When Karen Duell majored in business in college, she dreamed of someday starting her own company like her father had, never guessing she’d find her real calling years later, building mutually beneficial partnerships between public schools and the communities they serve.
South High School’s Community and Family Liaison grew up in Florida, where her father had moved the family from Michigan early on to launch a construction enterprise.
After graduating from John Brown University, Duell married and relocated with her husband Bruce to Southern California, where she worked for a few years at Shasta Beverages before moving to Denver while her husband attended seminary here. The couple then returned to Florida to help her dad with his building business. She gave birth to her oldest two children there, adopted a third child, and returned to Denver several years later when her husband took a church position and the couple adopted a fourth child.
“One of the reasons we moved was our youngest two children are mixed-race and the west coast of Florida at the time was pretty Anglo,” she says. “We felt strongly that they needed to be in a more diverse community both in terms of public schools and the city makeup itself and sought out such an area for Bruce to take a church.”
As her children got older, Duell began looking for a job within Denver Public Schools to accommodate her kids’ schedule and, when her youngest entered fifth grade, found a temporary office manager position at Merrill Middle School for a semester before landing a job as health tech nurse at Morey Middle School. “We were very big on neighborhood schools,” she says. “All our children had attended neighborhood schools including Morey, where we were very involved.” When then principal John Zarr created a “Community and Family Liaison” position at Morey the following year, Duell proved a perfect fit.
Besides obtaining grants for and coordinating all after-school programs, the new role involved meeting with neighborhood associations and creating a partnership board with community organizations and parents. “I felt strongly that community engagement was very important for public schools both in terms of the community supporting our schools and the schools giving back,” Duell explains. “The schools are really the anchor to the neighborhood. So I worked with John Zarr and the two principals that followed to establish that with organizations such as the Downtown Denver Business Partnership, Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods and local businesses. For example, the financial company ING was then located in the neighborhood and sent employees over to tutor our students after school. We saw a huge rise in student performance as a result of that commitment that later developed into a mentorship program.”
“At some high school football games you look up in the stands and see the black students in this section and the white students in this section. It’s not that they don’t get along but they don’t have an inclusive relationship. But here you see great diversity. I wish the UN would come over to see how it’s done because these kids understand how to do it often better than the adults. I love watching them."
When former South High School principal Kristin Waters (who had worked with Duell when Waters served as principal at Morey years earlier) asked Duell to come to South as Community and Family Liaison there in 2011, Duell welcomed the challenge. “One of the things she wanted me to do was reach out to the community and create greater awareness and understanding of what a jewel South High School is, because I don’t think everybody recognized that. I think schools have become a business and you have to market and recruit.”
Duell’s role at South includes cultivating and sustaining partnerships with neighborhood organizations, local businesses and nonprofits by reaching out to neighborhood groups such as the Washington Park East Neighborhood Association and South Pearl Street Merchants Association. She markets South to potential families and students through shadowing programs for eighth graders and hosting a showcase night for families and students, and connects students with tutors from the community.
“We created the Denver South High School Community Partnership Program Board to plan marketing events, meet school and student needs, and reach out to the neighborhood,” she says. “Our board members work with our athletic director to help meet those needs; they held a barbecue for the families of the football players, for example. One of our teachers just started an engineering program and has been trying to find engineers to come in and speak so they help with teachers’ needs like that.”
Nonprofits such as A Little Help partner with South. “Our students volunteer there through Student Senate and our football team did some community service work for them recently,” she says. “South partners with the University of Denver, which provides tutors and mentors. DU students come in and help our students develop skills necessary for college preparation. Some help in our Future Center funded by the Denver Scholarship Foundation where juniors and seniors go to get help applying to colleges and editing their college essays.”
Local businesses such as Waterway Gas & Wash employ South students and sponsor athletic events. “We have a program where if you pay toward athletics like they have, we’ll hang your company’s banner either outside on the fence or inside in the gym,” Duell says. “They’ve been amazing. Last spring, they gave all our teachers an $18 deluxe car wash coupon for Teacher Appreciation day. We give back because they need our students to employ and we can help them with advertising. We don’t just want to say you give to South; we want to give back, too.”
A new focus includes nurturing a new college fund to help low-income students pay for AP tests and the growing costs of applying to colleges. “We haven’t been a fundraising committee in the past, but this year we lost money from state grants to help students with college application costs,” Duell says. “So, in January we’re launching the South College Fund for capable students in financial need, including some of the 25-30 percent of South students in our English Language Acquisition (ELA) program, some of whom have greater needs than others like the rest of our population.”
As part of the “family” component of Duell’s job, until this year she handled parent meetings for ELA families “communicating what education looks like in the United States, specifically at South,” she says. “But this year the principal said you’re doing too much and so we have a new person in charge of that. Mostly, I think of myself as being the first contact person at South for students, families and members of the community. I provide communication through written materials, support via email and help connect people with carpooling. I help parents who have adopted a student from overseas find tutoring, and help nonprofits and businesses establish partnerships with South. Basically I focus on connecting people with the resources they need.”
Duell works with South student “ambassadors” appointed to represent the high school either at special events or through partnering with eighth-grade student “shadows” spending the day getting to know South. “I love working with kids,” she says. “There’s nothing better for me than being in touch with the students and seeing how inclusive they are of our community. It’s incredible how they embrace and support each other no matter what the ethnicity. Our international diversity at South is huge and it’s been so much fun to get to know students from places like Ethiopia and Sudan. I wouldn’t have taken this job or stayed with it if I didn’t believe in South. This is such a cool school!”
Duell’s work provides a source of continual inspiration. “At some high school football games you look up in the stands and see the black students in this section and the white students in this section,” she says. “It’s not that they don’t get along but they don’t have an inclusive relationship. But here you see great diversity. I wish the UN would come over to see how it’s done because these kids understand how to do it often better than the adults. I love watching them. There was a girl from Ethiopia who’s Christian, a girl from the neighborhood who's Jewish and a girl from Iraq who’s Muslim and they were all laughing and cutting up while they were helping me put some materials together recently. That’s South.”
Author Susan Dugan’s wide range of work includes newspaper and magazine articles, personal essays and fiction. An active volunteer in local schools, she has taught creative writing and brought authors into classrooms. If you know a member of our community who is contributing in extraordinary ways and might make a good subject for this column, email Susan at sadugan@gmail.com.
