In the dusty, red-hued southwestern corner of Colorado, a rural school district finds itself mired in a saga of drama and controversy which, despite receiving coverage in the local paper, has not yet broken into Front Range news outlets. On the surface, it’s a local affair, but the ongoing story in the Montezuma-Cortez School District is noteworthy for its ties to attorneys, administrators, and activists associated with Colorado’s network of right-wing education reformers, and for the way their actions in the district are flipping the script which they and their allies have run in districts across the country.
While right-wing activists in Jefferson County schools, the Poudre school district, and districts across the country have accused teachers of “grooming” children – to either turn them gay as part of an imagined long-term plan to erode conservative values, or to sexually abuse them – the conservative education reform ideologues who have descended on MCSD are taking a different tack. They’re defending a superintendent accused of violating his duty to alert proper authorities to an alleged sexual relationship between a student and a teacher.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about Colorado’s right-wing school reformers; about how a small but dedicated group of them have targeted districts around the state, like Woodland Park or Elizabeth or Garfield RE-2, for complete takeover and makeover; and about how they will almost certainly target more of them this year as school board seats come up for election. I wrote that my hope this year is to catch them in the act, to cover the action while it’s happening instead of sweeping up the pieces afterwards, and to place focus on the districts where they are operating.
As has become clear from conversations I have had with parents and teachers over the last two weeks, Montezuma-Cortez is one of those districts.
A 400-mile drive from Denver, MCSD has not yet gone the way of Woodland Park – where the controversy has been long enough and loud enough to attract national attention – but between the combative superintendent, the controversial attorney, and a school board which seems more inclined to fight with constituents than work with them, district parents and teachers fear it’s well on its way.
It started in early 2022, during a change in district administration. The past superintendent, Risha VanderWey, had departed, and the Montezuma-Cortez school board was interviewing candidates to replace her. Around the same time as the vacancy, in a January meeting, board president Sherri Noyes mentioned meeting attorney Brad Miller at a retreat, and encouraged her fellow board members to request a letter of engagement from his firm. By the next month, the district had hired Miller, but it still had not hired a superintendent.
Miller’s name is familiar to anyone who has followed education politics in Colorado over the last decade. First rising to prominence for his role as the eminence grise of the 2013-2015 takeover of Jefferson County Public Schools – which ended in collapse as national news outlets tuned in and more than a hundred thousand voters turned out to drum Miller’s clients out of office – Miller has cemented himself as the go-to attorney for Colorado’s right-wing education reformers. By all accounts, he is a true believer in the cause of education reform and school choice, and has brought his considerable skill to bear on advancing that cause in Colorado over the last two decades. With brother-in-law Sen. Paul Lundeen pushing education reform measures in the state Senate, and the two men’s sons running a service to equip districts with unlicensed substitute teachers, education reform is also the family business. Today, Miller’s firm represents more than 60 charter schools and a handful of public school districts in the state.
Notably, he also represents the Woodland Park School District, where his arrival as the board’s attorney was followed shortly by the hiring of a controversial superintendent and a general worsening of the board’s relationship with the district’s parents and teachers.
In February 2022, when the MCSD board officially retained Miller as their attorney, the district’s superintendent hunt was ongoing, but had been narrowed to a handful of finalists. Within a week of Miller’s hiring, one of those finalists had been selected. On March 1, 2022, the Montezuma-Cortez school board hired Harry “Tom” Burris as interim superintendent, and relationships in the district started sliding the way of Woodland Park.
Burris, who served as the district’s business manager two decades ago before returning to his native New Mexico to be superintendent of the district in Truth & Consequences and then Roswell, was a controversial pick even at the time. Then-school board member Cody Wells voted against the hiring, with the local Journal noting that Wells saw “red flags” on Burris, “including an ‘old-school’ mentality about discipline” and “a lawsuit from a former human resources employee whom Burris fired.”
That lawsuit, which came when Burris was serving as superintendent of the Roswell Independent School District, accused him of “unlawful retaliation in violation of the New Mexico Whistleblower Protection Act,” but was later dropped.
Within a year of his hiring in MCSD, though, Burris was the subject of student protests over his perceived treatment of teachers and administrators, and an online petition calling for his dismissal garnered hundreds of signatures. He responded to by threatening to investigate any teachers who might have been involved in the protests. Still, Burris maintained the confidence of the board and the board’s attorney, and remained secure in his position despite the protests and growing discontentment with the district’s budget and performance.
In late 2023, when a group of far-right candidates won seats on the board – further right than the board’s already conservative majority – pushing the kind of “DEI” and “critical race theory” culture war issues favored by so many of Miller’s other clients on school boards around the state, it seemed that Burris’ and Miller’s tenures in the district had been cemented for the foreseeable future. The district even allegedly entertained plans to bring a new conservative social studies curriculum to the district, in the same vein as the American Birthright curriculum in Woodland Park. And, like other Miller districts, MCSD was churning through chief financial officers at a staggering rate.
The takeover, it seemed, was complete, and the makeover was about to get underway. But in the afterglow of the conservatives’ election victories and plans to remake the district, few realized that Burris had started the countdown on a proverbial time bomb all the way back in June of that year, or that its eventual explosion would bring yet another controversial figure from Woodland Park to town.
In the subsequent police investigation, authorities determined that it was around June 1, 2023 when superintendent Burris allegedly violated Colorado Revised Statutes 19-3-304, “persons required to report child abuse or neglect,” but almost nobody knew about it at the time. Or, at least, Burris didn’t tell anybody.
That’s the date, per the Cortez Police Department, that Burris received a call from a student’s mother, concerned that her son had been given alcohol at a teacher’s house and might have been engaged in a sexual relationship with the teacher. As a school employee, Burris is subject to Colorado’s mandatory reporting law, meaning he was under a legal obligation in that moment to report to police if he had “reasonable cause to know or suspect” that a child had been subjected to abuse or neglect.
But he didn’t, later claiming that the student’s mother did not want him to file a report.
Burris did discuss the incident with the district’s HR director, Cyndi Eldredge, though, in a call roughly two weeks later, in which she said he sounded intoxicated. In the call, which Eldredge recorded, Burris told her about the allegation. When Eldredge told Burris that the incident should be reported, Burris forbade her from doing so.
Burris sat on the complaint for ten months before eventually informing the school board of the matter in May 2024. Even after they were informed, though, none of the school board members filed a report either – but they did fire the teacher. That summer, Eldredge was fired from her role in district HR as well, and decided to provide police with her recording of the seemingly intoxicated phone call from Burris the previous summer.
Though a later police investigation revealed that there had not been sexual contact between the teacher and student, and that abuse had not occurred, Burris’ duty under the law was clear, and he fell short of it – or at least that’s the conclusion the Cortez Police had arrived at by August 12, 2024, when Burris was cited for violation of the mandatory reporter statute.
After being arraigned in September, another face familiar to those who have followed Colorado education politics materialized by Burris’ side: former Woodland Park school board member David Illingworth, now serving as Burris’ defense attorney.
Illingworth, who I covered extensively in my reporting on Woodland Park, is a former client of Miller’s from his time on the WPSD board. During his tenure on that board, which ended in November 2023 when voters removed him from his seat, he was described to me as “unhinged” and “psychologically disturbed.” Illingworth’s tenure in the district was marked by his intensely combative relationship with district parents and teachers, memorialized in thousands of emailed screeds which district activists exposed with open records requests.
Having hung his hat on culture war issues during and since his time on the WPSD board – as an ally of Miller and the crowds of activist clamoring about “grooming” and the imagined “sexualization of children” in public schools – working as the defense attorney for a man accused of leaving students exposed to possible sexual abuse is an interesting turn for Illingworth. (If the movement’s goal is not, in fact, to protect children, but to use them as a tool to force change on a public education system which they loathe, though, perhaps it’s not a pivot at all. Perhaps it’s perfectly in keeping with the agenda).
In January of this year, Burris pled not guilty to the charge, with Illingworth by his side, and a jury trial was scheduled for May. When the new district attorney, Jeremy Reed – who won the office last November – was sworn in, though, things changed. Suddenly, Burris was offered a “diversion agreement,” by which he will be held to certain standards for six months before having the entire saga expunged from his record.
Montezuma County Judge Ian MacLaren, who presided over the Burris case and called the allegations against him “very, very concerning to the court,” described the diversion agreement as a “slap on the wrist,” even saying the court would have rejected the agreement if it had been a plea deal.
Nevertheless, Burris will not face a jury, and seems slated to remain in his job at MCSD into the future.
The story in Montezuma-Cortez is still evolving. The Burris scandal is only one facet of what’s happening in this latest district targeted for transformation by Miller, Illingworth, and others who share their goals and beliefs. It’s not clear what, exactly, they have planned for the district, but it’s clear that they have plans – and it’s clear that they are willing to go to the mat for a superintendent willing to accommodate those plans.
This is also in keeping with Miller’s well-worn playbook. As he told a crowd during a presentation in 2023 – which I obtained and published a secret audio recording of – a key element in taking and remaking a district is having “a superintendent who is aligned with” the broader ideological plan. If Burris fits the bill, observers can reasonably expect Miller to do whatever it takes to keep him in place until a pliant and politically palatable alternative comes along.
At the district’s most recent school board meeting, parents showed up to voice their displeasure with the diversion agreement – with the idea that a man credibly accused of failing in his mandatory reporter duties would be allowed to continue stewarding their childrens’ education – and Miller made clear his willingness to defend the “aligned” superintendent to the end.
“If someone were to come up to the board dais and make irresponsible accusations and things of that nature, there are sanctions available,” Miller told the assembled audience, in remarks which multiple teachers and parents told me they interpreted as a threat. He alleged that the case against Burris had been based on “intentionally false accusations of criminal conduct” by a member of the community, and informed the district community to be careful what they said about the case during the meeting.
“It’s not completely protected speech,” Miller said of testimony before the board, again warning the assembled parents that “sanctions can be applied” to them if they “accused employees of the district” of anything in their remarks.
When reached for comment on this story, Miller told me that his remarks at the meeting “were very general and related to recent federal court action that had the effect of clarifying that a meeting of a board of education is a limited public forum for purposes of public comment.” He also said that, during his “25 or so years working with schools and districts in Colorado, I am not aware of ever having been associated with a superintendent who obtained such stunning academic improvement as Mr Burris accomplished the past two years.”
Montezuma-Cortez is not Woodland Park, yet. It is not a district where decades-long friendships have been shredded by school board politics, or where an entire town’s worth of kids have had their only shot at high school jeopardized by the ideological crusades of outside agitators. Yet. If things don’t change, though, it looks a lot like it might be the next Woodland Park, and the bleedover between the districts is no longer limited to Miller and Illingworth:
“Ken Witt did a lot of movement on improving student outcomes,” Burris said at the same meeting where Miller delivered his carefully worded warning, speaking glowingly of the recently departed Woodland Park superintendent. “And he didn’t do that, as I haven’t done that, without breaking some eggs.”
