The first thing to know about Woodland Park is that it’s a conservative town. Last year, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance received more than twice as many votes in Teller County, where Woodland Park is located, than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The second thing to know is that not a lot of people in the small mountain town agree on what that word means: conservative.
For some of Woodland Park’s conservatives, the simple definition works wonders: they affiliate with the Republican Party, believe in free market principles, and hold socially traditional ideals. For others, that definition misses the mark. Many of Woodland Park’s conservatives are the older-fashioned type: their conservatism is not yoked to a man or a party or a set of hot-button issues, but to core values like family, faith, and home. Ironically, it is these old-fashioned conservatives who so many of the modern ilk want to strip of that label. And it’s that impulse, to determine who is and is not one of us, and to decide how much the answer matters, which has propelled so much of the town’s conflict.
The fight for the soul of Woodland Park has not been simple. It would be wrong to say that it’s been about labels, or about the inability of people to see past their differences. It has been about power, and tax dollars; it has been about curriculum, and about history; it has been about rearranging the boundaries around who does and does not belong. Most importantly it has been about thousands of kids and their futures. But matters of identity have played a role.
After a slate of far-right candidates won control of the board in 2021 with an aggressive pre-planned agenda to charter a specific school and usher in a curriculum change for the whole district, things began to change rapidly. Teachers were fired, families left the district in large numbers, and those who remained felt themselves being shut out of every decision. Transparency and accountability vanished while community concerns about the board’s motives and the district’s finances increased dramatically. People in the town slowly sorted themselves into camps.
As the battle lines formed, so did a tendency for those backing the board to castigate their opponents as liberals, outsiders, and puppets of the teachers’ union. But when most of those opponents looked at themselves in the mirror, they did not see any of those things looking back at them.
In reality, both sides of the conflict in Woodland Park were heavily populated by conservatives. The difference between the sides is that one of them only had conservatives, while the other also had liberals, moderates, and libertarians of all stripes. This year, that latter group united behind three candidates, collectively known as the “Three Gs” for their last names: Carol Greenstreet, Laura Gordon, and Kassidi Gilgenast.
In the end, it was the second group which won by double digits, and gave a masterclass in coalition-building in the process. They learned to work together, and to work past differences in the community to build a coalition: something the outgoing board never did.
Instead of letting their labels separate them from one another, the coalition set those labels aside to unite around what they agreed on. In this case, what they agreed on was the need to get the district out of the business of chaos and culture wars, and return attention to the finances, academics, and students.
Now, the Three Gs are faced with the task of governing – and, if the way they campaigned is any indication, I believe they are prepared to give a masterclass in that, too.
As Greenstreet told me, the three new board members are not entering office with a shared agenda, but they are entering it with a shared understanding of each other, and of the community they have been chosen to represent. “Anyone who believes we will all be alike is truly mistaken,” she told me. But –
“One of the advantages of our collaboration and all getting elected,” she said, “is that we have learned how to work together,”
Last Tuesday night, I gathered with those conservatives, liberals, moderates, and libertarians – those Christians and atheists and Zoroastrians – at a bar on the edge of town to watch as the results rolled in. It was a smaller affair this time than in 2023, when the crowd faced heartbreak: that year, with hundreds gathered together in the Ute Pass Cultural Center, only one of their three candidates made it onto the board. After door-knocking and phone-calling and pouring their hearts and souls into the effort all fall, many felt that they had failed. Those wounds took time to heal.
Despite their wounds, many of the same people who worked so hard in 2023 laced up their walking shoes and did it again this year. Despite being fully aware of the heartbreak they might be signing up for, they did it again. Then, with none of the pomp and circumstance of last time, but much more booze and nervous energy, they waited.
Then they won. Decisively, in fact. As of the final tally, Greenstreet won her race by 15%, Gordon won hers by 17%, and Gilgenast topped the pile with a 21% margin of victory.
When it became clear that the Three Gs had won, tears started flowing in multiple corners of the bar. The teachers who had been unjustly fired, the parents who had moved their kids to other districts as their local schools went off the rails; people whose lives had been genuinely upended by the chaos of the last four years. Before they laughed and shouted and hugged, they wept. They wept for what they had lost, and they wept because it was over.
“After the initial shock, my first real thought is just hope,” candidate Laura Gordon told me on election night, minutes after learning she had won. “Hope for our town and our community, that we really can come together and do right by our schools.”
The day after the election, I put a post in the main Facebook group populated by the Woodland Park resistance, asking locals what the results meant to them. The group is frequented not only by the parents and activists who have been central to the pushback over the last four years, but to hundreds of other community members invested in the future of the district: grandparents, alumni, current and former teachers, local business leaders worried about the impacts on the town, their interest reflecting the tight-knit nature of the community. Their responses capture the sentiment better than I could ever summarize.
“In spite of outside money and a misinformation campaign, Teller County voters sent a clear message: our schools are not for sale,” Jerry Penland wrote.
“This brings me hope that in spite of the political divisions that exist, we can still come together to support all of the kids in our community, wrote Dennis LeFevre.
Michelle Studwell, who has taught in the district for 18 years, said that it was “a huge relief to know that the new board members will bring fresh ideas, impartial decisions, fairness and genuine care about the families, staff, and students in our schools.”
“I am joyful,” wrote Wendy Schlosberg, capturing the mood. “In my 34 years of living and voting in Woodland Park, nothing has divided our community as deeply as the actions of the previous school board.” She cast the election of the Three Gs as “a welcome and necessary change.”
Even with the resounding victory, some of the accidental activists who found themselves near the center of this saga remain concerned about structural problems which they worry could bring the same sort of turmoil to other districts around the state.
“Colorado’s hands-off ‘local control’ approach to education has enabled the instability and controversy that we’ve seen in Woodland Park and also elsewhere in the state,” wrote Matt Gawlowski, one of the first Woodland Park residents I spoke to when I started poking around a few years ago. “While it’s encouraging to see the results of this last election, we need to reform education laws at the state level, enact more oversight of local school boards, and stop letting children be the pawns in political and ideological battles.”
At some point during the years I have spent covering the unfolding of events in Woodland Park, the story became personal to me in a way no other story ever has. I don’t mean that I ever lost my attachment to the facts, or reported anything I don’t stand by fully. I mean that, at some point amid the hundreds of hours of heartfelt interviews, the meals I have been fed, the lodgings I have been offered, and the realization that so much of that kindness was offered by people with such different labels from one another and from myself, I could no longer avoid learning the same lesson that so many locals had learned: that people can be so much more than they seem, so much more than they bill themselves as. I formed actual relationships with so many people in town, I can hardly think of them simply as “sources” anymore.
I’m not the only one who learned from watching this chronicle unfold. If not for that experience, Carol Greenstreet worries she might have made the same mistakes as the outgoing board. “It is so easy to look at someone and know they have different beliefs and lifestyles and because of that judgement discount everything they say,” she told me. “I have learned to listen to the words and look for the truth. Lo and behold, people I would have ignored were speaking truth!”
“I think that is how we narrow the divide in our community and nation,” she said. “I believe the more people are ignored, the louder they get. We must listen well. We must learn to care for our whole community, not just the pocket of people with whom we align”
To be clear, my takeaway from this saga is not that we should all get along, or that we’re not so different after all. I believe that ideology matters – that if politics is not a fight between competing values and visions for the future then it’s just about power and personalities – and that not everyone should be gotten along with. My takeaway is that the labels people wear tell us far less than we wish they did, and that, in the fight for a greater good or a shared vision, we do ourselves no favors by discounting possible allies based on those shoddy labels.
The great irony is that many of the conservatives of Woodland Park embodied an example which the American political left could badly stand to emulate.
In the years I have spent telling Woodland Park’s story, talking to a few hundred people in the town over that time, I have all but lost track of what labels people were wearing the first time I met them. After the first few times one of those small-town conservative Christians greeted this big-city agnostic liberal with a heartfelt hug and a “how’ve you been?” it stopped mattering. And, as it stopped mattering, I stopped being able to see the story of Woodland Park as a political story, even if it looks that way from the outside. It’s so much more than that: it is human interest, it is history, it is anthropology. It is as real and complex and multifaceted as every person within it.
With the Three Gs bound for office, it seems that the school board side of the Woodland Park saga is coming to a close. As board incumbent Keegan Barkley told me on election night, part of the hope is to “make school board meetings boring again.” She wants the board to operate in such a way that parents, teachers, and community members feel that problems brought to the board via normal channels like phone calls and emails will actually be addressed; that there will no longer be a need to turn out in droves just to be heard.
Even as the school district charts a course back towards normalcy, though, it would be premature to declare the battle for Woodland Park over. As I was reminded on election night, the other shoe has yet to drop. While much of the school district drama was fueled by political consultants and national right-wing think tanks – all of whom just lost their footholds in the district – the environment which those politicos deemed ripe for their experiments was fostered in large part by someone else: evangelist Andrew Wommack.
It was Wommack who said he had “sent a spy” into the school system, and it was Wommack’s Truth & Liberty organization which spent tens of thousands of dollars supporting the board’s controversial leaders. It was Wommack who tacitly endorsed the American Birthright curriculum, and it was Wommack whose Bible college students turned out in large numbers to support the board at critical junctures.
It was Wommack who, in 2021, told his followers that they “ought to take over this town,” and has taken every opportunity in the intervening years to do so. Last week’s school board results were a setback in the ministry’s quest for earthly dominion, but they have faced setbacks before. As I learned from my investigation into Wommack’s community last year, many of the people inside the ministry’s bubble are much more than their labels imply, too.
While it’s safe to assume that candidates aligned with the ministry’s quest will continue seeking local offices for the foreseeable future, like in next year’s council races, the town can take a deep breath for now: for the first time in four years, the immediate threat has passed.
As Kelly Hunsaker, a longtime local and the wife of a district teacher, wrote in response to my post asking for reactions: “I am relieved, and hopeful for the future of our community for the first time in four years.” Hunsaker was central to the campaigns in both 2023 and 2025, and is one of the first people who comes to mind when I think about the locals who dusted themselves off after a bad loss in 2023 and got back at it. “There has been so much anger, pain, sadness, and division, with no hope that anything would change. Finally we will have a chance to change all of that,” she wrote. “I know it will take time, but I also know that we now have the right people there to make it happen.”
