A third Denver school has made a bid for autonomy, asking to be set free from a wide array of school district and teacher contract regulations.

Montclair School of Academics and Enrichment, an elementary school in east Denver, submitted paperwork late Friday to Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association.

Principal Shannon Hagerman said her staff voted 22-1 in favor of seeking autonomy.

The waiver requests are identical to those already approved for Bruce Randolph School (a grades 6-12 school) and Manual High School, according to Hagerman.  They would free Monclair to hire its own staff on its own timelines (beginning next year, because this year's hiring for the 2008-09 school year is already complete) set their own working conditions, and provide incentives for hard-to-fill teaching assignments.

At least as significant, Montclair would receive salary dollars based on the actual cost of the teachers they hire, rather than based on the district's average teacher salary.

Hagerman said she was prompted to seek autonomy after going through another frustrating year of following the district's convoluted hiring processes. "I vowed I would never go through this again," she said.

Montclair is a rising star in DPS. It has an enrollment of 363 students in  ECE through fifth grade. Its Early High Strides program has, over the past three years, begun attracting a significant middle class population to what had long been an extremely high-poverty school.

The school ranked in the top third of DPS elementary schools in the recently released School Performance Framework, which gives greater weight to academic growth than to absolute performance. Eighty-three percent of the school's students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch.

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