When Jen Hanson, a veteran multilingual educator, first arrived at Denver’s Cherry Creek School District in June 2025, she said she quickly suspected the district was creating its own rules for moving students out of its English learner program, leaving her to question whether it was holding on to kids — and the state and federal funding they brought in — for far too long.
The 52,000-student district evaluated children’s English proficiency based on how they scored on a nationally used test called WIDA ACCESS and on two other measures, as required by the state.
Within days of taking the post, Hanson said she found more than 5,700 students between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school year who had hit the WIDA scoring benchmark, but many were not evaluated on their language skills, the first step in ultimately moving kids out of the program. If they were deemed English proficient, they would be placed in general education classes under a two-year monitoring phase.