East High shooting spotlights tenuous balance between school safety, “moral obligation” to educate kids

The shooting inside Denver’s largest high school last month by a student who administrators had been checking daily for weapons raises a stark question: How do you balance a child’s right to an education with the need to keep students and school staff safe?

Parents and community members are left wondering why Denver Public Schools enrolled Austin Lyle — the teen who shot and wounded two administrators while being searched at East High School — after he was expelled by the Cherry Creek School District and while on probation for a weapons charge.

Educators and others have criticized DPS’s broader record on student discipline, describing the district’s policies as too tolerant and administrators too hesitant to expel students. But activists and other teachers worry the outcry over the March 22 violence — and a fatal shooting near the school in February — will disrupt the progress the district has made in combatting the school-to-prison pipeline, especially if it spurs a policy reversal.

To better understand DPS’s approach to student discipline, The Denver Post interviewed more than a dozen teachers, school administrators, education law experts and restorative justice experts, and analyzed data on expulsions by the 10 largest school districts in metro Denver.

That data shows the number of students expelled by DPS has dropped over the last decade and that Colorado’s largest school district currently has one of the lowest expulsion rates in the metro area, although it’s not alone in reducing such discipline. By comparison, though, the Cherry Creek School District — which expels the most students among the large metro districts — had an expulsion rate last year that was 11 times higher than DPS’s rate.

At the heart of any discussion of school safety, teachers and advocates told The Post, lies the unavoidable issue of access to guns. DPS itself has seen a surge in guns — both real and fake — being found in schools as the city wrestles with dramatically increasing youth violence. Seventeen teenagers were killed in Denver last year, almost double the number who died five years ago. Another 70 teens were shot and injured. Most were injured or killed by other teens.

East High’s Aaron Lowenkron doesn’t know the answer to keeping guns out of Denver’s schools.

“I’m a math teacher,” he said. “I don’t want to be in law enforcement. I want to teach math and invite as many kids as possible into that process.”

Before the shootings at East, Lowenkron said he felt safe at his job. He hopes to continue feeling safe, although he said children’s access to guns remains the elephant in the room.

“What I don’t yet know how to do is build a school system or a school in a society that seems perfectly fine with children having guns, and I don’t think that exists,” Lowenkron said. “I don’t know what the district should do. I don’t know how we operate in a society that loves guns more than children.”

In recent years, DPS has actively sought to reduce how often it expels children, especially students of color and young kids who have historically been disciplined at a disproportionately high rate, according to district officials.

DPS, they said, has a “moral obligation” to provide an education to all students.

“A free and public education system is a lifeline for our communities,” district spokeswoman Rachel Childress said. “We don’t want to disallow a student from (receiving an education) for mistakes, especially mistakes when we lack the evidence to support.”

How DPS handles expulsions

The teachers and administrators who spoke to The Post said it was not uncommon for school staff to search students, even middle schoolers, for weapons once or twice a year. Some described DPS as reluctant to expel students after they were found on campus with a gun, despite district policy stating otherwise.

District officials have not disclosed what prompted the “safety plan” that required Lyle, 17, to be searched each morning when he arrived at East. Police said Lyle was being searched when he shot the two administrators; the teen took his own life hours later after fleeing the school.

“In my experience, especially in cases that I know about or have been a part of, they are not willing to expel for weapons in all cases,” said a DPS administrator who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity over fear of retaliation by the district.

DPS’s discipline policy places an emphasis on keeping children in the classroom, but it also says a student who brings a gun to campus is supposed to immediately receive an out-of-school suspension while the school requests an expulsion hearing and notifies law enforcement.

The district uses a third-party hearing officer to review evidence and consult with administrators during such hearings. Yet not much else is publicly known about DPS’s expulsion process. District representatives would not provide further details on the hearing officer when asked, and declined to discuss the hearing process.

If the hearing finds that a student did, in fact, bring a gun to school, then they should be expelled for a year, according to DPS policy.

But the DPS administrator said that not every expulsion request results in a hearing.

“For some of these extreme scenarios they’re not expelling, which ultimately puts the burden of possible harm on the school, and the school is not prepared to handle high-level threats with the type of staff we have and the expectation of how we run a school,” the administrator said.

Last week, a union representing Denver’s school administrators wrote a letter calling on the district to review and revise its discipline policies and create a new expulsion process.

Moira Coogan, principal at North Engagement Center who spoke on behalf of the Denver School Leaders Association, said the union’s biggest concern is this nuanced conversation becoming a political football rather than an effort to keep kids safe equitably.

“Even our most needy students and students experiencing the criminal justice system or who have behavior needs… it’s important to remember in these situations as parents or staff members that we can be concerned about safety, but also don’t want to vilify any one group of students,” she said.

Expulsions on the decline

Generally, most school districts in metro Denver are issuing fewer expulsions than they did more than a decade ago.

The Post examined discipline data from the Colorado Department of Education for the 10 largest school districts in the metro area for the academic years 2011-12 to 2021-22. Data for the current school year is not yet available.

All districts saw a dip in overall expulsions during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as students learned remotely, before expulsion numbers rebounded in 2021-22.

Data for the 2020-21 academic year was suppressed to protect student privacy for all but two districts, meaning there were fewer than five incidents that year that resulted in the district issuing an expulsion. The Boulder Valley School District expelled so few students its data was hidden for the entire 10-year span.

DPS expulsions have been on the decline for a decade. During the last academic year, the district — which enrolls nearly 90,000 students — recorded its fewest in that period: 21 total expulsions, including 10 for dangerous weapons.

That translates to roughly 2.4 expulsions per 10,000 students during the 2021-22 academic year, a rate similar to the neighboring Douglas County School District, according to state data.

Only two other districts — the St. Vrain Valley and Boulder Valley school districts — had lower expulsion rates than DPS last year, while the Cherry Creek School District expelled students at a higher rate than any other of the large metro districts.

Cherry Creek was the only district of the 10 examined that increased expulsions over the 10-year period. The district issued 142 expulsions during the 2021-22 academic year, more than any other year since 2011-12, according to the data. That translates to a rate of about 26.5 expulsions per 10,000 students.

“Cherry Creek School District did see a rise in behavioral issues after the COVID-19 pandemic when students returned to in-person learning,” the district said in a statement. “We anticipate reporting numbers for this year similar to our 2018-19 year before the pandemic.”

The district recorded 113 total expulsions in 2018-19, according to state data.

For years, DPS has worked to reduce how often it removes children from school through suspensions or expulsions.

The district had a history of expelling its youngest students — preschoolers to third-graders — at a disproportionately high rate. Then, in 2017, the school board adopted a new policy aiming to reform DPS’s discipline process.

The district’s new approach, DPS said at the time, was more equitable and would focus “on creating and maintaining more positive learning environments in schools and ensuring that there is a greater focus on corrective, instruction and restorative practices in place to keep students in the classroom.”

“We made some concerted efforts to make sure that wasn’t going to happen as frequently as it was happening,” Deborah Staten, the district’s current deputy chief of staff, said of expulsions.

Students who are expelled or suspended are more likely to drop out of high school, struggle academically and face incarceration, according to the district’s 2017 policy statement about the reforms.

And DPS, where about 75% of the children enrolled are students of color, also had a history of disciplining Black and Latino students at a higher rate than their white peers, according to the district’s website.

“As a district, (we) have put a lot of resources in training our school-based leaders to build a culture that allows for restoration,” said Simone Wright, the district’s associate chief of academics. “Those things need to be in place for students to productively learn.

“We believe it’s our moral obligation to provide every student, regardless of demographic information, a high-quality education,” she added.

For lesser offenses, the district offers other strategies educators can use to address misbehavior, including detention, mediation, classroom peace circles and mental health counseling, according to DPS policy.

And expulsion should be used “as a last resort,” said Childress, the district’s spokeswoman.

Safety concerns

But others argue DPS has gone too far, saying that while restorative-justice practices work for less serious behaviors, bringing a weapon — whether a gun or a knife — to school should lead to a student’s immediate removal from campus.

“What’s happened over the years is DPS has become much more tolerant of problematic behavior,” said Igor Raykin, an education law attorney who represents students facing expulsions from metro-area schools. “It seems as though DPS has really overcorrected over the last few years.”

Raykin pointed to the fact that Lyle, the teen who shot two East administrators, was still attending school despite there being enough concern about his potential behavior that staffers were searching him daily for weapons.

A student requiring a daily search for weapons should attend an alternative or online school where there is more security, mental health workers, and other supports, Raykin said.

“There’s no way that one kid’s right (to an education) is going to supersede thousands of other kids to stay safe,” said Raykin, who previously worked as a dean of discipline at DPS’s West High School. “When it comes to weapons, it has to be a zero-tolerance policy.”

Court documents obtained by The Post detail an example of the difficulty in balancing a student’s right to an education with student and staff safety.

The principal of a Denver school applied for a restraining order in February against a student who allegedly threatened to shoot the school leader and reportedly showed access to guns, according to the court records, which first were reported by 9News.

When the principal notified their supervisor and DPS’s attorney of the pending legal action, the court records show, the district informed the principal that, due to the student’s right to an education, the principal would have three options should the restraining order be granted: work remotely, accept a special assignment to the district’s central office, or go on paid administrative leave.

The principal, who didn’t respond to an interview request, did not go through with the protection order. DPS has since “worked with the student and faculty administrator to find a better solution,” Childress said, adding that the student has transferred schools.

When students with disruptive behaviors return to the classroom, it makes it difficult for schools to educate children, said Priscilla Shaw, who teaches music and orchestra at Hamilton Middle School.

“You’re not creating the ecosystem or the layout or the framework for us to do that when our institutional time is constantly interrupted by these types of behaviors,” she said.

A city facing rising gun violence

Denver is grappling with an increasing youth violence problem that’s overflowing into its schools with more guns and fake guns showing up on campuses than they did five years ago.

At the time of the East shooting last month, Lyle was on probation for possessing a dangerous weapon and a large-capacity magazine after a 2021 arrest by Aurora police.

He previously attended school in the Cherry Creek School District, but was expelled in the fall of 2021 for reasons the district has not detailed. Lyle attended Cherry Creek’s expulsion school, which offers a hybrid of in-person and online classes, from Jan. 26, 2022, to May 28, 2022.

By the time Lyle enrolled at East during the current academic year, his expulsion at Cherry Creek had expired. The teen attended the school because he lived in East’s boundary, DPS board Vice President Auon’tai Anderson said.

Much of Lyle’s disciplinary history in both DPS and the Cherry Creek School District is unknown, including whether he was ever found on a school campus with a gun or another type of weapon. Both districts declined The Post’s requests for his discipline records, citing student privacy laws.

So far this academic year, DPS has reported finding 14 guns and 22 fake guns on its school campuses. Five years ago, the district reported the discovery of just two real guns, along with nine fakes.

Students, parents and educators repeatedly urged DPS leaders to respond more aggressively to gun violence after a 16-year-old was fatally shot outside of East in February. Those calls have only grown louder after the second shooting — this time inside the school — last month.

Students have walked out of their classrooms multiple times to urge legislators to enact stricter gun control laws. Following calls for tighter security, the Board of Education voted unanimously to reverse policy and put armed police back in the city’s high schools when classes resumed last week.

The number of U.S. children and teens killed by gunfire increased 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the latest annual mortality statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

School shootings hit a record single-year high in the United States in 2022 — 40 school shootings killed 34 people and injured 88, according to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence.

Because there are so many factors affecting student discipline, Coogan, with the Denver School Leaders Association, said the solution to the nuanced problem the district finds itself in has to be addressed by more than just schools. The community must be involved as well, Coogan said. There must be conversations about students’ access to firearms, she said, and whether schools have adequate access and funding for mental health resources.

“Our youth are struggling and suffering”

When juvenile civil rights attorney Elie Zwiebel hears people talk about the need to make school safe, he wonders, “Safe for whom?”

Zwiebel largely represents students of color for low-level, non-violent issues and has seen the harm heavyhanded discipline policies can have on students of color from his time as an educator, he said.

“Expulsion does nothing to support the individual students that are expelled,” Zwiebel said. “What happens on the other side of an expulsion? The vast majority of students who are expelled across the state receive little to no support during that expulsion period.”

Research has established that expulsion disproportionately targets students of color, negatively impacts graduation rates and increases the likelihood of ending up in the juvenile justice system.

Zwiebel worries that measures taken to placate a community in mourning, such as the return of police in schools, will only worsen the heightened situation.

“After taking slow steps forward and trying to better understand racial injustice and systemic inequities and articulating what the school-to-prison pipeline is, suddenly folks who have been waiting for the right moment to get ‘tough on crime’ are now taking this opportunity and leveraging community sadness and fear to implement these knee-jerk responses that we know do not work and we know will cause significant harm to our neighbors,” Zwiebel said.

Too much of the dialogue right now, Zwiebel said, pits opposing the school-to-prison pipeline against supporting schools and educators, and Zwiebel said that tension is misplaced.

Instead, Zwiebel said school districts need to provide better support to educators and administrators who are understaffed, underresourced and underpaid and focus on mental health support for students.

“We must not resort to the disproven, easy answer and actually have a much harder conversation that gives a chance to envision a better future that keeps all of our students safe,” Zwiebel said.

Shelby Demby, managing director of Restorative Justice Education and former restorative justice coordinator at DPS, said restorative practices done right focus on looking at the harm done and figuring out with the student how to make it right.

Restorative practices also focus on prevention, she said. By creating strong bonds and trust, the adults have the social capital to find a path forward with the student if harm occurs.

“The more proactive thing to do is focus on school supports and mental health supports,” Demby said.

Shelby Gonzales-Parker, a teacher at Denver alternative school Contemporary Learning Academy, is familiar with DPS’s expulsion practices, having gone through them herself as a student.