The Denver Public Schools (DPS) provide a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of school segregation within the context of rapid demographic changes and key policy changes. In 1973, Denver became the first northern school district ordered to desegregate by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lawyers representing a group of Black, Latino and White families filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court charging that schools in the Park Hill neighborhoods were intentionally segregated to keep White students separate from minority students. Keyes was the first Supreme Court ruling that recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregation. Under Keyes, Denver created a plan that desegregated both Black and Latino students within the city and since then one of the most dramatic demographic changes in Denver Public Schools (DPS) has been the surge of Latino enrollment. In 1980, DPS was already majority minority with 41 percent White, 23 percent Black, 32 percent Latino, and 3 percent Asian student enrollment. A little over two decades later, DPS became majority Latino, with White students comprising only one-fifth of the entire student body by 2003.
Amidst the context of major demographic transformation, in 1995 the court ended nearly two decades of court ordered school desegregation in Denver schools (Keyes v. Denver School District No. I, 902 F. Supp. 1274 (1995)). Policymakers and educators will be uniquely challenged to provide education in a context that is both majority Latino and, as this paper documents, increasingly segregated and unequal for its growing diverse student body. This paper, the first of two reports, focuses on the dynamics of segregation, demographic changes, and implications for graduation rates in the Denver Public Schools.
