In May 2022, Denver school board members Scott Esserman and Auon’tai Anderson publicly humiliated a Manual High JROTC instructor at a meeting of parents and students. They falsely blamed him for a district decision to move the program and accused him of racism.

When the principal tried to take the blame, Anderson wouldn’t allow it: “I won’t let you take that bullet… Sometimes, grown men gonna have to answer to their grown choices,” he shouted, referring to the instructor.

It was a flagrant violation of board rules — and Esserman flaunted it: “We’re not supposed to be currently involved in operational decisions. But to hell if I’m gonna stay silent…”

No investigation. No accountability.

Now, Esserman is among those targeting fellow DPS board member John Youngquist — a highly respected former East High principal — with a $100,000 investigation into the crime of asking tough questions about performance and insisting on transparency.

Months ago, Superintendent Alex Marrero — at loggerheads with Youngquist since the beginning — demanded an investigation and censure, crying racism. The resulting report concluded Youngquist appeared “belittling, dismissive and condescending” toward staff but couldn’t substantiate deliberate racial bias.

Witnesses are anonymous, but many are obvious: DPS lawyer Aaron Thompson and Chief of Staff Deborah Staten have previously been reported to allege mistreatment and racial bias by Youngquist. Board members are unnamed, too.

Why are top staff and elected officials granted anonymity in this case? It reeks of concealing collusion among senior leaders with everything to lose by crossing Marrero.

Witnesses gripe Youngquist is “unsupportive” and “dismissive” of modest gains like a 79% graduation rate, which are “simply ‘not good enough’ for Mr. Youngquist” — even as students graduate without meeting expectations. Another whined he “treats every achievement as ‘never enough’” when he won’t celebrate supposed gap narrowing in math.

Good! It actually isn’t enough.

Black and brown K-8 students rose from 15.9% proficiency in 2024 to just 17.6% in 2025; high schoolers from 19% to 21%. White K-8 students jumped from 65.3% to 68.1%, while high schoolers slipped from 68.2% to 66.3%. That isn’t “healthy” gap-closing; it’s a failure to support vulnerable students.

District officials aren’t used to scrutiny. They bristle, expecting board members to toe the “positive data” line.

Youngquist, by contrast, is an accountability guy who views his job to hold the district to results. That’s refreshing.

This investigation was flimsy — grievance-heavy, context-light, wrapped in anonymity and innuendo. It reads like people easily upset by tough questions piling on through a formal process.

But that’s the point: Stack anonymous claims, toss out flash-words like “racism,” eventually pass a censure — and you can dog Youngquist forever with, “He was censured for mistreating staff in a racially biased way.” It’s a line built for repetition — a convenient smear through the legitimacy of an “investigation.”

In May, the board voted 5-2 to hand Marrero a $346,529-per-year contract extension with more job protections — four months after adopting new performance metrics he largely wrote himself, without evaluating him first.

Worse, the deal was crafted through an illegal two-member board committee, with Thompson as go-between for Marrero and the board — evading Colorado’s open-meetings law requiring three or more members to meet in public. Thompson reports to Marrero, meaning the same lawyer sat on both sides of the table.

His ethical lapses keep tallying up: the unlawful closed-door executive session following the 2023 East High shooting (a judge ordered the recording released); a $3,500 payout to Anderson buried as a “Settlement Payment” without board members’ knowledge; and an improperly noticed December backroom session where members berated Youngquist. And the list goes on, as I detailed last month.

In the report, President Carrie Olson even describes Youngquist refusing Thompson’s advice “until that same advice was given by a white attorney who served as outside counsel.” The implication: he refused advice because Thompson is Black.

Let’s be real: After years of bad advice, why wouldn’t Youngquist seek a second opinion? That’s called being responsible.

Competence knows no skin color. Track records matter. Thompson appears demonstrably incompetent at this point. Yet criticism meets a constant shield that brands critics racist. Ditto for Marrero.

Throughout Wednesday’s special meeting to discuss the report, members including Gaytán and Michelle Quattlebaum lamented that Youngquist wouldn’t take “accountability” for the “harm” of “white supremacist culture” he supposedly exacerbated.

But in 2021, after then-board member Anderson was censured when an investigation found he’d pursued inappropriate relationships with underage girls and intimidated witnesses, he refused accountability, called it a racist witch-hunt — and Gaytán, Esserman and Quattlebaum still voted him vice president after they joined the board. Esserman and Quattlebaum even hired him to help run their campaigns — twice.

The Youngquist investigation, however, proved nothing substantial — ultimately faulting Youngquist’s style of “pushing back on data and asking critical and/or repetitive questions,” noting that’s how he sees a board member’s role. And after all the ink, the report concedes they were “unable to reach a conclusion” that he “deliberately acted in a biased manner toward some District leaders of color.”

Dropping the hammer a week before the election, with a censure planned two weeks later, is meant to warn whoever wins: speak out of turn, hold Marrero and the data-spinners accountable, and you’ll face the same wrath.

But the new members mustn’t cower. The board answers to voters, parents and students — not backroom secrecy and unelected bureaucracy. Kudos to John Youngquist for remembering that.

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.