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Denver school board member Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán is running for reelection.
Gaytán has represented southwest Denver’s District 2 on the school board since 2021, including a two-year stint as president. She will face one challenger for the seat in November.
Gaytán, 50, is both a Denver Public Schools graduate and a DPS parent. She said she is running for reelection because she believes in the work the board is doing with Superintendent Alex Marrero, including the district’s new Latinx Student Success team, which aims to improve education for the Latino students who make up half of the district’s population.
“We need to continue that momentum, and I want to be a part of those discussions,” Gaytán said.
Four seats on the seven-member Denver school board are up for grabs in the Nov. 4 election, which comes at a key time. Declining enrollment has led to more than a dozen school closures in the past two years, and a new policy for low-performing schools could lead to more closures.
The district’s test scores are up, but big gaps remain between students of color and white students. DPS has been targeted by the Trump administration over an all-gender restroom and its support for immigrant students. And the board recently ordered an investigation of one of its members over allegations of racial discrimination.
Gaytán was born in Mexico and identifies as an indigenous Latina. She graduated from Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School and has worked for more than two decades as a real estate agent. Gaytán is bilingual and primarily works with Spanish-speaking clients, many of whom can no longer afford to buy homes in Denver, she said.
“It does shatter me to know that we continue to lose Black and brown families in this current housing market, which means we’re losing students that could potentially stay in DPS,” she said.
Gaytán’s younger son is a senior at CEC Early College high school, where she said he is taking a full load of community college classes. Her older son graduated from Denver Center for International Studies, a high school that the board recently closed for low enrollment.
Gaytán voted for the closure of DCIS and several other schools. Although she strongly opposed school closures when she ran four years ago, Gaytán said the vote was necessary due to factors outside of the board’s control. In addition to the gentrification that has pushed families out of Denver, Gaytán pointed to what she called the “over-charterization” of DPS. Charter schools, she said, have siphoned students away from traditional district-run schools.
“They have done a phenomenal job to convince our families that their children will fare better in their schools, which is a complete fallacy,” Gaytán said of charter schools, which are authorized by DPS but independently run by nonprofit organizations.
“Parents choose to attend there, leaving [district-run] buildings half empty, making it very difficult for us as a school district to be able to maintain a less-than-half-empty school building,” she said.
Gaytán recently voted for a four-year pause on enrollment-based school closures. But a new policy created by the superintendent calls for closing schools with persistently low test scores.
Gaytán said she appreciates that the district will first try to help the struggling schools improve. If a school is making progress, Gaytán said she would “take a hard look” at whether to close it. But she also said that “we could also see schools that just have no forward movement, and we will know at that point in time if we need to close.”
Gaytán was endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association when she ran in 2021. The union has not yet endorsed a candidate in District 2 this year.
Gaytán has supported the union’s causes on the board, voting in favor of a teacher pay raise that ultimately failed and helping craft a policy that requires DPS’ semi-autonomous innovation schools to abide by the teachers union contract.
Gaytán’s two years as board president, from 2021 to 2023, were marked by personality conflicts and tense debates. At one point, she told local media outlets that she feared two other board members were trying to replace her as president. But the past two years have been calmer.
“I put in the work with a mediator to improve any negative situation I may have had with any of my colleagues as board president,” Gaytán said. “That work helped tremendously. I’m open to doing that again if any conflict arises.”
Gaytán has voted to extend Marrero’s contract and raise his pay. She said she believes in the superintendent’s strategic plan and the emphasis he’s put on improving education for students of color and those learning English as a second language.
“It’s important to me that we continue to have an Afro Latino superintendent that speaks Spanish,” Gaytán said. “When he shows up in southwest Denver, he shows up speaking Spanish to our students, and the children light up and get so excited.”
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
