Colorado Board of Education Commissioner Steve Durham, Academy School District 20 Board member Aaron Salt, and Colorado Springs School District 11 Board member Lauren Nelson spoke at Engage the Rockies’ “State of Education” event at Library 21c in Colorado Springs this week.
“I am one of the founding board members of Engage the Rockies,” explained El Paso County Commissioner Carrie Geitner, who hosted the event. “A group of folks in our community got together and thought we really needed to do our part to help citizens with all kinds of information that they might need to perform their role as citizens … We strive to provide information that is valuable to folks to make sure that they can participate to the greatest extent that they would like to.”
Engage the Rockies is a conservative advocacy nonprofit formed in 2022 by Geitner and Cortney Salt, wife of Academy School District 20 board member Aaron Salt. During her tenure as a county commissioner, Geitner has voted to deny grant funding to local nonprofits over political ideology and supported the controversial decision by the Pikes Peak Library District board to close Rockrimmon Library.
Durham discussed the difficulties of public education. “There are a number of fundamental problems with American education that are going to be very difficult to solve over the long run, and I’ve always viewed those problems as being completely structural, that we have a system that doesn’t work very well,” he said. “We have a system that — to say it rewards mediocrity would be really an overstatement. I like to look at things that — what are the three most important characteristics of our current education system? Well, one, it’s government-owned. As a general rule, we can all recognize the problems that can lead to. Two, it’s a monopoly, so, for all practical purposes, essentially over 90% of all children in America in public schools, public schools are monopoly. As we all know, monopolies tend to deliver mediocre products at very high prices. And finally, it’s highly unionized.”
In 2022, Durham drew criticism for his efforts to connect the Holocaust and other genocides to socialism. “People don’t know and have a right to know that [the Nazi] party was and is a socialist party,” Durham said at an August 2022 State Board of Education meeting.
As the education news outlet Chalkbeat reported at the time, “Historians say Durham is wrong about the Holocaust and wrong about the roots of genocide. The idea that Nazis were socialists is ‘a lie,’ according to David Ciarlo, a University of Colorado history professor who studies German politics. ‘It’s completely wrong.’”
Nelson discussed funding for school districts in Colorado. “Funding for the majority of school districts in Colorado comes from local property taxes,” she explained. “That is not enough funding for what the state has determined it costs to educate children, so then the state backfills more funding to meet the needs of the total per pupil revenue.”
Nelson also noted the district’s declining enrollment. “We have been in a steady decline of kids choosing out of District 11,” she said. “We’re at around 10,000 children that live in District 11 boundaries, but choose to go to either other school districts or charters or homeschool or private.”
According to the Colorado Department of Education, D11 currently has 22,265 students, down from 22,744 students the year before. In addition to declining enrollment, D11 has some of the oldest buildings of any school district in El Paso County. Last year, D11 approved a $4.7 million contract as part of $100 million renovation project for historic Palmer High School, and last month was forced to close Jenkins Middle School due serious structural concerns with the building. Despite issues with existing buildings, D11’s board recently approved a $2.5 million transfer of capital contingency funds to renovate the space they plan to house the Colorado Springs School of Technology (CSST), a new charter school set to open for the 2025-26 school year, serving 100 students.
Durham noted that one factor contributing to swelling academic budgets is the growth of administrative positions. “I know I’m the oldest person in the room by quite a bit, but back in the old days, we really didn’t have counselors,” he said. “The assistant principal was the counselor, and he was the guy with the buzzed haircut who threw the kids against the locker, and things worked actually pretty well. But now we have counseling corps, we have mental health, we have food service. I spent the first five years of school in the rural Kansas district, and you brought your lunch. There was no hot lunch, no cafeteria. I think schools probably serve more meals than McDonald’s nowadays.”
Currently, 58% of D11’s students receive free and reduced lunch.
Aaron Salt discussed D20’s career and technical education (CTE) offerings. “We’ve been pushing a lot of our CTE programming over the last year and a half to two years since we brought in our superintendent [Jinger Haberer],” he said. “With this, we have one big career CTE center that’s based out of Liberty High School. We have four different career centers. We call them centers of excellence for CTE … Back in November we passed a bond, the community passed a bond that will allow us to rebuild Air Academy High School. Air Academy High School is going to have probably four different career pathways.”
D20’s bond measure was the subject of a campaign finance complaint after parents raised concerns about $11 million of the bond funds, 13% of the total funds, being used for two charter schools in the district.
Salt also discussed D20’s character education. “What we’re doing is we’re tying in the portrait of a graduate, and what we’re saying, when you walk across the stage, you will be a lifelong learner,” he said. “And what it means to be a lifelong learner is that you’re going to show the attributes and the characteristics of being tenacious. You’re going to be a self-starter. You’re going to have agency. You’re going to be respectful, whatever it is. And so we’re able to tie these back, and then we actually have grade level — almost like the standards that we have for academics. We’re going to have effectively the same type of standards from a character perspective that starts in kindergarten and moves all the way up through 12th grade, that it’s a progression from early on all the way through their K -12 career. So we know when they walk across the stage what that actually means, that they have the character that we want them to have.”
In many school districts across Colorado, conservative activists have pushed back against character education, a component of many social emotional learning programs. “I think the intent was was kind like anti-bullying, teaching kindness,” said conservative education activist Lori Gimelshteyn during an appearance on the Kim Monson show in January. “But it’s really transitioned and it’s really designed to disrupt the morals and values that you’ve instilled in your child.”
Durham warned that progressive efforts at character education and inclusive education standards, which include mentions of LGBTQ people, could be considered indoctrination. “I will say that the attempt, the backdoor attempt by the legislature to prescribe curriculum using standards has led to something that I think many parents find frightening and inappropriate,” he said. “We really have standards now, social studies standards that more than anything else sexualize children. So they’ve gone in the back door of what they couldn’t do in the health standards and trying to accomplish the social studies standards. So I think it’s a serious problem. And I’m personally concerned about civics instruction turning into some form of indoctrination.”
