Wounded East High Dean’s First Public Statement Builds on School Safety Conversation | #hacking | #aihp

On May 8, Kwame Spearman — who had officially announced his candidacy for the Denver Public Schools Board of Education just hours earlier — stood back and watched as East High School dean Wayne Mason talked in public for the first time since he was shot by a student six weeks earlier.

Auon’tai Anderson, who holds the at-large seat Spearman is after, listened from the other side of the crowd, donning a full suit and aviator sunglasses.

The gathering was part of a weekly series of get-togethers coordinated by the Parents – Safety Advocacy Group, which formed immediately after Mason and another dean, Eric Sinclair, were shot by seventeen-year-old Austin Lyle on March 22. The Monday meetings are a response to ongoing community concerns surrounding students and staff safety at both East High School and the DPS district as a whole.

Spearman describes himself as an early member of the group, while Anderson — who is currently school board vice president — is a familiar face at the events, which are held at the Thatcher Memorial Fountain outside of East.

P-SAG has been a loud and consistent voice in the ongoing discussion around DPS policy issues and safety concerns, including a large amount of criticism thrown at the school board owing to its flip-flopping decisions to remove and then reintroduce SROs, as well as its highly publicized and ongoing dysfunction.

Mason’s account of the East High shooting during this Monday’s get-together added fuel to the fire of the still-burning DPS safety conversation, which has found a new venue in the upcoming school board elections.

Anderson has adamantly refused to resign from the school board, despite continued pressure from groups such as ResignDPS, which contends on its website that the DPS board has “abdicated its most basic duty: keeping students and staff safe.”

In the past, Anderson has advised upset community members to “take your anger out on us at the ballot box.”

In a release sent out Monday, Anderson welcomed Spearman to the school board race, saying, “It is essential for voters to have diverse choices.”

For Spearman, Mason’s account of what happened at East on March 22 depicts both a shining example of East’s long legacy of educators going above and beyond the requirements of their jobs — something he’d seen firsthand when he attended East in the early 2000s — as well as a policy failure on the part of both the school and the district, which put Mason and Sinclair in a position where they had no other choice but to take extra measures to ensure student safety.

“That was exactly the experience that I had at East,” Spearman says. “Going to school with a group of people, particularly teachers and administrators, who would do anything to keep students safe.”

Anderson says he’s grateful for Mason’s firsthand account of the East shooting to finally come to light.

“I think we truly got a first look at what actually happened at East High School on that day,” he says.

According to Anderson, the school board is waiting for Superintendent Alex Marrero to send an “after-action review” so it can make recommendations in order to prevent an incident like this in the future. “Superintendent Marrero is the operational leader of this district,” he adds, referring to Marrero’s oversight of staff and hiring.

Anderson says he knows that “every school is having staffing issues across the board.”

While speaking to the press on Monday, Mason recalled how staffing shortages led to him and his colleagues having to take on additional responsibilities that they did not have the time or qualifications to fulfill.

There were originally four deans, but one had recently left, and his vacant position was never filled — leaving three deans responsible for 2,500 students, he said. Additionally, East had lost staff who were in charge of front and back door security, and he and the other deans needed to take on that role as well.

Mason claimed that Lyle had been seen with a firearm in class by another student a few weeks before the shooting but that Lyle left the school before the sighting could be verified.

Mason feels that not only should Lyle not have been allowed to return to school after the report, but that the incident should have resulted in an increased security presence at East.

“We should have had armed safety patrol there every morning that Austin came into the school,” he said. “My friend Eric Sinclair should have never been put in that position. I believe there were things that we left on the table that should have been taken care of but weren’t,” Mason continued.

Spearman agrees.

“It underscores where we are, where we have people who work for Denver Public Schools who love students and are willing to do anything to ensure that those students have an excellent outcome,” he says. “But there’s not a plan in place to ensure that they have the proper support needed to deal with day-to-day incidents at the school, and we have to fix that immediately.”

Adds Spearman, “At what point can a school say that it is not safe for our schools for an individual like Austin to come to school? I think we need to give more deference to our principals to allow that to happen.”

One solution that Spearman proposes is putting students like Lyle in alternative education environments so that they do not take away from other kids’ learning or put people at risk. Spearman’s mother was a longtime teacher and principal in the DPS system and would often encounter situations where, in a classroom of thirty kids, one would take up all of a teacher’s attention.

“Do you teach to that one student or to the other 29?” Spearman asks. “To me, it’s pretty clear that you teach to the other 29.”

Anderson agrees with Mason that Lyle should have been expelled after bringing a firearm to school — but only if the firearm sighting had been verified.

“If it’s credible that Austin did have a firearm at school prior to the shooting at East, then he should have been expelled,” Anderson says. “That is district policy.”

When it comes to placing Lyle and others in alternative education environments, Anderson disagrees with Spearman and believes DPS shouldn’t send students away. As someone who personally went to an alternative pathway school, he says, “I know what it means to go to school in those settings, and those students aren’t bad. … Nobody should have to go through exclusionary discipline.”

Adds Anderson: “I hope Kwame will start studying about what it means to be a school board member, because we don’t have those jurisdictions to start telling kids where they can and can’t go to school.”

The board VP announced his reelection campaign last November. When speaking at the May 1 P-SAG meeting, Mason’s sister — Collinus Newsome — said that Anderson is the only DPS boardmember who had reached out to her and her family after the shooting.

Spearman entered the Denver mayor’s race at the beginning of the year but dropped out in mid-March. He endorsed Kelly Brough, whom Anderson also endorsed, over Mike Johnston in the upcoming run-off election.

The former Tattered Cover head hinted at his school board run in early April, when he stepped down as CEO of the bookstore to focus on politics. When officially announcing his school board run, he told Westword that he takes issue with the ongoing politicization and dysfunction of the board.

Spearman claims that rather than addressing the safety concerns that came to a head after the Lyle shooting — and in the wake of its 2020 decision to remove school resource officers — the board has spent its time “political grandstanding.”

The board needs someone “who isn’t going to spend their time tweeting at two in the morning,” he adds — referring to Anderson’s Twitter habit that once earned him censure from the rest of the school board for online bullying behavior.

“I think that if Kwame could be more concerned about literacy scores than about what people do in their personal time, or on their own personal social media, then we would be in a much better position,” Anderson responds. “I look forward to Kwame giving some [ideas] on how he plans to achieve academic outcomes instead of trying to already start a campaign off with smearing the incumbent who’s actually already won a citywide election.”

Kwame does say he thinks boardmembers have good intentions, however.

“You only run for the school board if you are committed to the students,” he says, adding that there must be a renewed focus on those students rather than internal conflict.

Spearman thinks that SROs should be allowed to remain in Denver’s public schools but says that it should be up to each individual school to decide whether to have them. Anderson, on the other hand, opposes their continued presence following the end of this school year.

Both board candidates have issues with the district’s recently released draft of a long-term operational safety plan. “While that was a draft, it was a draft that they’ve had years to work on,” Spearman notes.

The plan includes at least 35 pages about what the city is currently doing to improve safety.

Anderson’s primary issue with the plan, according to his May 2 press release, is that the survey on which it is based does not accurately represent Denver’s diverse community.

According to Mason’s recollection of the events, when Lyle arrived at school on March 22, the assistant principal who usually met with the teen for pat-downs as part of an implemented safety plan was nowhere to be found.

Deans are not trained or qualified to do security work or body searches, and without knowing the specific procedures the assistant principal usually went through with Lyle, he and Sinclair were in unfamiliar territory.

After Sinclair radioed the assistant principal and could not reach him, Sinclair decided to take the teen back to the deans’ office. Mason said he heard Sinclair call repeatedly for the assistant principal over the radio moments later, and also for a safety officer. Neither answered.

Then Sinclair called Mason.

“Help me!” he cried. ‘Wayne! Wayne! Help me!”

Mason rushed into the room and saw Sinclair and Lyle wrestling. At the gathering, he recounted how he’d grabbed Lyle, prompting the teen to pull out a gun.

At least two shots were fired at Sinclair, then two more at Mason.

“Austin broke away from me, and he stood there staring at Eric and I, still pointing the gun at us,” Mason recalled.

“The moment that Austin pulled that trigger, I forgave him,” Mason said, noting how Lyle later committed suicide that evening. “The regret that I have right now is that he is not here for me to tell him that, and I wish he was.”