CharterFolk X Volume 6.7 Bill Kurtz — Building Something Bigger Than Yourself

Today, we are honored to profile the extraordinary Bill Kurtz, Senior Advisor and Former CEO of DSST Public Schools in Denver, Colorado. 

Two years after stepping down as CEO of the network he helped build from the ground floor, Bill Kurtz keeps coming back to the same sentence when he talks about the Denver School of Science and Technology, now DSST Public Schools. 

“DSST is much, much more than I am,” he said. “Always has been, always will be.” 

It’s an easy enough sentence for any founder to repeat. It is also a much more challenging concept to actually plan for, even with about 20 years’ worth of preparation.  

DSST currently serves more than 7,000 middle school and high school students across eight campuses in Denver and Aurora. (Read more about CharterFolk’s visit to DSST.) 

Bill was the Founding Head of School when the network’s first school (DSST Montview High School) opened in 2004, and he eventually became DSST’s first CEO before stepping down in 2024. 

During Bill’s tenure at DSST, the network established the highest-performing and highest-growth secondary schools in Denver and Aurora Public Schools, helping 100% of its high school graduates earn college acceptance since 2008. 

In addition to all the accolades and accomplishments DSST earned during his time at the helm, Bill has a tremendous amount of pride for all the work he did to prepare the organization to succeed without him.  

From Wall Street to the South Bronx 

Bill’s path into education took him through a place charter leaders don’t always venture: the trading floors of Wall Street. 

Growing up in Maine, Bill had always gravitated toward working with young people, but mentors in college steered him toward finance first. Bill spent three and a half years in the mergers & acquisitions group at JP Chase, an experience he still credits with teaching him how to operate in a world that, as he put it, largely revolves around money. 

While Bill enjoyed working on Wall Street, he couldn’t quite shake what always seemed like a baffling money/math problem. 

“We were probably the wealthiest country in the history of the world, but we couldn’t figure out how to teach a high percentage of our children to read or do basic math,” Bill said.  

Bill volunteered at a school in Harlem on Wednesdays during his time on Wall Street. He eventually traded mergers & acquisitions at JP Chase for Holy Cross School, a K-8 Catholic School in the South Bronx where Bill worked as a teacher, coach, helped start a board, raised money, ran the business office, and eventually became assistant principal.  

From there, Bill found his way to the Link Community School in Newark — the school whose model would later become the foundation for Uncommon Schools — and spent six years as its principal and learning how to lead a school.  

He was ready for a new challenge by the time DSST became a possibility.  

Dedication to DSST 

In 2003, Colorado’s DSST was among the first schools to receive funding from the Gates Foundation’s small high schools initiative, and the network ran a national search for a founding leader.  

Bill, several thousand miles from the East Coast circles he’d built his career in, decided it looked like an interesting opportunity. He got the job and DSST Public Schools was born. 

What followed was two decades of building, in Bill’s words, a school designed to outlast him rather than to reflect him.  

In 2018, DSST won the Broad Prize as the top-performing charter school network in the country. Three DSST schools have been recognized as National Blue Ribbon Schools by the U.S. Department of Education; DSST also finished as one of the top three high schools in President Obama’s 2010 Commencement Challenge and Oprah’s Angel Network gave DSST $1 million on her daytime talk show in 2011. 

Bill says he is most proud of the flagship school he founded not simply because of what it became, but because its model and success was replicable across the network without Bill standing directly over each school leader. 

“We are diverse by design because our school reflects the actual population of Denver,” Bill said.  

Bill added that DSST still has the highest college-going rate among low-income students in the entire Charter School Growth Fund portfolio, and its graduates report some of the highest first-job earnings of any charter network in the country, a byproduct of DSST’s early and sustained commitment to STEM education. 

He credits an organizational foundation that has barely shifted in more than two decades and was never dependent on any individual leader to hold up. That foundation includes: 

• A clear mission that every child will have the opportunity to attend a four-year college. 
• A defined view of the human condition: that everyone wants to be affirmed for their gifts and to make a meaningful contribution to the world.  
• A commitment to educational equity regardless of race, income, or background.  
• A shared set of core values — respect, responsibility, courage, curiosity, integrity, and doing your best — that bound students, staff, and families to one another, not to any CEO. 

“You can’t build a culture if you’re not designing towards something,” Bill said. “That was the secret sauce.” 

A Decade in the Making 

For most charter leaders, succession planning is a conversation that starts a year or two before a transition. For Bill, it started nearly a decade before he ever announced he was stepping down. 

Since the goal was to create an organization that wasn’t totally dependent on its founders, the leadership handoff itself couldn’t be an afterthought. 

“Founders can overstay or understay,” he said. “Overstaying often leads to the organization becoming too synonymous with the person who created it.”  

For that reason, the timing of the transition is key. 

Bill sees his final CEO chapter as one defined by steering DSST through the pandemic and back into a position of strength. Once that was accomplished, he believed the network was ready for a leader who could take it somewhere he couldn’t.  

That leader turned out to be Nella García Urban, who spent 20 years at YES Prep before joining DSST. Three years into Nella’s tenure, he credits her leadership — and a board that, in his words, did its own work well — for making that transition hold, and for proving that DSST really was bigger than the person who founded it. 

His advice to other founders considering the same leap is blunt: Don’t wait until you think you’re ready.  

“Some leaders might start thinking about their succession about four or five years earlier, but don’t take any action yet because it feels too soon,” Bill said. “That’s actually when I encourage them to dive into this work. A lot of times when succession planning comes around, people say they will spend about a year and a half and feel like that is enough time. “ 

While a year and a half of planning might feel substantial in the moment, it is barely a blink in the lifespan of an organization that is built to last generations. 

Staying Out of the Way 

These days, Bill’s role at DSST is intentionally light, by design as much as anything else he built there. 

He supports Nella and the board in his capacity as a Senior Advisor when they ask for it — often on matters where his institutional memory of Denver or DSST specifically can be useful — but he’s the first to say Nell doesn’t need much of his time to keep running things well.  

Nevertheless, Bill remains invested in the current state of education.  

Outside of DSST, Bill currently serves as an advisor for several organizations, including local nonprofits Denver Families for Public Schools and Clayton Early Learning. He also writes a biweekly Substack that focuses on leadership best practices and posts regularly the topic via his LinkedIn. He credits a handful of hobbies that he’s cultivated over the past decade — including running, hiking, photography, reading, painting, writing poetry — with keeping him whole enough to stay in the work as long as he did. 

“The leaders who pour everything into developing everyone around them while neglecting their own growth and well-being will eventually run out of capacity to lead well at all,” Bill said.