Welcome to the
Board of Education
Board Members
Jeannie Kaplan - District 3
Kaplan was born in Youngstown, Ohio on September 2, 1945. Both of her parents were public school teachers: her mother was a music teacher; her father was a history/social studies teacher.
Kaplan attended public schools and graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in American Culture. She has lived in Denver for 29 years and is married to Stephen H. Kaplan. They have two children: Leslie, 25; and Michael, 22. Both of them attended DPS from first grade through 12th except for one year of middle school and two years when the family was in Washington, D.C. (They attended public schools there, too.)
While raising their children, Kaplan worked in television news part time as the director of the Colorado Electronic Election Pool. CEEP was a conglomerate of Denver and some Colorado Springs television stations, some radio stations and some newspapers. It provided real vote totals on election night through a statewide network of reporters and centralized tallying center.
Kaplan also has worked for the Summit of the Eight in 1997, as well as volunteering for various political campaigns throughout her years in Denver. While living in Washington, D.C. she worked as an assignment editor for CBS News.
During her 29 years in Denver, she has been very active in Denver Public Schools matters, both at the local school and the district level. As a parent, Kaplan served as PTSA president, a member of the very first Collaborative Decision Making team (CDM), After-Prom co chairman, as well as many other school committees. She also has served on several district-wide committees that concentrated on changes in the school calendar and ways to implement smaller class size.
Public education has been her passion for as long as she can remember. She strongly believes that public education is a major cornerstone of our democracy, a cornerstone that is under great stress and one whose future viability is very uncertain. As a school board member, she will work to ensure a lessening of the achievement gap and dropout rate and an increase in student performance by all students by emphasizing small classes, school-business/government partnerships for supplemental programs and hours of operation, and searching for ways to increase family/parental involvement.
