Denver District Accused of Keeping Kids In English Learner Program Far Too Long

Jo Napolitano — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:28:44 +0000

Updated

When Jen Hanson, a veteran multilingual educator, first arrived at Denver’s Cherry Creek School District in June 2025, she said she quickly suspected the district was creating its own rules for moving students out of its English learner program, leaving her to question whether it was holding on to kids — and the state and federal funding they brought in — for far too long.

The evaluated children’s English proficiency based on how they scored on a nationally used test called and on two other measures, as required by the state.

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Within days of taking the post, Hanson said she found more than 5,700 students between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school year who had hit the WIDA scoring benchmark, but many were not evaluated on their language skills, the first step in ultimately moving kids out of the program. If they were deemed English proficient, they would be placed in general education classes under a two-year monitoring phase.

And as for the two other objective measures, Hanson said Cherry Creek’s were not up to state standards.

“Sometimes it was a writing sample and sometimes it was a reading test,” she said. “They also had a random point system that gave different things various ‘points’ in order to exit. That was always arbitrary and inconsistent.”

It was also a big secret, she said: There were people in her own department who didn’t know what those metrics were — or how kids stacked up.

The district denies Hanson’s allegations and says it has always been in compliance with state guidelines.

Hanson, the former director of language supports and services, said she dug into the student testing data and applied more standardized measures for the other criteria.

In September 2025, she said she moved nearly 2,000 English learners — roughly 1,200 from that year and 800 from the year before — into the monitoring phase, the greatest number of kids to reach that next step in years.

But what was initially lauded by the district as a major leap forward — “We made certificates so schools could celebrate the kids,” she said — worked against her: Hanson was informed eight months later by Cherry Creek leadership in an email that her contract was not being renewed.

The news came at a time when the district was embroiled in multiple controversies: its former superintendent resigned that January amid complaints that he and his wife, the human resources director, had created a where employees felt they could not speak out about professional concerns. The HR chief was fired in May after an investigation showed the couple likely billed the district for travel that was not business related and may have .��

And the U.S. Department of Education announced in June it was , alleging student clubs were excluding members based on race and teachers improperly used race as a consideration when making class assignments or deciding on academic supports. The Trump administration has across the country, prioritizing those that charge antisemitism, discrimination against white students and protections for LGBTQ kids. Cherry Creek has denied that it discriminated against students based on race.

Hanson believes she lost her job for calling attention to troubling issues within the English Language Acquisition program. In July, she filed a complaint with the alleging retaliation.

“I want the district to be held accountable and stop doing this to kids,” she told ��.

When a cut score isn’t a cut score

There are about accounting for roughly 11% of all U.S. students. In Cherry Creek, Colorado’s fourth-largest district, that figure is slightly higher at 15%, officials there said.

School districts across the country receive millions in state and federal funding to support these children, with the dollars flowing based on the number of students they classify as English — or multilingual — learners.

Over the past five years, Cherry Creek, which served 8,480 English learners in the 2025-26 school year, according to state records, received $3 million in federal Title III money and $10.25 million in to bolster its English language acquisition instruction, spokesperson Abbe Smith told ��.

“We are in compliance and we have been in compliance,” Smith said of how they designate English learners. “Our top priority is always to meet the needs of our students and help them be successful at the next level.”

The district denies Hanson’s allegations that it wrongly kept some English learners in place — and disputed some of the data she provided to ��, including the number of students moved out of the program in fall 2025. School officials put that figure at 874.

The biggest point of contention between Cherry Creek and its former director is over the WIDA test score used to judge students’ English proficiency.

These scores, determined by the state, vary widely. And many were adjusted in recent years. by the Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy of 35 states showed that 15 had recently lowered their so-called cut score — test results range from 1 to 6 — and only two, Michigan and Tennessee, raised them.

Colorado’s, at 4.0, stayed the same and ranks among the lowest of the group.

But Hanson, who worked for Denver Public Schools for nine years, said Cherry Creek set a higher standard: It would only assess English learners’ proficiency when they reached a 4.5 or above on the WIDA ACCESS test.

Hanson rolled that back, she said.

“I reviewed district databases and asked a lot of questions of my team and my supervisor,” she said. “I called colleagues in the field and double-checked state requirements. After discussing with my boss, my team, the superintendent and executive directors, who supervise schools, my team changed the criteria back to the state (4.0) cut points.”

Cherry Creek School District buses lined up. (John Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Cherry Creek officials said that until this school year, when the state issued new, more explicit guidance, they had discretion over that 4.0 cut score. They said they never exercised it — sticking to the state cutoff — but also viewed 4.5 as the more accurate standard.

“We have, I can see, historically, discussed the reality that a 4.5 is generally when students show they are actually proficient on state assessments,” said Remy Rummel, Cherry Creek’s new language supports and services director, adding, “in prior years, districts were allowed to make some decisions and have some flexibility around those minimum cut points.”

�� quizzed the Colorado Department of Education on this point several times. In a July 31 email, department spokesman Jeremy Meyer wrote that districts “are not permitted to raise the statewide exit criteria for multilingual learners” beyond the state standards.

In an Aug. 4 email, he was even more emphatic, saying “our guidance has always been that a WIDA ACCESS Assessment criteria for English language proficiency (of) 4.0 Overall AND 4.0 Literacy triggers eligibility for redesignation.”

The state then went silent, not returning calls or emails on the matter for several days. On Aug. 7, it retracted its earlier statements. Despite having said that 4.0 has always been the standard, the state education department now said districts did have leeway in past years.

Through the 2021-22 school year, it said, the state’s guidance was that districts “should” use the 4.0 cut score. And then, starting in the 2022-23 school year, “should” was changed to “must consider” 4.0 as the trigger for possible redesignation.

Still, some districts didn’t get the message, the department said.

“When school systems have many thousands of employees, our distribution lists certainly do not reach them all,” Meyer, the department spokesman, said. “We are working to redouble our efforts to make sure this shift is effectively communicated to the field.”

For the upcoming 2026-27 school year, it changed the guidance once again to say districts were prohibited from using a higher standard.

The department apologized for the delay in correcting its earlier statement, saying “we do appreciate that your work helped elevate this issue around the clarity of the guidance.”

More than 2,800 Cherry Creek students hit the 4.5 benchmark between the 2022-23 and 2025-26 school years, Hanson said. Data provided to �� by the district put that same number at 1,876.

But even students who met this higher standard did not appear to be moved into general education classes, Hanson said: She identified 283 kids who had earned 4.5 on both critical parts of the WIDA test and were still in the ELA program years later.

‘Kids know you don’t believe in them’

Advocates told �� that retaining English learners longer than needed raises financial concerns over the related state and federal funding while creating academic and emotional anxieties for students. It could limit their ability to attend school alongside more English-speaking peers — from whom they learn much linguistically — and place them in a less challenging setting, they said.

It also denies them a chance to celebrate a significant milestone and point of pride for participants, multilingual educators say.

Hanson said many Cherry Creek English learners lost eligibility for career and technical education, college-level Advanced Placement courses and other postsecondary classes.

“Kids know when you don’t believe in them,” she added. “We are systematically saying that the students are not valued, that we don’t think they can succeed and that they don’t matter.”

District officials disputed that students in their English learner program missed out on high-quality instruction and said some took advanced courses where they earned both college and graduation credit.

When asked about their rate of participation, officials said it was roughly 5%, well below the 15% of all Cherry Creek students who are English learners.

Jorge Garcia, executive director of The Colorado Association for Bilingual Education. (Jorge Garcia)

“If we are looking at proportionality, yes, ideally, that would be proportional and that is part of our strategic plan and the work ahead,” said Rummel, the ELA director since June 2026. “We acknowledge we are not proportionate in that representation — however, it is not zero representation.”

Jorge Garcia, executive director of The Colorado Association for Bilingual Education, a nonprofit professional development and civil rights organization, said he was outraged by Hanson’s claims about students’ delayed reclassification.

“When you hold (students) back too long, you are killing their spirit to achieve and to try,” he said. “This is a civil rights issue — a human rights issue. I hope we can do something to effect some change.”

‘The data was near impossible to pull’

Hanson said the district superintendent, assistant superintendent, other administrators and executive directors were generally supportive of her efforts to reclassify students last fall. They told her they didn’t know English learners were being kept in the program for too long, she said, and had no knowledge about the funding their inclusion triggered.

But a leadership shakeup in early 2026 meant several top Cherry Creek administrators left their posts. Suddenly, management didn’t appreciate her findings, she said.

Hanson detailed her concerns about the program in a March 11, 2026, email to her new supervisor, Michelle Weinraub. She shared the missive with ��.

A few months later, Hanson said she was called into human resources and was told she was not doing her job, that she had too many absences and that she needed to stop complaining about the school system.

The district informed her in a May 29 email, when she was out on medical leave, that her contract would not be renewed. Hanson said she was given no further explanation.

She filed her EEOC complaint on July 20 and also shared a copy with ��.

Smith, the district spokesperson, said the number of students Hanson moved out of the ELA program might be unusually high because she lowered expectations for kids on those two other measures, leaving administrators concerned that some of the students might not have been ready.

Hanson denies this, saying there was no mechanism to allow for an easier standard. The district appears to only be raising that concern now, almost a year after Hanson acted.

Hanson said no student moved into the monitoring phase during her time at the district expressed any problem with their reclassification or was flagged as needing to move back into the English learner program.

Before her arrival, Hanson said there was a sense of secrecy and closely held decision-making around the other two measures needed to evaluate kids. She said her predecessor, Holly Porter, and Porter’s sister, a department program lead, kept a tight grip on that information when it should have been widely shared.

Hanson said she and other staff worked to standardize the process by which kids were exited from the program, fixing the internal reporting tool that generated students’ classifications and sharing the corrected rules with teachers.

Reached by email, Porter said she complied with state regulations.

“I categorically deny the allegations that I improperly administered Cherry Creek School District’s multilingual learner redesignation process or engaged in misconduct related to that process,” she wrote in a seven-page email addressing Hanson’s claims.

Porter said the redesignation process was documented, standardized and implemented district-wide, dismissing any possibility that Cherry Creek received state or federal dollars for English learners who were no longer eligible.

She said the district was regularly audited by the state education department and had to provide information on their redesignation process and the criteria they used both to move students out of the program — and to keep them in.

“If the required documentation was not present, those students were not eligible to be included for funding through the audit process, and the associated funding was removed,” Porter said.

Current district administrators also cited the audits as evidence that nothing was amiss with Smith saying, “Our audits from (the state education department) are clear. It has not been flagged at any point that Cherry Creek is a concern or massively out of compliance.”

The state department of education said late Monday afternoon that its 2024-25 audit of Cherry Creek looked at 17 students and found five — or nearly 30% — did not meet the requirements to receive funding based on the documentation provided by the district. The audit of Cherry Creek, one of 31 districts for which the state reviewed English learner documentation, is not yet finalized, Meyer, the department spokesman, said.

A former Cherry Creek staffer, who said she worked as a professional learning partner both inside the district office and onsite at 25 schools, told �� she believed Porter’s ideas about how multilingual learners learned were not backed by current research or best practices.

The woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said she worked for many years at a neighboring district where Cherry Creek students would sometimes transfer. She said that the other school system was often stunned to learn they were still receiving English language services when they scored so high on proficiency exams.

“There are kids who get put in these classes who never get the chance to leave,” she said of Cherry Creek, adding that while she was there, she had no access to individual English learners’ test scores, valuable information that could help instruction. “The data was near impossible to pull.”

When she asked to see kids’ marks, she was denied, she said — and scolded by her superiors.

“It was, ‘How dare you ask that. That is not your business,’” she said.

Porter retired in June 2025 and her sister resigned shortly after Hanson joined the staff.

Earlier in her career, Hanson was principal of Denver South High School, an international school where 67% of the students were economically disadvantaged. In 2017, the campus won a , partly for moving hundreds of English learners into advanced classes, pushing their numbers from 73 in 2015 to over 620 in 2018.

“And they passed with a B average,” Hanson said. “There is absolutely no reason why kids should be given gates and barriers to access and opportunity.”