threat is bigger than the school level.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, it\u2019s not just in-house, we\u2019re making sure that we have several providers, people that have different roles, so we can look fully at a student. We conduct interviews, we take all the information that the building has gathered, like witness statements, anything that law enforcement can share with us,\u201d Megel said. \u201cWe do additional kind of deep in-depth interviews with individuals that are in some way involved, and parents as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, the committee goes through a \u201creally long list\u201d or checklist of sorts before making recommendations for next steps.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe make sure that we prepare. Basically, what does that look like if it\u2019s reentry into school? \u2026 How can that be safe, comfortable, all of those things. If not, then what are the other things that we\u2019re going to be doing to help take care of that student and make sure that they continue to get an education in some way?\u201d Megel said.<\/p>\n

Action items<\/div>\n

The board approved the city of Cortez memorandum of understanding for the school resource officer and the ACA, ACA-R and ACA-E Non-Legal Name Change for Students unanimously.<\/p>\n

This policy lays out the processes for schools when students want to change their name to match their chosen gender identity.<\/p>\n

If a student fills out a form requesting that the name they are called at school be changed, the school is expected to adhere to that request, barring instances of inappropriate or threatening names.<\/p>\n

Though parental approval is not required for the name change, the district is still expected to notify the parents in most instances.<\/p>\n

The next school board meeting is Nov. 19 at 6 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

District improves average reading score but saw math score declines <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,155,28,60,216,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-25293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-education","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-county","tag-montezuma-cortez-school-district-re-1","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78876,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25293\/revisions\/78876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25293"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=25293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}