A proposed charter school in northwest Douglas County has made waves after the local board of education allowed it to bypass the normal charter school approval process — and powerful Republican interests appear to be involved in helping propel the school forward.
John Adams Academy, a California-based network of charter schools with the aim of “restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders,” is seeking to add a new location in the Sterling Ranch area. The proposed academy in Douglas County would offer a tuition-free classical education to kids aged kindergarten through 12th grade.
But instead of being vetted and approved by the county’s board of education, as is typical for charter schools, John Adams Academy is heading straight to the state Charter School Institute (CSI), per a founding member’s request. The school would be under the jurisdiction of this state entity if it’s approved. That means it would not be subject to Douglas County School District regulations or oversight.
At a meeting of the Douglas County school board in mid-December, the founding member, Ellie Reynolds, asked to bypass the district’s approval process partly to expedite the application for the school — she wants to apply with the state next year — and partly for overtly political reasons. She told board members that the politics of the board tend to flip, and she worries a future board might take a less friendly stance toward charter schools.
Reynolds herself occupies a powerful position in the community. She is a conservative lobbyist as well as the CEO of the Douglas County Economic Development Corporation, a new entity born from the merger of the Northwest Douglas County Chamber and the Douglas County Economic Development Collaborative.
On top of that, the school has attracted attention and support from big-name conservatives in Colorado, such as former Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, and members of Ready Colorado, which promotes school choice and educational reform but also funds local Republican candidates and has ties to conservative dark-money group Advance Colorado. Reynolds is also a board member with Ready Colorado.
Another Ready Colorado employee, Kim Gilmartin, who runs Ready’s Liberty Schools Initiative, is a “key organizer” behind the effort, according to reporting by Ganahl’s conservative news outlet, the Rocky Mountain Voice. Gilmartin also echoed Reynolds’ reasoning for asking the Douglas County School Board to give up its local control, when she celebrated the vote on Facebook:
“Last night, the Douglas County School Board majority voted (4-3) to release the JAA charter application to the Colorado Charter School Institute,” wrote Gilmartin. “This is a BIG win because we need multiple pathways to authorization. School boards are captured by the teachers union, and by allowing us to apply to CSI, we’re free from the politics. Now we apply to CSI!”
Gilmartin also appears in the far-right documentary Who’s Children Are They, produced by Christian conservative radio host and former GOP primary candidate for U.S. Senate, Deborah Flora.
Additionally, while John Adams Academy Douglas County isn’t explicitly religious — that would be illegal for a school that receives public funding — there are reasons to question whether it would offer a completely secular education. The school network’s founders come from Christian backgrounds, and there are themes within the school’s literature that are suggestive of religious ideas and values.
It’s no secret that Republicans tend to be more supportive of charter schools than Democrats. But given the charter school’s unusual pathway to approval and the conspicuous Republican interest in it, the Colorado Times Recorder did some digging into what John Adams Academy is, who’s behind it and what it would teach.
How we got here
Sterling Ranch is a new and quickly growing master-planned community similar to Highlands Ranch. It is expected to eventually have 18,000 homes, but there are currently zero elementary schools there.
By comparison, Highlands Ranch has more than twice as many homes and close to 20 elementary schools. Other reporting by CBS News has described the Sterling Ranch area as a school desert.
If it’s approved, John Adams Academy would open in the same area where voters just approved a $490 million bond last year for a new public elementary school that’s set to open in 2027. It would begin as a K-8 school and add one grade each year until reaching K-12, according to a Facebook post by Reynolds. And the charter school could even open sooner than the public school, as early as 2026.
It took several election cycles to get a bond approved for a new school in Sterling Ranch — attempts to pass a bond in 2022 and 2023 failed. CBS reported that, according to Douglas County School District Superintendent Erin Kane, passing a bond was the only way to build a neighborhood school in that area, and if a bond hadn’t passed, a charter school might have been the only way to get a school into the community.
Charter schools in Colorado come with their own set of requirements. They typically need to be approved by the school district where they would be located. If a school district rejects a charter school application, the applicants can appeal the decision to the Colorado Charter School Institute, which oversees charter schools at the state level.
Reynolds is working with several other founding members to bring John Adams Academy Douglas County to fruition. Her co-founders include Linda White, who founded Grandparents4Kids and has advocated for banning LGBTQ+ books, as well as Roger Kime and Dwayne Maragoni.
Ahead of a Nov. 19 Douglas County School Board meeting, the school’s backers reportedly approached board President Christy Williams privately and asked if they could give a presentation to the board on releasing John Adams Academy to the state Charter School Institute. Normally, members of the public who want to present to the board must submit an advance written request.
Williams seems to have granted that request. At the Nov. 19 meeting, one board member, Susan Meek, said there were rumors circulating on social media and in the community that the board would be discussing John Adams Academy at that very meeting. However, she said she hadn’t heard anything about the school, and she felt the board’s standard procedure for scheduling an item for discussion had not been followed.
Fellow board member Brad Geiger said he also didn’t know about the pending discussion on John Adams Academy, and members of the public should not discuss being given a spot on the school board’s meeting agenda before all board members have been made aware of it.
“There’s a perception that certain people have the special ear of the board, and that’s a dangerous perception,” he said at the meeting.
On Dec. 10, the school board allowed Reynolds to make her pitch for John Adams Academy. Reynolds gave a PowerPoint presentation that was light on details about the proposed school but asserted there’s a need for a school offering classical education in Sterling Ranch. It cited a recent poll of Douglas County residents that found that voters view charter schools even more favorably than public schools. It’s not clear who conducted this poll or how participants were chosen.
“(While) we believe that this board currently is pro-charter schools and pro-classical charter schools, we also realize that this board has a tendency to flip, and oftentimes when this board does flip, it can become not charter-friendly,” Reynolds told board members. “And that pendulum swing really is risking our children and my child who I would send to this school.”
Reynolds went on to say she felt the Charter School Institute was a more stable body, with bipartisan members who are appointed instead of elected. Several of the institute’s board members are conservative and charter-friendly, including Brenda Dickhoner, who is the president and CEO of Ready Colorado.
Dickhoner, Reynolds, and Gilmartin share more than just their professional connections through Ready Colorado. The trio appears to have recently traveled to California to tour John Adams Academy, as documented by Reynolds in a Feb. 24 Facebook post. Reynolds tagged herself and Gilmartin in a photo album from the trip, the first image of which shows them alongside a woman who appears to be Dickhoner.
Several prominent conservatives showed up at the meeting to champion John Adams Academy and urge the board to advance it. The school’s advocates included Ganahl, Republican Douglas County Commissioner Kevin Van Winkle, former Douglas County GOP Chair Steve Peck, and Colorado GOP Director of Special Initiatives Darcy Schoening.
However, numerous community members also voiced concern and anger at that meeting that the district would consider giving up oversight of John Adams Academy. Several people said the school shouldn’t be allowed to skirt the approval process other charter schools have to go through and that they were worried about a lack of transparency. Some pointed out that the new charter school could interfere with enrollment at the incoming public school.
The first person to speak, Meg Furlow, said she is “deeply concerned” by the possibility of the district releasing John Adams Academy to the state.
“This decision raises serious questions about fairness and transparency, particularly when it appears that the interests of a single politically influential parent are being given more weight than the needs and voices of the broader community,” she said.
“The voters in our area overwhelmingly supported the bond to build a neighborhood school in Sterling Ranch, and the community has been vocal in its desire for a long time. The timing and urgency of this request after the bond approval raises several red flags.”
She said it was also troubling that “a parent with considerable political influence” was publicly discussing the vote on social media before it had officially been put on a meeting agenda.
Ultimately, though, these concerns did not sway a majority of the board. The board voted 4-3 to take the extraordinary step of abdicating the district’s authority over the school and releasing it directly to the state Charter School Institute. And it was the four conservative board members — president Williams, Becky Myers, Kaylee Winegar and Tim Moore — who cast the deciding votes.
Reynolds and Williams both could not immediately be reached for comment.
What is John Adams Academy?
John Adams Academy was founded in 2010. Its original campus opened in Roseville, Calif., in 2011, but new campuses sprung up in El Dorado Hills and Lincoln in 2017. All three locations are in the Sacramento area.
According to the school’s website, the campuses together boast thousands of students, and all three campuses are accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit organization that accredits about 40,000 schools worldwide. The school’s IRS 990 tax form shows that in the fiscal year ending in 2023, the school chain reported $58.8 million in revenue, 697 employees and 1,000 volunteers. Top executives with John Adams Academy earned six-figure incomes that year. The 990 form does not list contributors to the organization.
The John Adams Academy curriculum, which includes history, English, math, the arts, science and language, is aimed at “preparing future leaders and statesmen through principle-based education centered in classics and great mentors,” the school website reads. The school bills itself as offering a classical education, with core values including the “appreciation of our national heritage.” According to John Adams Academy, the “national heritage” includes principles like liberty, “natural rights” and limited government.
The idea of classical education is fairly nebulous, but generally, it tends to be Eurocentric and emphasizes Western literature, philosophy, and thought. It’s an idea and a movement that has been picking up steam in recent years, especially in right-wing circles as culture wars have raged over how hot-button issues like race and gender are taught in public schools.
In a March 2024 story, Emma Green of The New Yorker wrote that religious institutions have been key promoters of classical education, and the traditional bent of this education model has also appealed to Republicans angered by public-school “wokeism.” Conservative governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Bill Lee of Tennessee have supported classical schools in their respective states. Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News host, told Green he became interested in classical education as a reaction against “progressive indoctrination” in public schools.
According to Green, progressive academics have characterized classical education as a “fundamentally Christian project that doesn’t include or reflect the many kids in America who aren’t white, or who have roots outside this country.” Green also quotes Diane Ravitch, an education scholar and activist, as saying classical charters are “weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.”
Classical education is not inherently religious, though some classical schools do have religious affiliations. As a classical charter school, John Adams Academy must be secular because it would receive public funding if it’s approved. Nevertheless, its professional development page lists five programs for staff to learn “Foundations in Classical Education,” all of which are Christian.
Another document from the El Dorado campus also lists JAA’s teacher development programs offered through explicitly Christian institutions like Hillsdale College, the University of Dallas, Classical U, and the Society for Classical Learning:
“The American Classical Leadership Mentoring Program is a continuing education program that is designed to empower a mentor-teacher toward opportunities that will aide in the pursuit of truth, wisdom, and virtue. The pursuit of these virtues develops Servant Leaders who are prepared to Restore America’s Heritage. There are several external opportunities that are worth pursuing and we encourage each Mentor-Teacher to engage in these opportunities.
Resources that provided training in our model, pedagogy and philosophy, which rooted our teachers in the Mission, Implementation and curriculum at John Adams Academy are:
National Symposium of Classical Education, Reacting Consortium, Freedoms Foundation, APEX, Great books training, Classical U, Society for Classical Education (Foundation funded), Logic of English, University of Dallas, Doug Reeves-Deep Change Leadership, and The Art of Mentoring.”
One of the key goals of John Adams Academy’s educational approach is developing students into “servant leaders.” The idea of “servant leadership” was first coined by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, and while the idea has caught on with some corporations, the term also has strong associations with Christianity. An article on the Colorado Christian University website talks of how people can develop servant leadership by following the example of Jesus. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson invoked the term in a clearly religious context after he was elected as speaker.
While John Adams founder J. Dean Forman does not reference religion outright in the founder’s statement on the school’s website, posts on his personal blog make countless references and allusions to faith. Forman attended the Mormon Brigham Young University and spent two years as a missionary in Brazil in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Adams’ executive director, Joseph Benson, is also a BYU graduate and former missionary, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The stated mission of Forman’s blog, “Leading a Revolution in Education,” is “to courageously liberate your life with learning that creates a culture of virtue by building faith, family, and freedom.” His posts are peppered with biblical references and quotes that suggest he sees religion as foundational to good education and citizenship.
In a post titled “Real Religion and Real Education Build Servant Leaders,” Forman cites the following quote, which he attributes to Reverend Earl L. Riley of the First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City:
“Our forefathers knew that any other basis than religion and education, the two greatest forces in the world, would be inadequate as a basis upon which to build a civilization. And if it were built upon anything less than real religion and good education, we would have only an artificial structure.”
In another post, he quotes John Adams saying “it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.”
Aside from his apparent passion for education and the Founding Fathers, it’s not clear what qualifications Forman has for opening a school. Most of his educational and career background is in financial planning, but he also received a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Constitutional Law from George Wythe University, a non-accredited school that was forced by the state of Utah to shut down for handing out fraudulent degrees. Not all of the school’s degrees were found to be fraudulent, though, and the status of Forman’s degree is unclear.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that GWU was a “great books” college with a conservative curriculum and ties to powerful Republicans such as former Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, former Sen. Mitt Romney and commentator Glenn Beck. The teachings centered on the classics the Founding Fathers studied as well as their writings, but it also drew from the work of Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent and police chief who “intertwined his Mormon faith with libertarian views.” Skousen, who was associated with the John Birch society, became a “significant figure” in far-right politics, according to the Tribune.
Forman could not immediately be reached for comment on this story.
Other people associated with John Adams Academy have also had religious ties. There was a push to open a John Adams Academy in southern Oregon, but that location’s major backers were religious, and some community members were worried the school might have religious ties because there was some discussion about a partnership between the school and the nonprofit Masterpiece Christian Fine Arts Foundation.
Currently, Reynolds is working to drum up community support for the school. She has been asking for letters of interest for the school from prospective parents via social media. On Feb. 23, Reynolds announced plans to apply for John Adams Academy this spring while also praising the “beautiful model” of the original John Adams Academy schools in California, which she described as “much like the Ascent Hillsdale models,” referring to the education model at the Ascent Classical Academy network of schools. Ascent’s curriculum was developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College.
According to the Charter School Institute’s presentation to the Douglas County School Board, its vote on John Adams Academy would likely not happen until June. A spokesperson for the institute confirmed the charter school had not yet applied to the state Charter School Institute as of late February. The application deadline is March 24.
Erik Maulbetsch contributed to this article.
