Colorado Republicans held a town hall Saturday for El Paso County board of education candidates. The candidates for the ostensibly nonpartisan seats in Colorado Springs School District 11, District 49, and Academy School District 20 were joined by Colorado House Minority Leader Rep. Rose Pugliese (R-El Paso County), U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), and Colorado GOP Chair Brita Horn. The primary focus of all candidates was policies banning transgender athletes from competing in sports associated with their chosen gender.
“Our district passed a no boys in girls sports policy,” said Bruce Cole, a former D11 teacher. “In so doing, they have joined the lawsuit against the Civil Rights Commission for the law that has been passed at the state level, and I support that.”
Eddie Waldrep, a psychologist and candidate for D20, also supports efforts to ban transgender people from sports. “I’m also a girl dad, who’s also a student athlete, and we just spoke about that here at our recent school board,” he said. “So I’m hoping that we’ll be able to join in developing policy as well to protect female sports.”
Waldrep has a long history of anti-trans activism, serving with the Colorado chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), which has led fights against LGBTQ inclusive policies. Waldrep, like many diehard anti-trans activists, has experienced professional consequences for his activism. After co-authoring an anti-trans op-ed for the Hill, Waldrep, who worked at a Veterans Affairs Clinic in Denver, was stripped of his ability to supervise students and prohibited from doing didactics trainings with rotations and from attending meetings where students were present.
Recently appointed D20 board member Susan Payne, founder of student safety software Safe2Tell, said she looks forward to D20’s adoption of similar policies for transgender athletes. “We have been in two weeks of meetings,” she said. “We have irreconcilable differences between state and federal laws, which means that our state laws put all of our school boards into a position of, can we lead to protect our students, our classrooms, our athletes, and their private spaces? And our current laws, or our CHSAA rules, put us in jeopardy of violating not only state laws, but the executive orders of the President of the United States.”
During a Douglas County Citizenry forum in May, Horn discussed the Colorado GOP’s plan to focus on nonpartisan school board races. “We’re getting these [regional offices] up starting now, and the reason why is because we have school board elections coming,” she said. “We are going to be taking on some initiatives that are really important. They’ll be on — can’t talk about right now — but I’m just going to tell you we have some high-level issues that are going to target certain things like that and but they’re going to be all the issues like special parental rights, because the parental pieces are 1312 and the summer camps, blah blah blah.”
In April, dozens of Colorado school board members and administrators — including those in D11, D20, and D49 — issued an open letter to the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), making what they called “an urgent and resolute demand” that the organization “immediately adopt rules” to ban trans-identifying teens from participating in high school athletics in Colorado. Signed by 80 signatories representing 14 public school districts, ten charter schools, and one BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), the letter references President Trump’s February 5 Executive Order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and suggests that CHSAA will be subject to federal investigation if it does not comply with the letter’s demands.
D49 incumbents Lori Thompson and Jamilynn D’Avola also discussed their support of their district’s trans sports policy. “I have been on the board for the last four years and have fought vehemently for parental rights and against the immorality and things that are being pushed upon our children,” said D’Avola. “We were the forerunner of the ‘no boys in girls sports’ policy and were the ones who put forward the lawsuit at the state level with the lawsuit against the general attorney, and the CHSAA organization. And we decided, we had many conversations about how state law and federal law do not agree. And the pushback that a lot of school board members have had over the years is you can’t do that because it violates state law. Well, we decided, as a district, to violate state law because it’s unconstitutional, it goes against our founding documents, and it encroaches on parental rights and the safety and security of our kids, and so we are very proud of being a part of that.”
In 2023, the D49 board – which documents obtained via public records request confirm is represented by Miller Farmer Carlson – passed a resolution to acknowledge the United States’ alleged “Judeo-Christian biblical foundation” by hanging signs with “In God We Trust” in public buildings through the district. The D49 board has also waded into controversies around “critical race theory” and transgender issues in the past.
School board elections are scheduled for November of 2025.
Following the town hall, Pugliese posted a video to Facebook. “I just want to thank everybody who was able to attend my town hall today in House District 14,” she said. “It’s really important that we talk about the issues that we’re hearing and as minority leader I get the unique privilege of being able to travel the state and talk to people from across the state. Affordability is still top of mind. Protecting the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, supporting our law enforcement and public safety, and protecting parental rights. So thank you so much for all of you that engaged today. We also had our conservative school board candidates that are running in School District 20, in School district 11, in school district 49. All three of those school districts are located within House District 14.”
