Pueden encontrar la versión en español aquí.
Members of the Roaring Fork School District’s (RFSD) Board of Education announced on Tuesday that Dr. Anna Cole is their preferred candidate for superintendent.
If contract negotiations go smoothly, Dr. Cole could become the school district’s official superintendent later this year, but she’s already been serving as interim superintendent since the fall of 2023.
RFSD identified Dr. Cole as one of three finalists for the superintendency on Feb. 27 alongside Tharyn Mulberry, the assistant superintendent of the Aspen School District, and Dr. Bill Wilson, the superintendent of the Brush School District in northeast Colorado. Mulberry withdrew his candidacy on March 4 to pursue the superintendent role in Aspen after its current leader, David Baugh, announced his resignation.
Dr. Cole has served as RFSD’s chief of student and family services since 2021, and she served as the director of the Family Resource Center, a RFSD nonprofit partner, from 2019-2021. According to her resume, she has experience as a teacher at the high school and university level and received her Ph.D. in Educational Thought and Sociocultural Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2009.
The school board was confident in Dr. Cole’s capacity to do the job well. At their Tuesday meeting, school board member Lindsay Defrates said that she’s excited about the future of the school district under Dr. Cole’s leadership.
“The days will always be long,” Defrates said. “I'm excited about her growth mindset and her willingness to not only be here, but to seek out feedback from the board, from teachers, from students, and from the community. Because if that feedback stops coming, then that's when we know we have a problem.”
Many of the other board members said they believe Dr. Cole will prioritize narrowing the achievement gap between white and Latino students.
In a presentation to families on March 7, Dr. Cole identified some of her priorities as a superintendent. She said addressing that achievement gap between white and Latino students is the biggest challenge facing RFSD, and she said part of tackling this problem is hiring a more diverse pool of teachers.
“In the Roaring Fork schools, our students of color make up about 55 to 60% of our student population, and our teachers of color make up about 10%,” Dr. Cole said. “We're way off. We're way off there. We need to have partnerships with organizations that are training and supporting and recruiting and retaining teachers.”
President and CEO of Latino advocacy organization Voces Unidas, Alex Sanchez, asked Dr. Cole if the board had required her to present evidence of her experience in closing the student achievement gap. She said it was a big topic of conversation in her interviews.
“I would definitely say that I've been asked a lot about that topic,” Dr. Cole said. “Over the last two or three weeks of conversations and communication, that has been the topic. … ‘What's the plan? How are you going to address it? What are your measures? How are you going to attack that? How are we going to work on it together?’”
She added that building more teacher housing and increasing salaries is a big component of attracting high quality educators and support staff to lower the school district’s rate of teacher turnover.
Since Dr. Cole became interim superintendent in the fall of 2023, she has been working on solidifying the RFSD’s new strategic plan and fielding concerns from families over the district’s new 3R health and sexual education curriculum, which includes lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The Roaring Fork School District plans to finalize contract negotiations with Dr. Cole, but no timeline has been announced.
