Zach Serrano

Senior Equity Leadership Consultant

zserrano (at) nationalequityproject.org

Zach joined the National Equity Project in August 2018 after a ten-year career as an educator and leader in Denver Public Schools. He entered the classroom with a vision of what bell hooks refers to as “education as the practice of freedom” and continues to see his work as activism rooted in a long standing, intergenerational struggle for social justice. As a teacher, he has experience working at the middle school, high school, and university levels where he partnered with his students to use the classroom and the learning process as a site of resistance, healing, and transformation. As a leader, he served as an instructional coach, member of the School Leadership Team, and ultimately as the Dean of Culture. Zach supported and designed numerous school-wide efforts and initiatives to facilitate implementation of and professional learning around culturally responsive practices, curriculum to develop global competency, restorative approaches for school discipline, and social justice pedagogy. During his time in DPS, he was recognized as a Mile High Teacher of the Year (2012), and identified as a “Distinguished Teacher” his final three years with the district.

A core belief Zach carries about the profession of teaching is that educators are equally and simultaneously students of the young people with whom they are graced to share the space and time of their classrooms. And he sees his two greatest teachers as his children, Xavier and Nizhoni. Of all the work he does, it is his role as a father that fills him with purpose and gives him the most hope for a better future.

Zach holds a bachelor’s degree in Ethnic Studies with an emphasis in Chicanx and American Indian Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder (Summa Cum Laude, 2008). He earned his master’s and a certificate in teaching for Cultural and Linguistic Diversity from the University of Colorado at Denver (2010) where he studied Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Urban Pedagogy and Leadership.