When Mike Johnston became principal of Thornton’s Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts in 2005, he learned many of his students couldn’t claim in-state tuition if they enrolled in college after graduation because they were living in the country without proper immigration documentation.

He recalled in a interview that his distraught and dispirited students were questioning the point of all the work they were putting into high school.

The 48-year-old Johnston, Denver’s newly elected mayor, says that’s what planted the seeds that have driven him to a career in public service, including multiple runs for office.

After working on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign as an advisor on education issues, Johnston was appointed by a vacancy committee to fill a state Senate seat in Northeast Denver. At the State Capitol, he worked with other lawmakers to introduced legislation to allow immigrant students who lacked sufficient documentation to qualify for in-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities.

The proposal, dubbed the ASSET Bill — short for Advancing Students for a Stronger Economy Tomorrow — would fail to gain traction over several sessions before finally passing with bipartisan support in 2013, making Colorado the 14th state to grant in-state tuition to students who aren’t in the country legally.

“I had to work hard to find Republicans who would support the bill, which they eventually did,” Johnston said.

“That kind of relationship-building has always been really important to me,” he added. “I learned you have to be able to see from the perspective of all the other stakeholders.”

Johnston often describes that collaborative approach to policymaking when he made a case for why he’s qualified to succeed term-limited Mayor Michael Hancock.

“It’s about how do you build broad coalitions that have taken on some of the city’s toughest problems and deliver historic results,” he said. “I think I’ve done that as a state senator. I think I’ve done it as an entrepreneur and a startup leader. I’ve done it as a foundation leader.”

After serving two terms representing Colorado’s Senate District 33, Johnston sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018 but finished third in the primary, behind former State Treasurer Cary Kennedy and then-U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, who went on to win election and was reelected to a second term last fall. Johnston briefly ran for the U.S. Senate nomination in 2020 but withdrew from the primary after former Gov. John Hickenlooper jumped in the race.

More recently, Johnston ran Gary Community Ventures, a major local philanthropic organization.

But before his ventures in the political and nonprofit spheres, Johnston cut his teeth as a teacher and principal. After getting his undergraduate degree at Yale, he taught English for two years at a high school in a small town in Mississippi as part of the Teach for America program, later chronicling the experience in his book, “In the Deep Heart’s Core.” He followed that by getting a master’s degree at Harvard and a law degree at Yale before returning to Colorado, where he found work as a principal at several schools around the metro area.

The way Johnston tells it, his legislative experience, combined with his work as an educator and nonprofit head and his ability to break down barriers and build coalitions, made him the best qualified candidate for mayor of Denver.

After Johnston was born in Oklahoma City, his family moved to Colorado before his first birthday and opened the Christiana Lodge in Vail. Johnston grew up in the mountain resort town, working nearly every possible job at the hotel from an early age. While growing up, he says he viewed Denver as the “big city,” where his family would go for back-to-school shopping trips or to attend Bruce Springsteen concerts. The trips also included volunteer work, and Johnston recalled spending many days working at Catholic Charities soup kitchens.

After graduating from college, he became a fourth-generation educator, taking his first job in Greenville, Miss., in one of the poorest regions in the country. After graduate school, he returned to Colorado and found work as a school principal at the Joan Farley Academy, part of a nonprofit network for at-risk kids.

Johnston said that he was encouraged to help found Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts by “an amazing superintendent who had a vision for (taking a) struggling school and converting it to small high schools.”

His work at the school he ran, known as MESA, has become part of the story Johnston told on the campaign trail.

“We were able to successfully turn it around,” he said. “The school had a 50% dropout rate but became one of the first public high schools with 100% of our seniors both graduated and admitted to a four-year college.”

He credits the collaborative approach to helping pass last year’s Proposition 123, a statewide ballot measure that allocates surplus state revenue under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights to a variety of affordable housing initiatives.

“We brought 260 organizations together — everyone from Dick Wadhams, a very conservative Republican, to the SEIU, the ACLU, the NAACP, and everyone in between,” Johnston said. He added that it was the ability to form partnerships, sometimes between people and groups with strongly opposing views, that helped pass the state’s “historic” first successful attempt to tackle affordable housing.

Although serving as a state legislator is different than running Colorado’s largest city as its mayor, Johnston said a lot of the work is the same. 

Johnston said he will be “very actively engaged in making sure on the front end that we’re getting legislation in place that supports Denver and our goals, and stopping legislation that could be adversely impacting Denver in our goals.” “That will make a difference in terms of how we build partnerships with those organizations and how we make sure to prevent unintended consequences from those organizations.”

This story first ran on May 16, 2023 and has been updated to reflect Johnston’s election as mayor of Denver.