Two members of El Paso County School District 49’s (D49) conservative board majority are up for re-election this year. Should either Jamilynn D’Avola or Lori Thompson lose their race, the board could flip to a more progressive majority.
D49 was one of the first school districts in Colorado to take part in a lawsuit against Colorado and the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSSA) over the participation of transgender athletes in sports. In April, dozens of Colorado school board members and administrators — including those in D11, D20, and D49 — issued an open letter to the 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.
In 2023, the D49 Board – which is represented by Miller Farmer Carlson, according to documents obtained via a records request – passed a resolution to acknowledge the United States’ alleged “Judeo-Christian biblical foundation” by hanging signs with “In God We Trust” in public buildings throughout the district. The D49 board has also waded into controversies around “critical race theory” and transgender issues in the past.
D’Avola and Thompson are both supporters of the lawsuit. While Thompson’s only opponent is Chris Harrell, D’Avola is facing Holly Withers and ultra-conservative culture war veteran Ivy Liu.
“I do have two opponents actually,” said D’Avola during an Oct. 14 appearance on the Kim Munson Show. “I have Holly Withers who is supported [by] a group that’s a part of the teachers union. And then we do have Ivy Liu, who’s running against me in my same seat, who has a personal vendetta against the school district.”
In April, 2022, the D49 Board voted 3-2, with D’Avola and Liu opposed, to take action against Liu for public statements and Facebook posts that they claim led to harassment campaigns against board members and a “toxic” environment. In November, 2022, Liu was officially censured by the board after quoting Adolf Hitler on social media. In 2023, Liu was unable to run for re-election due to redistricting and sued D49 in a case that was dismissed by the judge. In October, 2023, Liu was arrested for felony menacing, but the charges were later dropped by prosecutors.
“I’ve been out for two years,” Liu said during an Oct. 20 appearance on the Kim Monson show. “They changed the boundary lines, and I was not able to run back until 2023. I’m back because I have been watching obviously what’s been going on in D49 — and across the nation — really keeping track of what’s going on in the county, and I am back specifically for the achievement. Academic achievement, in the four years since I’ve been involved — actually more like five years ago now — when I first got appointed to the board in April, 2021, that really things have not gotten better and in some things has gotten worse.”
Liu described her campaign against social emotional learning in D49. “I was learning that curricula were being brought in specifically to — it has the publicly declared objective of transforming society and injecting equity into the kids’ minds and social justice,” she told Monson. “So basically to make social justice warriors. Well, that is equivalent to Marxism.”
D’Avola plans to continue her fight against transgender people. “These kids are so confused about who they are as a person and who they are created to be that we have a mental health contagion in our classrooms that are distracting us from being able to learn,” she said. “And so we as a school board, Lori Thompson, who’s also running for re-election with me, as well as Deb Schmidt — she’s not for re-election but she’s on our board — and I voted to take a stand against the transgenderism nonsense that’s happening in our schools and so we have a policy now in place where we are protecting our female athletes by not allowing biological boys to compete as girls on our female sports teams or to be in the same bathrooms and locker rooms.”
Ballots are due by 7 p.m. on Nov. 4.
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