Public schools need ‘overhaul,’ Hickenlooper says

BOULDER – Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told Boulder education and business leaders “We need to totally overhaul our public schools” in a morning breakfast forum Jan. 11 presented by Impact on Education and the Boulder Chamber of Commerce.

As an advocate of finding new ways to fund scholarships and increase the number of high school students attending college, Hickenlooper said he made it a goal to visit every public school in the Denver system, and he has made weekly visits to nearly 130 schools in his three years in office.

The goal in finding ways to help public schools, he said, is citizens must believe that every school is good enough for their children to attend.

Hickenlooper recently succeeded in getting a successful entrepreneur to donate $50 million into a scholarship trust of the Denver Public Schools Foundation.

Kids’ eyes pop out, he said, when you tell them that if they only graduate from high school, on average they will make $1 million less in their careers than if they graduate from college.

Economic development needs to be looked at in a “new light,” Hickenlooper said. Programs should not just be geared to bringing more people to Colorado, but raising the quality of life for people who live here – and that means support for public education.

Several Boulder County businesses – Roche Colorado, Seagate and bivio Software – were recognized at the second annual forum for their programs assisting schools and students.

Executives from Roche and Seagate said their companies struggle to find employees strong in science and math.

Only 6 percent of high school students nationally say they have an interest in engineering, said George Wiebecke, president of Roche Colorado, which has a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Boulder.

Roche sponsors a Colorado regional science fair for public schools, and the company, partnering with the EPA, started a hazardous cleanup program for school laboratories.

Getting more women interested in technology careers has been one of the goals for Seagate, which builds disk drives in Longmont. The company sponsors a program called Expanding Your Horizons, which focuses on girls in middle schools to learn more about science and engineering careers.

The company also funds scholarships for science-oriented students, said Michael Crump, vice president of design center reliability for Seagate. In March, women engineers from Seagate will be demonstrating disk drive technology to students at a University of Colorado conference.

Business programs to assist schools do not have to be limited to larger companies, said Francie Anhut, executive director of Impact on Education.

bivio Software, a five-employee Boulder company, is a good example of how smaller companies can get involved, Anhut said.

The company developed a “frequent biker” program called Freiker that encouraged students to ride their bicycles to schools. The program started out small at Crest View Elementary, but eventually doubled the number of bike riders at the school.

Chief Executive Rob Nagler, who admits he’s a tech geek, used RFID technology to track the bike riders, proving the program could work. He’s now taking the program, online at Freiker.org, to other local schools and eventually could see it being used in other states.

Nagler, who wore a T-shirt with the Freiker logo, explained he once saw Boulder venture capitalist Brad Feld in a T-shirt at a business event.

“I thought if I wear a T-shirt, maybe I will get rich like him,” Nagler joked.

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