School board elections are gearing-up around the country right now, set to take center stage on an off-off-year ballot . Here in Colorado, there will be no statewide races sucking up time and attention, there will be no statewide ballot initiatives flooding the airwaves with advertisements. School board races will get top billing. And, if the past is any indicator, that means things in districts around the state are about to get…rowdy.
School board races are important even in low-stakes times and places, with the winners being given the often unseen power to impact countless facets of life for local children, for either good or bad. But Colorado in 2025 is not a low-stakes time or place when it comes to education policy. Despite being a blue state, Colorado is home to an organized and well-funded coterie of school privatizers and profiteers who have spent the last decade perfecting a playbook for seizing and transforming local school districts. Some local activists are increasingly worried that the ultimate goal is to use one of Colorado’s school districts to trigger a Supreme Court case.
Some of the privatizers are in it for the tax cuts: a whittled-down public education system would save landowners plenty in property taxes, as they see it. The profiteers, meanwhile, want to capture as many public dollars as possible to line their own pockets, mostly via contracts with friendly charter schools. For others, it’s purely ideological: they do not believe the government should have any role in educating children. For many, the crusade to seize and transform the schools is based in an earnest – if completely off-base – belief that Democrats and teachers unions are already using the schools to indoctrinate children, giving conservatives permission to do the same.
Whatever their ultimate motivations, Colorado’s conservative school reformers are good at what they do.
This fall, they are going to try to do it again. In a handful of the state’s nearly 200 school districts, they have already recruited candidates, put plans in place to shuttle dark money into the small local races, and set their sights on the changes they hope to make immediately upon taking power. We know who they are, we know how they move money. We know what they do when they win. The only unanswered question is where they will focus their efforts this year.
With 179 districts in the state, it’s not possible for me to keep an eye on all of them. That’s why I asked for your help earlier this year, identifying the municipalities which will be under the microscope this fall – and help you did. I have heard from several readers who have flagged districts to watch, and I am working on building a list of districts we believe will be targeted this fall.
At this point, though, I am far from convinced that we know all the targets. I expect at least one or two unexpected districts to be on the receiving end of a massive mailer and ad campaign. And while I have my suspicions on where they might be (and would love to hear from you if you have your own suspicions), there are some we can be certain will find themselves in the hot seat this year – districts where the reformers made enormous gains in 2021 and 2023, and are now trying to hold on.
Here are three to watch.
COLORADO SPRINGS DISTRICT 11
The twelfth largest district in the state, with more than 22,000 students, Colorado Springs District 11 is firmly in the hands of conservative school reformers heading into the November election. Over the last two election cycles, and with encouragement from large amounts of anonymous dark money, voters in the district have shown a marked preference for candidates with a laser-like focus on culture war issues but little concern for student achievement.
It’s not unheard-of that a school district in El Paso County would be governed by conservatives – the county’s three largest districts tend to flip back and forth every few years – but the particular kind of conservatives who took over D-11 in 2021 have ruffled feathers even among some of their own voters in the last four years. If the district’s academic accomplishments in the last four years had kept pace with the board’s culture war salvos, incumbents seeking reelection might be sitting pretty — but that’s not what has happened, and now the district is at risk of flipping again.
Like so many school boards inspired by the Moms for Liberty model of school governance (that is, neglecting educational matters in favor of a permanent, unhinged focus on culture war issues), the district has lost its way. Its attendance and graduation rates are well below the state average, and its truancy rate is above average. Instead of focusing on remedying those problems, the board banned transgender students from athletics and dedicated a lot of time and effort to worrying about flags.
The district has also struggled with hiring and retaining high quality teachers, thanks to the board’s frequent antagonism towards the teachers’ union. In 2024, the board hired an anti-union attorney, Suzanne Taheri, to consult them on labor negotiations. Incidentally, Taheri is also the go-to attorney for Advance Colorado, whose Springs Opportunity Fund committee provided most of the dark money which got the D-11 board elected. In December of last year, after consulting with Taheri for months, the board finally terminated the union’s collective bargaining agreement, which had been in place since 1968.
Now, the board’s conservative majority is at risk, with four board seats set to appear on this November’s ballot. Conservative dark money organizations were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to take control of the district. This fall, we’ll find out how much they’re willing to spend to keep it.
ACADEMY SCHOOL DISTRICT 20
Next door to D-11 is Academy School District 20, slightly larger but no less dominated by a specific kind of conservative majority. Like D-11, ASD20 has been under the thumb of the “parents’ rights” crowd since at least 2021, drawing the lion’s share of the district’s efforts into pointless crusades and avoidable controversies. Unlike D-11, though, ASD20’s academic performance has more or less withstood the onslaught of distractions. In fact, the Academy district’s graduation rate is about 21% higher than in neighboring D-11.
Despite maintaining academic performance, though, ASD20’s board has done itself no favors on the political front, wallowing as they have over the past two years in transphobia, conspiracy theories, and lawsuits against district parents. Like the board in D-11, ASD20’s leaders have shown more interest in banning books and flags than in soothing the tensions roiling the district community.
Much of the tension has centered around board incumbent Derrick Willburn, who made his name as an activist supporting stolen election conspiracy theories and railing against “critical race theory.” In 2023, shortly before he was elected, the Colorado Times Recorder obtained transcripts of chat logs from a Discord server in which Willburn pushed to abolish or downgrade the district’s Gay Straight Trans Alliance (GSTA) clubs, and described transgender healthcare as a “death cult.”
While his passionate and often unhinged demeanor aided in getting Willburn elected, it has not been particularly well suited to the task of governance. When Willburn read sexually explicit excerpts from books at a public event with children present – in an attempt to prove some point, no doubt – Willburn attracted the ire of district parents like Bernadette Guthrie, who took him to task publicly for the incident. With the help of former Woodland Park school board member, David Illingworth, Willburn then sued Guthrie for defamation. Legal proceedings are ongoing.
While Willburn has been a lightning rod for criticism, his views and votes have been very much in keeping with the rest of the board’s conservative majority. In fact, most of them were in the same Discord chats which CTR previously reported on.
Unlike in D-11, where the board incumbents are up against their own shoddy record on educating the district’s children, the outcome of the races in Academy District 20 seems more likely to hinge on the broader mood. School boards nationwide have been bogged down by drama like Willburn’s since the parents’ rights movement was astroturfed into existence in 2021. Many people, including many conservatives, have grown sick of the circus. But, very much like in D-11, a lot of dark money was spent to win these seats, and they likely won’t be surrendered without a fight.
MESA VALLEY 51
The third district where Colorado’s conservative school reformers will be fighting to hold onto their recent gains this November is hundreds of miles west of the other two, in Grand Junction, where the races in Mesa Valley 51 are already heating up.
Like the other two districts on this list, Mesa Valley 51 was launched onto its current trajectory by the “parents’ rights” wave in the 2021 school board elections, which saw an over-opinionated and under-experienced slate of conservative newcomers take control of the board majority. Like the upstart insurgents who took over Woodland Park, D-11, and dozens of other districts that year, the conservative slate of Andrea Haitz, Angela Lema, and Will Jones had a lot of plans, but little idea how to run a school district. Instead of desperately backfilling the administrative knowledge they lacked, the Mesa Valley 51 conservatives did what so many of their colleagues elsewhere did: ignored the tricky stuff and turned their focus to culture war issues instead.
In 2022, Haitz and Lema attended an anti-diversity workshop hosted by Heritage Action for America, a wing of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, where Haitz voiced her opposition to any discussion of “social justice” – a theme in keeping with her opposition to the imagined boogeymen of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“To start telling kids that certain groups are victims, while others are oppressors – we have to be careful,” Haitz said. “That’s getting into the political realm, rather than focusing on education. I just don’t think we need that in schools.” The irony of Haitz and her cohort being the ones to bring this discussion into the schools is, it appears, lost on her.
Earlier this year, the board waded into the effort to have the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSSA) ban transgender student-athletes statewide.
In 2023, the board’s majority was not up for grabs: with three conservatives having won seats on the five-member board in 2021, only two seats were on the ballot last cycle. Nevertheless, the conservative majority was bolstered that year by Barb Evanson, who believes creationism should be taught in science class. This year, though, the majority is in contention, and the incumbents are going to need to outrun their baggage to keep control of it.
Though not quite as loud or centrally located as D-11 and ASD20, Mesa Valley 51 is no less important: with 45 schools and about 20,000 students, it’s a valuable asset in the reformer portfolio, and they don’t seem interested in letting go of it yet. Money is pouring into Haitz’s and Lema’s coffers, but their opponents are keeping pace. How it turns out in November is anyone’s guess.
I know that school board races are often overlooked, that they are not deemed as sexy or intriguing as other elections, that people without children in the school system often ignore them altogether. I cannot overstate what a mistake it is to ignore them. Your local school district has more to do with you than you think: what it does with your tax dollars, how it educates your future coworkers and employees, the tone it sets in your local town or community. Still, it’s a hard sell. You don’t see your local school district’s politics on CNN or major news websites, you don’t pick up on it passively, you have to seek it out.
I’m here to tell you that that’s exactly what you should do. You should seek it out. You should find out exactly who is running in your school district this November, whether you have school-aged children or not. Then you should learn what they believe in, what changes they want to make in the district, and then, when your ballot arrives in the mail, you should vote for the ones you find yourself most aligned with. Because the schools aren’t just about the schools, they’re about the culture. These races are important. These districts are important. That’s why the Colorado Republican Party is opening a series of regional offices to boost conservative efforts to capture them this fall. It’s why anonymous billionaires keep spending millions of dollars on small, local races.
If they weren’t important, would any of that be happening?
