Candidates for the Academy School District 20 Board of Education took part in a forum at Liberty High School in Colorado Springs this week, discussing issues ranging from budget issues to transgender athletes and book bans. This year, D20’s conservative board joined Colorado Springs School District 11 and District 49 in banning transgender athletes, and D20 has also joined a lawsuit against the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA) over their policy for trans athletes.
Conservative candidates, ideologically aligned with the current board, include Holly Tripp, Susan Payne, Eddie Waldrep, and Cynthia Halverson. Payne is the only incumbent of the bunch, appointed to replace former board member Aaron Salt, and the founder of student safety and prevention initiative Safe2Tell. Waldrep, a psychologist, 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.
Halverson is a graduate of the unaccredited Charis Bible College in Woodland Park. “The Lord’s put it on my heart to be a part of this school board, to look at some of the things that have been changing in the last few years and see if those are the changes that we want,” she said.
The more moderate slate of candidates include D20 parents Renée Malloy Ludlam, Brandon Clark, and Jennafer Stites, all of whom were critical of the current D20 board’s decision to take part in the lawsuit against CHSSA.
“The reality is this is a topic that is in the ether, but it is not a reality that our schools are dealing with on a regular basis,” said Ludlam. “As far as we know, there are no transgender students who wish to compete in athletics in the district. We have over 26,000 students. There have been two — my understanding from the presentation from the [athletic director] during the lawsuit discussion — there have been two in the past 15-plus years, and both were a non-issue. I am not dismissing the arguments that you’ll hear tonight in terms of the complexity of this issue, but I will say that the challenge of our school as the lowest-funded school district, this is already getting worked out in the courts. It has to get worked out in the courts, and it is not [for] us to decide. So when we make these decisions, we are taking our taxpayer dollars and we are putting them basically in the trash can, because those taxpayer dollars are not going to do the most good for the most students. They are addressing an obscure argument — while valid — that is not a problem in our district. We have a lot of other problems.”
Halverson supported the lawsuit. “I’m glad that they joined that lawsuit,” she said. “I see that morals and values that children used to have while they were going through school, they don’t have today because so many things have been put in front of him and things have been taken away. And when I, having just learned about our founding fathers and our framers and how they put our government together, including school government, our first schools, the only textbook in the school was the Bible. That’s not being used today. And other books that are coming into the schools that are promoting things like boys being in girls sports and so forth. We have 1,400 books in our libraries that our children’s eyes should not see, their ears should not hear. And I am just adamant that those books get out of there, that we keep our children focused on the academics and not these transgender things and not mutilating their bodies and pushing them to do that. I just stomp my foot on the devil on that.”
Last year, D20 approved a policy preventing middle school students from accessing school library materials unless a parent or guardian signs a form granting permission to use library resources through the district’s parent portal. The conservative slate of candidates supported limiting access to certain materials in D20 libraries.
“Schools have the duty and the right to curate content for students, whether that’s websites or apps,” said Tripp. “We even curate food to make sure that it’s healthy for our students. Why would we not curate other content in the school environment to make sure it’s healthy? Sexually explicit content, extreme violent content, pornography is not healthy for children of any age. Things that are explicitly instructing them in how-tos — those kinds of conversations belong in the home. They do not belong in the school. We have a limited physical presence to put things and we should be surrounding our students with the best of the best and not with some of this other stuff that is degrading.”
Stites had concerns about infringing on the parental rights of others. “I think we just have to be so careful about pushing our own values on other parents,” she said. “Just as I get to make the choices on what my kids get to read, and let me tell you, I have a 10 year-old and a 14 year-old. My 14-year-old is allowed to watch shows and listen to music that is very different than my 10-year-old, and so I am all about age appropriateness and I practice that in my own home. What we have to be careful of is making decisions for other parents and for other students. The other thing is — so why are some of these books like ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ that’s sexually explicit. Why is it a classic? It’s a classic because it has high literary value, because it focuses on real world problems, because it sparks discussion, because it points to different experiences. I think that’s important.”
Editor’s Note: This story was edited to more accurately describe the nature of Safe2Tell.
