Delia Armstrong-Busby is a trailblazing educator who has dedicated her life to ensuring marginalized communities have the Freedom to Thrive in public schools across Colorado Springs. Serving 24 years in District 11, she became Mitchell High School’s first Black female principal, implementing innovative programs that reduced dropout rates and improved student success which earned several local and national awards. Despite facing racism and sexism that led to her removal as principal in the school, she continued advocating for students through leadership, policy work, and community initiatives, leaving a lasting legacy of empowerment and opportunity.
A LINEAGE OF EDUCATORS
Delia comes from a long lineage of visionaries who emphasized the importance of education, community, and believing in oneself. Delia traced this lineage back to her great-great-grandfather L.W. Robinson: a formerly enslaved man who worked hard to become a successful businessman and community leader in Texas in the late 1800s after narrowly escaping life in prison (Jackson, 1994).
In 1871, Robinson was convicted of killing a white man and sentenced to life in prison by an all-white jury, despite his clean record and the fact the altercation leading to the man’s death occurred after Robinson confronted racial abuse. Despite occurring only a few years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the racial context in Texas, his mother Judy Jones refused this conviction. Jones worked hard for her son’s release, petitioning for the governor of Texas to pardon Robinson. She collected signatures from white community members and gained support from the family who had previously enslaved them, and in 1874, the governor pardoned Robinson after determining that the three years he had served were enough punishment. The fight for Robinson’s freedom was thus made possible by the family’s abilities to read, write, and debate (Jackson 1994). Robinson went on to start a school for Black children in Eagle Lake, Texas, and the family made sure to emphasize the importance of education to his children.
The legacy of educational access was successfully modeled and passed on to Delia by the women in her family, in particular her mother, grandmother, and aunts. Delia’s mother, Zeltee, raised her children with high expectations, teaching them to take personal responsibility for their actions and expecting each child to graduate high school at least (Jackson 1994). Their emphasis on education spanned past high school achievement for Delia, however, as the heritage of college graduates provided by aunts on her maternal and paternal side reinforced the idea that she too could go to college:
“The heritage that you’re worthy to go to college in a society that says, ‘well, these people, all they need to do is clean the kitchen and scrub the toilet’, and then realizing that you have role models immediate to you that went another way.”- (Freedom to Thrive Interview)
In addition, her mother and grandmother were also role models for economic success, as both women purchased and owned valuable properties.
Delia makes it clear that the women in her family taught her it was okay to be a woman in this society who found a voice, greatly shaping a perception of self within her which led her to not only believe that she was worthy of education, but also that she was capable of anything in a society that had a tendency to think otherwise. This messaging and support eventually led Delia to become an educator who has fought for educational equity in Colorado Springs since her arrival in the city in 1969.
EDUCATIONAL EQUITY: WORTHINESS AS A FOUNDATION
Although her journey as an educator began at 16 in Sunday school, her formal career in Colorado Springs started in 1969 at District 11 (D11). Over the course of her 24-year career, she served at Irving Middle School, Doherty High School, and Mitchell High School, holding several roles including teacher, Dean of Students, Assistant Principal, and Principal. Across these positions, her students were able to experience her distinctive approach to education which prioritized development over retribution. Delia described a developmental approach to education as follows:
“It’s not about punishing; it’s about growing and supporting and respecting and seeing the best. And so I love to see students connect with that in themselves and did anything I could do to support that…(Educators Ignited Podcast EP 31)
Delia did not just advocate for a developmental educational approach, however, but ensured her actions followed it no matter her position. Instead of viewing struggling students through a deficit lens and focusing on the lack of good grades, she tried her best to show students that they were still worthy of care, love, and an education, nonetheless. This approach resonated with students like David, whose life turned around for the better after struggling with alcoholism at an early age:
“Even as Assistant Principal where I was expected to be a disciplinarian, I took a more effective approach to working with the kids. One in particular, his name was David, was already a full-blown alcoholic, but he was being treated as a discipline problem. But he wasn’t a discipline problem because he acted out- he was a discipline problem because he was disengaged. I had the honor of doing some things differently with David. He may have show once a day or not, but he would check in with me to show me he was there in the school. Shorten the story a little bit. In life, David became a school counselor…” (Educators Ignited Podcast EP 31)
In David’s case Delia did not simply punish David for displaying the symptoms (disengagement) in school due to the struggles he was experiencing at a young age (alcoholism) but instead worked to re-engage David with the school and place him in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program the school had. Delia explains that after David became a school counselor, he touched the hearts of several students he worked with before he unfortunately passed away in a motorcycle accident.
Although David is just one story she shares, it serves as a testament of the power and impact a good educator can have not just on students, but on societal levels. Delia emphasized that these interventions were so effective because they treated every student with respect and as whole beings who wanted to be successful; they just needed a portal of empowerment to get there. Once that portal was achieved in a few students, Delia explained it had a great potential to keep growing:
“If you are effective with students, they become a part and partner to the governance of an effective school and effective classroom because they help to set the norms from their own expectation systems and acculturations. And what you can do is tap into that. They want to be tapped into. And when you get students in a school or in a classroom embracing the messages, the lessons, the need for success, you’ve got a wonderful thing and you’ve got an organic thing that grows and grows and grows.” (Educators Ignited Podcast EP 31)
And boy did it grow. Delia went on to become the first Black woman Principal at Mitchell high school where she went on to develop impactful programs and earn several local and national awards.
MITCHELL HIGH SCHOOL: NATIONAL AND LOCAL AWARDS
Programs & Success
As Principal, Delia worked tirelessly to develop and implement programs, schedules, and community coalitions at Mitchell all aimed at improving student performance by prioritizing student safety and well-being. As Principal, Delia aimed to address the high rates of truancy, gang violence, and substance use at the school and by 1993 she had secured approximately $250,000 to address these challenges.
To address high rates of truancy, Delia developed and implemented the Absence Addiction program, which provided counseling, support groups, and tutoring for students struggling with attendance. She described the program as one that fostered community and self-reflection to teenage students socially and academically:
“Some of the failing [in school] was disengagement and not attending, [so we asked students] to join what they came to call the skippers group. After they went to the skippers group, they went out and got the other people that they had been truant with and got them in these groups…They became far better at keeping kids in schools than adults could ever be. And in their space, they learned themselves and loved themselves much, much more than they would have been if they hadn’t formed a community that way.” (Educators Ignited Podcast EP 31)
At the same time, Delia recognized that student success could not rest on students alone. She also implemented the Individual Action Plan program, which brought together teachers, parents, and counselors to communicate regularly about how best to support struggling students.
In addition, she worked to change the environments in the school and surrounding communities to discourage gang activity and substance near the school. She prohibited gang-affiliated clothing on campus, advocated for drug-free school zone legislation, and encouraged landlords in the surrounding neighborhood to adopt anti-drug clauses in rental agreements. She also served on the Pikes Peak Community College, today known as the Pikes Peak State College, advisory committee and was working to establish a partnership with the college and Mitchell that would have allowed college courses to be offered at Mitchell during the day and night. Although the outcome of these conversations with PPSC are unknown, she displayed the willingness to continue to open doors for her students at the school.
The results of Delia’s efforts were substantial. Within the first three years of the Absence Addiction program and Delia’s leadership, Mitchell’s annual dropout rate fell from 10% to 2%. Student achievement also improved with scholarship awards increasing 80% between 1987 and 1993, reaching $2.2 million (Welsh 1993). Delia’s work earned her the prestigious Milken Educator Award in 1990, in which she was described as a “champion of disadvantaged students” was able to “create an orderly and safe learning oasis within the walls of Mitchell High (Milken Educator Awards). Her work impacted the neighborhood as well, as she received a document from the police department at the time thanking her for the reduction in crime and murders around the school (Educators Ignited Podcast EP 31). As such, D11 encouraged other schools such as Doherty, Palmer, and Coronado to model Mitchell’s tactics, until she was suddenly targeted for removal by the school in the spring of 1993 (Owen-Cooper 1994).
Her sudden removal and the district’s sudden change in treatment toward an award-winning Principal was nothing short of controversial. The tumultuous end to her time at Mitchell emphasized the very real barriers educators of color were up against in the city. Analyses of the articles covering Delia’s removal from 1993-1999 in the PPLD museum and the lawsuit in the Pioneer’s archives serve as time capsules of the racism and sexism she had to fight against despite doing everything right.
D11 Narrative: Teachers vs Delia
Initial reporting on Delia’s transfer framed the situation largely as a breakdown in interpersonal relationships between her and the teaching staff, minimizing the role of the district and dismissing allegations of racial and gender discrimination. This framing is particularly exemplified in Trudy Welsh’s (1994) article, “Principal Never Had a Honeymoon,” which portrayed Delia as “never having a good relationship with her teachers,” describing the situation as a poor marriage that had “soured beyond repair.”
These accounts centered the voices of teachers who dismissed Delia as an underqualified, authoritarian educator who had only been hired because she was Black. Their disapproval was explained as having started following Delia’s decision for the school to adopt a structured schedule without consulting the teacher’s union, which they argued violated the union’s contract (Welsh 1994). Several articles thus depicted her removal as the result of collective pressure from teachers, with “dozens of current and former Mitchell teachers [packing] the office of Superintendent Kenneth Burnley, demanding [her] removal.” (Welsh 1994). The articles also claimed that Burnley attempted to mediate the conflict through a third party and only recommended her transfer after those efforts failed. As a result, this narrative attempts to cast the district’s decision as one that was reactive and justified, rather than strategic and discriminatorily influenced.
Although briefly touched on in the articles, however, deeper tensions were subtly acknowledged. In two articles, Delia was quoted as stating she believed that racial and gender discrimination played a role in her removal (Welsh 1994; Welsh 1994). She noted that just three years prior to her removal, there had been four Black female Principals in the district, but by the time of her transfer, she was the only one remaining. These comments pointed to the broader structural barriers Delia was facing as an outspoken Black woman in a position of authority who was aiming to reform the educational system. The archival lawsuit located in the Pioneer Museum explores these barriers more deeply.
An Educator Against Racism and Sexism: Lawsuit Revelations
Delia’s educational approaches challenged the system, which earned her both praise and significant opposition among staff and faculty who resisted her methods. In her lawsuit, Delia and her legal team presented evidence and testimony that Superintendent Kenneth Burnley and Assistant Superintendent James Kosher played key roles in her forced removal. While tensions between Delia and the teacher’s union did exist, the evidence also suggested that the conflicts were amplified and, in some cases, even encouraged by the district’s central office. Delia had also received strong praise and positive evaluations as Principal until Kosher took over her supervision, after which her evaluations declined, and her leadership was increasingly criticized.
Although some tensions stemmed from the labor disputes mentioned earlier, many conflicts and disapproval of Armstrong-Busby were rooted in her advocacy for students who had been mistreated by staff. During the 1992-93 school year, she disciplined a “legendary school coach” for kicking a black student in the crotch and uncovered several instances of sexual misconduct by male teachers against female students, including a case that resulted in a student pregnancy. Rather than ignoring or concealing these incidents as had reportedly been done in the past, Delia pushed for teachers responsible for the misconduct to be charged and held accountable for their actions; an action that generated resentment among teachers who feared they would be held accountable next.
Delia’s crackdowns also included steps to address practices and notions that were pushing students out of school. Her Absence Addiction Program and other efforts to keep troubled students in school were very controversial for teachers at the school who believed it was only keeping “problem” students in the school. She uncovered that these beliefs were being acted upon, with a few teachers going as far as purposefully assigning extremely low grades to drive the “problem” students out of their classrooms, and effectively, the school. At the same time, the demographic composition of Mitchell was shifting, with the minority student population growing which Busby alleged caused anxiety among some older faculty and traditional parent community.
Evidence from the lawsuit further suggested that district administrators did not work to resolve the tensions at the school but instead intensified them. While the media reported that conditions at the school had deteriorated to the point teachers brought the issue to the superintendents, Busby’s legal team provided evidence that the Superintendent duo had been in ongoing, private communication with disgruntled union members, staff removed by Delia, and even the disciplined coach. When Delia filed a formal grievance against Kosher for his actions, it was dismissed and never followed up on. Instead, she was called to the central office and informed of Burnley’s initial recommendation for her involuntary transfer to the school board. This initial recommendation was, however, rejected by the school board in favor of the conflict being resolved by Chadwick, a third-party mediator. The mediation process showed great progression towards relationship building and acceptance of the schedule changes among staff and faculty at the school. Despite improvements with tensions at the school, however, district leadership relentlessly continued with their efforts to remove her.
The lawsuit details the actions the superintendent team took to continue to discredit her, including attempts to reframe her removal as the result of misconduct rather than conflict. Burnley’s team fabricated a story that she had forged a letter to a parent falsely accusing him of being a racist who was out to get her and forcing her staff to sign the letter. They went as far as to intercept Chadwick the mediator to argue that Delia had changed following the mediation for the worse and that problems had re-emerged. Armed with the new, fabricated reasoning for her removal, Burnley approached the central office again with the request for her transfer out of her position. The central office failed to get Delia’s side of the story before approving her forceful transfer, removing her from the position.
Even through Delia’s appeals to the district and her 30-day notice, she continued to face harassment from district leadership. Upon receiving notification that she was to be transferred out of the school, the district immediately seized all her files and ordered their attorneys to conduct financial audits to uncover any financial wrongdoings. This harsh action and her very sudden removal thus did not only follow district procedures but also caused “nasty rumors to fly about the reason for her removal”. False accusations and rumors were also spread internally among the central office, further damaging her professional reputation.
It is not easy to describe the sudden, harmful switch as anything other than being deeply rooted in racist and misogynistic prejudices, and it was the point with which Delia’s legal team utilized in their argument that D11 had discriminated against Delia. The lawsuit puts it bluntly:
“Perhaps the district can convince the jury that this is the normal and ordinary way that District Eleven treats administrators who have given more than twenty-four years of good service, but it is probably more likely that a jury will believe that the shabby and bizarre behavior of the district in this case is more compatible with racial and sexual discrimination.” (Lawsuit)
Delia later reports in the Freedom to Thrive interview that she believes the district realized they were in a bad position legally and attempted to prolong the cost of the legal process to get her to back down. In the end though, the prolongation of the case was unsuccessful for a reason she described as a blessing, because in her own words, “When your brother-in-law is a millionaire, it’s really hard to chase you out of town because you don’t have any money, right?”
The district ultimately failed to crush Delia’s lawsuit and settled the case with over $405,949 (Lawton 1997). Delia makes it a point to emphasize that although she could not get her old Principal position back, she had served the district for 24 years and was set on continuing her fight for educational equity in the city.
Following her time at Mitchell, she continued to advocate for educational equity and in 1999 even returned to D11 as a school board member. On the school board, she held the board accountable by asking for monthly diversity staffing reports to take place. In addition, she pushed the board to make superintendents contractually obligated to be held accountable for the quality of learning children were receiving in D11 schools. She has continued to share developmental education materials for educators including workbooks detailing how the Absence Addiction program and Student Success models can be adopted at their schools. Her work at Mitchell with the Milken foundation to establish the American Dreams Academy at the school in 2023, which aims to equip up to 200,000 Americans with the skills needed to access tech and jobs with high skill barriers. Following in her great-great-grandfather’s footsteps, she has also founded the non-profit organization Adventures in Learning K-12, where she continues her work as an educator.
CONCLUSION
In 1993, Delia Armstrong-Busby received a Certificate of Appreciation from the city of Colorado Springs, which stated the following:
“Colorado wishes to gratefully acknowledge that Delia Armstrong-Busby and the staff of Mitchell High School have made a valuable contribution to the City by meeting the educational challenges and demonstrating that great things can and are happening in public education in Colorado Springs, in District 11, and at Mitchell High School. Thanks for a superb job on behalf of our community and the children who are our future citizens.”
In her career, Delia has worked tirelessly to advocate, uplift, and provide education for the children with marginalized identities of Colorado Springs. Delia’s work as Principal of Mitchell from 1955-1994 exemplifies this, as her developmental educational approach resulted in significant improvements with student success at the school. Her impact was not only felt at Mitchell, however, but also by schools and students touched by her leadership and guidance across the state. Delia has ensured that her approaches are publicly available to educators and has published handbooks for educators to implement the Absence Addiction Program and Student Success Cycles into their schools.
Delia deserves her roses for being a trailblazer in the educational spaces for her work in creating and implementing programs that don’t just give up on students that are struggling but find ways to create the conditions for the city’s future citizens to thrive. When asked what Delia wished for listeners to take away from her Freedom to Thrive Interview, she replied with the following:
“That it’s important to be an actualizer and to find out your personal mission in life and to make it so, and to realize that we are a village, and the role we play as villagers has to be constructive for all of us.” (Freedom to Thrive)
Delia’s story is one that shows us how we can move to ensure Colorado Springs becomes a place where everyone can have the freedom to thrive, regardless of their background, identity, or experiences.