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promised to unveil her 100-day plan this month, capping a tense superintendent search process for the district.

Her predecessor Corey Wise was controversially fi red without cause in a split 4-3 board vote on Feb. 4. The decision was complicated by allegations from the board minority that majority directors violated open meetings by privately planning Wise’s removal, and asking him to step down in a closed-door meeting before holding a public vote.

Speculation started almost immediately that the majority had predetermined Kane, a well-known school leader in the district, as Wise’s replacement. It was fueled further when board President Mike Peterson confi rmed he asked Kane if she had interest in the superintendency before Wise was terminated.

As the board narrowed its search from two fi nalists to naming Kane as its sole fi nalist, again in a split decision, calls ramped up for Kane and the majority to disclose more detail about a retreat the newly elected directors held after winning offi ce in November. Kane attended. Her opponents wanted to know why.

Asked if she took part in any conversations regarding Wise’s employment with the district, Kane’s voice raised.

“Absolutely not. Absolutely not,” she said.

She attended the retreat to present about school fi nancials and push for funding, she said. Kane said people alleging she colluded for the job “are creating a narrative that isn’t true.”

“I don’t know what else to say,” she said.

Community reaction to Kane was strong, met with both fi erce and passionate support for her to become DCSD’s leader, and staunch opposition from those leery of her path to secure the job.

School Board Director David Ray said the other fi nalist, Danny Winsor, was a unifying choice. He considered Kane to be the opposite. She is a successful leader, he said, but a divisive name that would continue to polarize the community.

Ray, who passionately opposed the manner of Wise’s fi ring and the superintendent search process, boycotted Kane’s hiring by refusing to attend the special meeting in which directors approved her contract.

But the embattled superintendent argues her track record tells a different story.

“I don’t think people calling me divisive makes me divisive,” Kane said.

Skeptics remain

Twice now, a board president has asked Kane to consider helming the district amid a season of chaos. The most recent instance was earlier this school year when Peterson approached her. The second was back in 2016, when the then superintendent left for another job and the district needed an interim leader.

Kane felt apprehensive, she said.

She spent two months thinking of every reason why applying to be interim superintendent was “a terrible idea,” she said. No education degree. A charter school leader? And after a board of reform-minded directors had made contentious changes in the district, such as pursuing a voucher program and changing the way teachers were paid, tensions ran high in DCSD.

“The district was just a mess at the time,” Kane said.

Kane said she expected her time as interim superintendent to be brief. Six months, at most. Instead two years went by, although not without pushback.

Two directors at the time, Ray and former board Director Anne-Marie Lemieux, gave Kane negative evaluations of her interim performance and voted against extending her contract in 2017.

Lemieux has remained a vocal critic of Kane’s fi tness for the job throughout the 2022 search.

She said Kane lacked transparency with the board as interim superintendent, citing an example in which Kane informed school principals she was making budget cuts before talking with directors about her plan.

Lemieux said Kane is taking credit for a boost to employee morale between 2016 and 2018 when she shouldn’t be. A superintendent left. New board members were elected. Those were signifi cant factors, Lemieux said.

Lemieux worried Kane will open the door for more charter schools in the district. Of DCSD’s 89 schools, 18 are charter. Increasing the number of charter schools “takes funding out of the Douglas County School District pot,” she said.

“Her track record is an outspoken proponent of the charter school model, and she is now leading a district that needs its neighborhood schools to be taken care of. And that’s not in her wheelhouse,” Lemieux said.

Lemieux questioned if Kane would instruct employees against best practices “because she doesn’t understand pedagogy.”

“It’s alarming because she’s not qualifi ed for the position,” Lemieux said. “This is the third largest district in the state and a deep understanding of the diverse educational needs of the students has to be a No. 1 consideration. And someone with no educational background doesn’t have the qualifi cations. I’m not being mean, I’m being honest.”

Where it all started

Kane went to college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, earning a degree in applied math and computer science. Her sophomore year, Kane said, she was hired as the university’s only undergraduate teaching assistant.

“I’m a math girl, and so I started teaching math classes at the university for arts and science students who didn’t like math,” she said.

She was 19 and getting her fi rst go

Erin Kane in her American Academy o ce on her last day of work leading the Douglas

County charter school before fi lling the DCSD superintendency. PHOTO BY JESSICA GIBBS

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at helping run a classroom. Kane recalled the feeling of students have a lightbulb moment, clicking with a subject that did not come easily for them.

“It really, I think, lit an early fi re in me for caring about getting that lightbulb to come on,” she said.

Her fi rst group of students gifted her a card and teddy bear at the end of their course, which Kane has kept to this day.

She landed her fi rst job out of college at the technology company IBM, working on positioning global satellites, or GPS. It was 1994 and the technology had yet to make its way into cellphones. People still bought separate GPS devices, Kane said.

“I used to program telemetry,” she said.

From IBM, Kane moved to the private sector and worked for a business intelligence company in D.C., specializing in data science. She and her husband returned to Colorado in 2000, settling in Castle Pines North to start their family after the birth of their fi rst daughter.

There, Kane raised her three children. She worked a few more years in high technology before spending a brief stint as a stay-athome mother. In that time, she also tutored district students in pre-calc and trigonometry.

“Nerdy. I’m very nerdy,” she said

Also during that period, Kane formed the idea of starting a charter school. The district had great schools, Kane said, but she envisioned an education model that prioritized science, technology, engineering and math.

“STEM was literally not even an acronym in 2004,”she said.

Kane helped found American Academy in 2005. Opening with 391 students, the school launched at a strip mall in Lone Tree. Parents and staff painted the 20,000 square feet of warehouse space, carpeted the fl oors, and watched as a waitlist began to form.

“Concrete playground and all,” Kane said.

The county and district was undergoing a phase of growth, she said, and American Academy helped absord that. As enrollment climbed, the charter school moved to Castle Pines North, opening its fi rst building in 2009. That same year, the school’s director left. American Academy’s board asked Kane to step in “for just fi ve minutes,” she said, while it sought new leadership.

A board member at the time, and still dabbling in the engineering fi eld, Kane recalled feeling reluctant. She knew she did not have experience as a principal, she said, but she agreed.

“I stepped in for fi ve minutes, and that was 14 years ago,” she said.

An emulated leader

Mark Middlebrooks, the specials department director for American Academy, oversees art, music, technology and physical education for the school. He’s one of the charter school’s employees to have joined its staff in 2005, and never leave.

He recalled a culture of camaraderie, and a vision for the school that drew people in despite the “less than desirable” facility it opened in. People joined because “of what we sensed was a really great thing happening.”

“It wasn’t perhaps the most glamorous of roles in which to get started,” he said, “but there was such a sense of purpose about it.”

In interviewing for the job, Middlebrooks said he wanted to try new, emerging strategies in music education such as music workstations for each child, and found receptive leaders at American Academy willing to let him innovate.

He met Kane while she was still an American Academy board member and not yet its director. Roughly 17 years later, he holds her up as 10335 S. Parker Rd., Parker

303-805-9742

The new superintendent of Douglas County Schools, Erin Kane, o cially

started the job on March 31. PHOTO BY JESSICA GIBBS HICKORY HOUSE RIBS FEATURED ON

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