Garfield Re-2 is like a lot of other school districts. It has sports rivalries, budget issues, and plenty of local pride. And, like a lot of other districts, Garfield Re-2 has spent much of the last few years embroiled in politics, controversy, and culture war.
Anchored on the town of Rifle, just shy of 200 miles west of Denver along the I-70 corridor, the district’s 10 schools are doing their best to educate 4,700 students amid the constant barrage of political distractions. That task has not been easy in recent years, as teachers and parents have had to mobilize time and again to keep their own school board responsive to their wishes.
One of the biggest flare-ups came two years ago, when the school board attempted to adopt the American Birthright social studies standards, a controversial curriculum package assembled by a network of right-wing think tanks. At the time of the controversy in Garfield Re-2, the Woodland Park school district was the only district in the nation to have adopted the tendentious standards.
When the board set out to adopt the standards, the community in the majority Latino district pushed back, citing the curriculum’s overt emphasis on White, European cultures, as well as its frequent departures from established fact. After listening sessions and a community survey, the district convened a 59-person committee to vote on whether to adopt the standards. 83% of committee members voted against American Birthright.
After the Birthright fiasco, the politics kept rolling. Next was the recall of board president Tony May, seen as the ringleader of the push to adopt the controversial curriculum standards. Between a petition drive and a court challenge, the process continued for months. May was ultimately removed from the board, with 58% of voters in the recall election choosing to oust him.
One thing after another, it continued. Fights over book-banning. Ongoing fights for control of the local library board. At one point, I even showed up to be yelled at in-person.
Earlier this year, there was the months-long fight over a student name change policy, led by then-board president Britton Fletchall, who seemed to view the entire issue through the lens of the national culture war over rights for transgender Americans. In June, Fletchall resigned.
All of that to say, Garfield Re-2 is like a lot of other districts. Too many districts, one could argue. And, like in a lot of other districts, school board elections this November will answer one big question: whether people are sick of it yet.
This year, three candidates are running for two seats on the five-member board. Whoever wins, the board’s majority will not change, but it’s center of balance could. In District E, Steve Beaulieu is running unopposed. I asked him why he chose to run, and how he felt about the recent turmoil in the district.
“We have seen what happens when a political agenda is put ahead of thoughtful governance,” he told me. “Outside organizations, consultants, and lawyers were vying for influence into our schools and community. Time and attention are wasted on emotions and division while real and hard problems go unaddressed.”
He added, “I have been vocal in my opposition. If I am going to complain, then I should step up with a solution.”
Beaulieu spent a decade in the classroom as a high school science teacher, his wife has taught in Re-2 for twenty years, and their son attends 3rd grade in the district. “I believe I have the skill and experience to do the job well,” he told me. With no opponent on the ballot and his election a foregone conclusion, Beaulieu will have a chance to do just that.
It’s the head-to-head matchup in District A, though, which is really set to answer the question of whether local voters are sick of the drama yet. In that district, incumbent Megan Heil is up against challenger Darlane Evans – and it’s hard to look at the two candidates without discerning which stands for a return to normalcy, and which might still have axes to grind.
The challenger, Darlane Evans, grew up in Rifle, graduated from Re-2, and later spent nineteen years teaching in the district. She has one master’s degree in curriculum development and instruction, and another in gifted education. In other words, she has devoted her life and career not to politics, but to education.
When I asked Evans why she chose to run for this seat, despite how difficult and unpleasant the task of serving on a school board often is, she told me that meaningful work is rarely easy.
“I chose to run because I have spent my life in these schools,” she told me. “I care deeply about our students, teachers, and community. The challenges don’t discourage me; they remind me how much our schools matter.”
I also asked Evans about the recent years of turmoil in the district.
“The past few years of political division have taken a real toll on our district,” she said. “When so much time and attention are consumed by conflict, students bear the biggest brunt of it because teachers lose focus and morale, and parents become divided instead of engaged partners.”
She would have preferred to see the time and attention spent on the political fracas dedicated elsewhere. “Imagine if every hour spent debating politics were instead spent mentoring new teachers, expanding learning opportunities, deepening family partnerships. That’s where I believe our focus belongs.”
I asked Evans where she believes the recent turmoil has come from, and she told me that she thinks it is “a mix of fear, frustration, and misinformation.”
“Our community cares deeply about their children and our schools,” she said, “but when rumors spread faster than fact, fear and division take hold.”
If elected, Evans wants to rebuild trust and communication with the community, so that they can get back to the important work of educating the district’s kids. She listed it as one of her top three priorities, alongside strengthening student achievement, and supporting and retaining quality teachers.
“By sharing progress goals, listening to families, and addressing misinformation directly, we can move from division to collaboration and continue to build community confidence in our schools.”
On the ballot opposed to Evans is Megan Heil, who has been an incumbent member of the Re-2 board since August of this year, when she was appointed to fill a vacancy. According to locals, Heil has not touched on the recent controversies much during her time on the board or during her campaign, leaving open questions as to where she stands on the issues which have plagued the district in recent years, and whether she still has an appetite for the kind of culture war fights many are ready to move past.
I reached out to Heil by both phone and email but never heard back. Without input from the candidate herself, I attempted to find answers to those questions on my own.
Heil’s career has looked much different than Evans. Rather than a career in education, Heil spent her career in law enforcement – including several years in schools as an SRO, or school resource officer – and is now retired. And, rather than displaying a desire to leave the sectarian conflicts of recent years in the past, Heil is sending different signals. Though her Post Independent Q&A says she is “not running with a political agenda,” Heil’s website boldly proclaims that she is “the only conservative Christian running for school board” – listing it well above anything to do with academics, student achievement, or teachers.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being a conservative Christian – a great many people in my life are both – but conservative Christians are not a monolith, and the differences can be important in electing a representative. Some conservative Christians believe in small government and freedom of religion, tending to the libertarian side of things. Others have merged their faith and their politics in a way which defines them as part of the fast-growing Christian nationalist movement, a decidedly big government affair which feeds on the kind of controversies which have beset Re-2. Despite the prevalence of Christian nationalist beliefs among white evangelicals, those beliefs are not subscribed to by most Christians.
Thankfully, Heil’s history of social media posts provides a better understanding of how she defines the terms, and what kind of conservative Christian she identifies as.
In November 2024, replying to a post depicting Donald Trump carrying two trash bags – one showing Joe Biden, the other showing then-Vice President Kamala Harris – Heil replied, saying, “That made my heart happy.”
In October of that year, Heil posted about “two websites that support Christian ideals at the voter box. Check them out and share the information with others.” The links she provided were to myfaithvotes.org and truthandliberty.net. Both organizations advocate exactly the kind of culture wars which have riven the district in recent years. One of the two has even been involved in those controversies, to some degree.
Truth & Liberty, the political arm of Woodland Park televangelist Andrew Wommack’s global ministry empire, is a central tentpole in the Christian nationalist media environment. When the Woodland Park school district became the first – and, for a while, only – district in the nation to adopt the controversial American Birthright standards, they did so in no small part at the urging of Truth & Liberty, and with the help of board members who had graduated from Wommack’s Bible college. When those standards caused controversy in Garfield Re-2, Truth & Liberty produced voter guides supporting the board members and candidates who had backed the standards.
All of that to say, while Heil is more than entitled to her own views of these matters, voters who are ready to leave the last few years behind may be concerned to learn that Heil continues to promote one of the organizations which contributed to the turmoil of those years.
Another interesting note: Heil’s husband, Geoff Heil, is a local teacher. He is not, however, a teacher in Re-2. Instead, he is a teacher at a classical Christian school in New Castle, Liberty Classical Academy. Though Heil’s older children graduated from Re-2, she did not respond when I asked her to confirm whether her youngest child attends the private school instead.
Garfield Re-2 is like a lot of other school districts. The last four years have been hard. Weird. Overwrought.
And, like a lot of other districts, what happens there matters. It has an actual, tangible impact on the lives of the district’s students and their families; an impact that will stretch decades into the future, for either good or ill, as those students graduate, enter the workforce, and become leaders in the community. It’s easy to take education for granted, until no one has enough of it.
The school board fights of recent years, in Garfield County and around the country, have taken focus away from where it belongs. They have placed focus on the contents of books instead of on whether the students know how to read them. They have sought to remove books instead of instilling in students a desire to seek them out, to read and to learn. They have focused on queer kids and trans kids, instead of doing the simple, obvious thing and treating those kids like they treat all the other kids.
Even for those who somehow still manage to believe that queer and trans kids should not exist, or that books should be heavily censored, or that dissenting views should not be welcomed in the halls learning, it is hard to imagine how they can still justify the constant disruptions to the fundamental business of education that these side-quests have wrought.
At the end of 2024, Garfield Re-2’s score with the Colorado Department of Education was 55.1%. During the last four years of hyper-politicization within the district, it has been on and off an official improvement plan with the state agency. Though full of teachers who care about teaching, students who want to learn, and parents who want the best for their children, the district is struggling to achieve its basic goal: the education of the children within its boundaries.
As voters in the district fill out their ballots this year, they will choose which of these things matters more to them: perfect orthodoxy with their ideology of choice, or educating the next generation. As the last four years have shown, it’s surprisingly difficult to pursue both.
