When the Woodland Park City Council convened for a special meeting on Monday morning, no one expected the vote to be unanimous. No one was even quite sure which way the vote would go. By the time the adjourning gavel fell two and a half hours later, though, all seven members of council had converged on the same page, determined to put an end to the latest crisis triggered by the town’s controversial school board.
The decision they made was not easy — rescinding a local 1.09% sales tax which generated additional revenue for the school district — and not without consequences, but members of both city council and the public believe the dramatic move was the best way out of what one local told me was a “hostage situation” between the school board and the city government.
Rescinding the tax was the latest salvo in a conflict which has roiled Woodland Park since a slate of conservative school board candidates won power in 2021 with backing from Truth & Liberty, the political arm of Andrew Wommack Ministries, which has its world headquarters in the small town. The ensuing struggle between the board and district parents opposed to the direction it was steering the district (a struggle which has involved shouting matches, wrongful arrests, fired teachers, a dramatic rise in the district’s legal expenditures, and a dramatic decline in its ability to retain both students and staff) put Woodland Park at the center of a national effort to recruit public schools into the service of a conservative political movement. In 2023, I covered the early years of that struggle at length.
In the last year, though, the conflict in Woodland Park has taken on new dimensions, with the focus shifting away from the board’s handling of ideological matters and landing instead on their handling of cold, hard cash. District parents, and others, have also expressed concern about the board’s alleged favoritism towards Merit Academy – the district’s only charter school, which board members rushed to approve as soon as they took office in early 2022 – and what role that favoritism might play in the school district’s increasingly opaque and troubling financial position.
After a year of simmering and bubbling, those new dimensions of the conflict finally boiled-over last weekend.
By the end of the day on Monday, the sales tax was gone, the district’s future plans were in chaos, and the cross-town relationship between the school board and the city council had reached a new low – something the parties involved all hoped they had avoided as recently as last Thursday.
“I think what pushed everybody over the line,” Woodland Park city councilwoman Carrol Harvey, a Republican, told me of Monday’s conflagration, “is that the school district was basically leveraging a sales tax in order to loan money to a charter school. And they don’t have the authority to do that.”
“There is a recognition, I believe, that a charter school enterprise saw an opportunity to leverage money not only for the current charter school, but potentially more charter schools.”
Woodland Park voters approved the sales tax as an additional revenue stream for the school district in 2016, five years before the late 2021 takeover of the school board, which put them into a unique position. Most local governments in Colorado are not involved in funding local schools; that job is left to the state and federal governments. With the inclusion of the city’s sales tax into the Woodland Park School District’s revenue stream, though, city council became involved.
According to Harvey, WPSD is one of only four districts in the state which have a local sales tax as an additional source of revenue, the others being districts in Aspen, Steamboat, and Gilpin County. Crucially, Harvey noted, the other three districts had situations different than Woodland Park’s.
“Aspen and Steamboat use third-party management boards” to manage the additional revenue, Harvey told me. “So it’s not the city versus the district. Somebody is managing the money. The city collects it, but then it’s turned over to these third parties. The one in Black Hawk is a little more free because Gilpin County School District is very small, but they have very specific uses for the tax. And then Woodland Park had just almost an open-ended tax that had no sunset date on it.”
In Woodland Park, the sales tax is administered by the council, which collects and then disburses the funds to the school district. According to the constraints of the referendum by which the tax was passed in 2016, the district is allowed to use the funds on expenses like programs, salaries, and facilities.
In exchange for the funds, which totaled $3.2 million last year, the school district was supposed to carefully document and account for how it spent the revenue, and provide city council with line-item reports of those expenditures. When the new board took office, though, it seemed they had little interest in completing the necessary paperwork.
Assuming that the lack of reporting was an oversight by school administration, Harvey says that council members met with the district’s then-CFO and attorneys to talk about their expectations. “We said, look, here’s the problem. You’ve got to segregate the sales tax from your general fund, and then provide a line item ledger to tell us how you’re spending it,” Harvey said. “And they totally agreed.”
Then, nothing.
About a year after the first wave of controversial new board members took office, they brought in an even more controversial figure to serve as the district’s superintendent: Ken Witt. An engineer by trade, Witt’s prior experience in school administration was checkered. From 2013 to 2015, Witt served on the board of Jefferson County Public Schools, a tenure which resulted in mass protests, national media attention, and a successful recall election which saw tens of thousands of voters turnout to remove Witt from office.
After JeffCo, Witt founded an organization named Education ReEnvisioned BOCES, or ERBOCES. BOCES are a Colorado-specific legal entity originally created for multiple rural districts to pool resources in order to pay for programs like special education, which the districts could not individually afford. In the last decade or so, conservative education reformers have also latched onto BOCES, which have the ability to authorize new schools, as a vehicle for their agenda. Witt’s ERBOCES was the latter kind; he used it to authorize Merit Academy as a “contract school,” the term for Colorado schools which are run by entities other than a board of education.
Witt did not respond to requests for comment.
When control of the Woodland Park school board turned over in 2021, Merit Academy was at the top of the new board’s agenda. Authorized via ERBOCES as a contract school, Merit had come to WPSD seeking a charter, which would change them from being a contract school to being a charter school, and give them a home in the district. In Colorado, charter schools operate under waivers which allow them a much higher degree of latitude in decision-making, curriculum, and other areas than traditional public schools. While charters can play an important role as schools specializing in STEM or other fields, they have also become a fixation of the right-wing education reformers in recent years because of the greater flexibility they offer around ideological curriculum and, perhaps most significantly, the profit opportunities they present – something traditional public schools lack. Although charter schools are non-profit entities, people have found many ways to profit from them, like contracting with associated businesses for management, maintenance, or other services.
Given that one of the then-new WPSD board members, David Illingworth, is the husband of a Merit Academy board member, there was little doubt that the WPSD board would approve the charter. And they did. Within a year they also brought in Witt, the man who first authorized Merit Academy into existence, as the district’s new superintendent.
From the moment Merit entered the discussion in Woodland Park, the tangle of relationships between the school, the district, the board members, ERBOCES, and Ken Witt raised concerns about self-dealing and conflicts of interest for some in the community, especially when the district decided to relocate existing students in order to let the new charter use the middle school building.
Adding to the swirling suspicions was the fact that Merit Academy, operating in and benefiting from the district where Ken Witt serves as superintendent, still carries two outstanding loans from Ken Witt’s other organization, ERBOCES.
As the possibility for conflicts of interest grew, and the district’s use of the sales tax revenue became more opaque, some became concerned that the district was quietly being used to subsidize the charter at the expense of the district’s other students.
“The whole point of what they’re doing to the Woodland Park School District is just to bleed it dry, pump everything they can into Merit, and then get the hell out,” one local told me, summarizing a popular sentiment. “Then they’ll move onto the next one, leaving a bleeding corpse when they’re done.”
It was in this milieu of suspicion, favoritism, financial opacity, and alleged conflicts of interest that the school board found itself tangling with the city council over the sales tax, and with district parents over its own sloppy reporting.
For the last eleven months, WPSD and the Woodland Park city council have gone back and forth over the sales tax: council’s desire for it to be reported fully and accountably, and the district’s reluctance to do so. During those eleven months, the district has lost two separate Chief Financial Officers.
Over roughly the same time period, Dr. Don Hoying – a local who also happens to be an MIT-trained rocket scientist who spent decades managing billion-dollar government contracts – noticed that the public finances which the district presents at board meetings were drifting further and further from plausibility, and the annual audit was months late.
“The budget is a mess,” Hoying told me, “Because they adopted a budget, and have not – from what I’ve seen – formally revised that budget, but the numbers they show in their monthly reports reflect dramatic variations.”
Between September and December, Hoying said, the board’s projected annual expenditures shown in monthly financial reports saw a $4.2 million increase, something which was not explained or reflected in the adopted budget.
“There can only be one adopted budget, so the fact that these numbers are changing doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They’re just all over the place.”
Meanwhile, the district’s annual audit, which is almost always released in November, was nowhere to be found. When that audit was finally released four months late, on March 1 of this year, it confirmed Hoying’s suspicions: the district’s finances were not entirely on the up-and-up.
The independent auditors’ report, conducted by Colorado Springs-based accounting firm Hoelting & Company, said that auditors identified “certain deficiencies in internal control over compliance that we consider to be material weaknesses and significant deficiencies.”
In the summary of findings, the report indicates that auditors found “material weaknesses” and “significant deficiencies” in the district’s internal systems for financial compliance, in addition to noncompliance material to financial statements, and material weaknesses in systems for “internal control over major programs.” The report also cited lax control over the purchasing cards linked to district bank accounts which “increase the risk of fraud or error.”
The auditors’ report also noted district financial practices which increase the likelihood of abuse, fraud, or error regarding bank reconciliation and the district’s travel policy.
Even before the audit confirmed the district’s troubled financial practices, city council was reaching a breaking point with the district’s continued refusal to provide adequate reporting on their use of the sales tax revenue. An idea had entered the conversation: if the district will not live up to its reporting requirements for this revenue, maybe they should stop receiving it.
“We have a plenary responsibility to control a city tax,” Harvey told me. If they couldn’t account for where it was going, could they, in good conscience, continue disbursing it?
Last November, amid the wrangling around the district’s use of the sales tax, voters once again voted to keep the tax in place. Council did not have the authority to repurpose the tax, but they did still have the authority to revoke it. As the district’s noncompliance grew worse, they considered using that power.
Some community members were concerned that rescinding the tax would hurt students, and might not even rein-in the board. “People have said, ‘we understand the position you’re in, and we want to demand accountability too, but please don’t take the tax away,’” Harvey told me. “So our thought was, okay, if we want accountability, how do we make it easier for the school district?”
“That’s why we revised the contract between the school district and the city twice in less than a year, and why we spent time with the CFO, who then quit,” she said, referencing last month’s abrupt departure of district CFO Jack Bay.
On February 19, after only 7 months on the job – much of which had been spent dealing with the sales tax dispute between the district and the council – Bay resigned his position, telling KOAA News5 that he was “fed up with the back-and-forth over how the district was supposed to report its spending of taxpayer dollars.”
Last week, pro-Merit and pro-school-board community members escalated the conflict, filing for recall petitions targeting city councilmembers.
At last Thursday’s council meeting, after Bay’s departure and an impassioned round of public comment, council ultimately voted to leave the tax in place, and to continue working to help the district reach the expected level of transparency and accountability regarding the sales tax revenue. The district had won. They’d keep their extra revenue stream with no extra strings attached.
Then all hell broke loose.
Last Friday, two things happened. First, in the victorious afterglow of the council vote to leave the sales tax in place, superintendent Ken Witt announced his resignation, effective April 15, saying that he would be seeking new opportunities. When the news first broke, I thought it made sense: Witt, a longtime crusader for education reform, had just secured his biggest victory to date in Woodland Park. He decided it was time to seek greener pastures.
Second, a whistleblower in district administration leaked a document revealing the school board’s long-term plans for the revenue stream they had just saved: using it to finance the sale of the middle school building to Merit Academy, for well under market value.
The document, a copy of a resolution dated for this Wednesday’s school board meeting which was included in the packets being prepared last Friday for board members, lays out the school board’s commitment to sell the district’s middle school building to the charter school. It also included a clause which city council members saw as a threat, saying that if the sales tax was amended or rescinded at any point in the next thirty years, the district would simply give Merit the building for no additional payments. Either move would dramatically improve Merit’s financial standing, while saddling the taxpayers with the eventual need to build a new middle school.
“The taxpayers paid to have that building built. And now they [the school board] tried to strong-arm us,” councilmember Steve Smith told KOAA.
“In that resolution it says, okay, we’re going to do one of two things,” Carrol Harvey broke it down for me. “If the city council does not take the sales tax away – which was on the table last Thursday night – we will use that to finance a mortgage for Merit Academy to buy the building they’re in.”
“If the city council does take away the tax, though, then we’re just going to give them the building.” she continued, summarizing the part of the resolution which struck the council so poorly, “I thought that was the screwiest thing I had ever heard.”
In light of the resolution to sell the building, Witt’s departure made even more sense than I had made of it on its face. Of course he’s leaving, he had just won the ideological crusade which brought him to Woodland Park in the first place. He had authorized Merit Academy at ERBOCES, shepherded it to its new home in the Woodland Park School District, ran that district for two years, and then won a hard-fought bureaucratic battle to shore-up Merit’s finances on the taxpayer dime for the next thirty years. And it wasn’t just an ideological crusade: Witt also ensured the financial future of a school which still carries two outstanding loans from his other organization. Take a bow and exit stage right, Ken; you’ve done it.
Or, at least, he thought he had.
When the document leaked, the town’s major Facebook groups erupted. Dozens of posts, hundreds of comments: parents accusing the board of selling-out the district to benefit Merit; real estate professionals shocked at the sweetheart deal being offered to the charter. Some even suggested that the cost to the district to eventually build a new middle school could top $30 million, while they were giving away their current building for $5 million.
City council, which felt that it had just generously extended an olive branch to the school board after the board’s repeated failures at financial transparency, was not happy.
“What caused us to come to the table with the emergency ordinance today was that we bent over backwards as a council on Thursday night and we said, okay, you can keep the tax, for God’s sake,” Harvey told me on Monday. “Then the very next day, they put out the letter for that resolution in the packet for their board members.”
Over the weekend, councilmembers met with lawyers, assessed their options, and finally called Monday morning’s special meeting to consider an emergency resolution to rescind the sales tax.
Suddenly, Ken Witt’s fait accompli appeared to be coming undone.
By Monday morning, the school board and Merit factions seemed to think the situation was getting away from them, judging by the tenor of the Facebook groups. Merit supporters took to the digital town square to defend the board’s plans, while school board supporters started to claim that those plans weren’t the board’s plans at all. The leaked building resolution was supposed to be listed as a “discussion item” for the upcoming board meeting but had accidentally been listed as an “action item,” board boosters claimed online. You could almost hear the nervous laughter through the screen.
By the time the city council meeting convened at 10:30 AM, it was clear that no one’s mind had been changed in the comments section.
For the most part, the public comment period at Monday’s meeting was more of the same. Merit boosters, including some affiliated with Andrew Wommack Ministries’ Charis Bible College, challenged the procedural basis for the council meeting, or accused the councilmembers of not caring about the town’s children. One simply stated that “the sale of this building to Merit is none of the council’s business.”
The charter’s co-founder and current board member, Nicole Waggoner, argued that both the sales tax and the building sale were necessary for Merit’s financial security.
“Should the sales tax be stripped, there will be a budget shortfall,” Waggoner claimed. “If we [Merit] enter into an agreement and the sales tax money is taken away, where does that leave us?”
At two points during the meeting, school board members themselves appeared as public commenters, including Mick Bates, who came to council to reiterate the claim that he had meant to list the resolution action item as a “discussion item.”
Others who spoke at the meeting attempted to earnestly wrestle with the difficult balance between the interests at hand – revenue vs. transparency and accountability – like district parent and former attorney Kelly Hunsaker.
“I don’t know if the sale of the building is the right answer,” Hunsaker told the council on Monday morning, “And I don’t know if it’s the wrong answer. I don’t have the expertise for that. But I do know that the sale under these terms is absolutely the wrong answer.”
The problem, she said, was that the building resolution laid bare the lack of parity between Merit and the district’s neighborhood schools. “The contract they have proposed to accept on Wednesday night sells them a building for $5M at only 2.5% interest. And yet, in the same provision, if we have to buy it back, we will have to pay fair market value. That’s a lack of parity. If the sale of the building is right, then they should get it for a discount and we should too, or they should pay fair market value and we should too.”
Recognizing that rescinding the sales tax would not prevent the sale of the building, per the leaked resolution, Hunsaker argued that it was still the right thing to do. “This contract is egregious and it cannot go forward. Yes, they may still get rid of the building, we can’t stop that. They still may get a sweetheart deal, but they can’t hold us hostage for thirty years.”
By the time the public ran out of comments some two hours into the meeting, it still wasn’t clear where the councilmembers – who are almost all either registered Republicans or unaffiliated, reflecting the conservative community – would land. And then came their turn to speak.
A visibly irritated Steve “Coach Smitty” Smith, a three-decade resident and long-time coach in the town who now serves on council and had just sat through multiple commenters telling him that he does not care about schoolchildren, went first.
“For those people who accuse me of not being for the kids or the teachers or anything else like that, well, you don’t know me. And that’s a plain fact,” he said. What troubled him, he said, were the district’s constant financial problems.
“I’m done,” councilmember George Jones said. “I’m done with the back and forth. I don’t feel like the city has the right structure to do this kind of school funding,” he said, an argument for rescinding the tax and ending the city’s role in funding the district for good.
“This has got to stop, and it stops right here,” echoed councilmember Jeff Geer. “I do not at all have any remaining trust in the sitting board of education or its administrative staff. I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we’re even sitting here this morning. This didn’t have to be that way.”
One after another, council members made it clear that they had no interest in continuing their financial relationship with a district that would rather resort to threats and fiscal hostage taking than comply with basic transparency requirements. Even those who had been on the fence were knocked off of it by the brazenness of moving to lock-in the building purchase immediately after the council had decided to give the district another chance. When the vote came down, it was unanimous: the tax has been rescinded.
As with so much in Woodland Park’s long-running school board saga, the fight over the sales tax was never really about a sales tax. Or, to the extent that it was, it was only incidental. A product of circumstance. What the fight is really about – what it’s been about for the last four years in the small mountain town – is what and who public schools are for.
And, as with so much in Woodland Park, the coalition which has formed in opposition to the school board’s attempts to narrow those categories defies partisan taxonomy: crunchy atheist hippies standing arm-in-arm with Christian, Republican veterans. They have figured out how to coexist with each other in defense of public institutions which they all value, leaving little doubt in my mind as to which faction in the town’s running battle is the source of most of the bad feelings.
Woodland Park resident Shawn Maddox shared a similar sentiment during public comment at Monday’s council meeting.
“There is so much common ground here, and so many moments when we could find that common ground. I feel like the group holding us back from that common ground is not you,” she told the council. “The school board is holding us back from that common ground.”
The residents of Woodland Park are tired. They are, more than almost anything, sick of being news. They miss the time before their school board became the locus of a national experiment in education reform. They miss the time before their local district became a testing ground for interests well beyond it. Like parents everywhere, they just want their kids to have access to a good education. They just want things to go back to normal, like they were before the circus came to town.
The fight is not over. The tax has been rescinded, but the building will likely still be sold to Merit Academy for pennies on the dollar. Ken Witt is still set to exit the district, but is unlikely to take all the problems with him when he goes. And Merit Academy – the students and most parents of which have done nothing wrong in this saga, but have been sucked into the vortex anyway – is left to figure out its own financial future after its biggest backer, Witt, overplayed his hand and fumbled a bag worth millions of dollars. The school board will make its next move on Wednesday night.
What is over, though, is the district’s access to several million dollars a year which it never felt compelled to provide receipts for, but was more than willing to hold hostage.
As the pieces slowly fall into their new places in the wake of Monday’s explosion, as factions plot their next moves, most residents of Woodland Park will simply get on with the task which has become an everyday part of their lives in the last few years: figuring out how to get along in the town they have all decided to call home.
“It’s sad to see,” Shawn Maddox said of the ongoing fight. “There’s so much beauty in small towns, so much beauty in the connections that happen. I would hope that the school district would take the community into consideration,” she said. “The entire community, not just the interests they serve.”
