Last week, I received the kind of text message I love the most. “I have something you might be interested in,” it read, “but can you keep my name out of it?” I agreed, source confidentiality being a cornerstone of journalism, and was sent a document which did, in fact, interest me: it was a letter of engagement between the state’s 10th largest school district and a controversial law firm I have covered at length.
The district is Academy School District 20, which educates some 25,000 kids spread across a large swath of northern El Paso County. D20 has never been a district to shy away from controversy: the conservative school board has banned LGBTQ pride flags and books they deem pornographic, and members were caught in private messages criticizing local activists as, among other things, “fire-breathing lesbians.” Last year, while many of the state’s voters turned out against the culture war mania which has beset school boards nationwide for the last half-decade, voters in D20 went the other way, rejecting a slate of qualified challengers in favor of baggage-ridden candidates and more of the same.
The law firm is no stranger to controversy either. In fact, in many ways, the Miller Farmer Carlson firm seems to seek it out. Led by conservative education attorney and political strategist par excellence, Brad Miller, the firm has spent years on the leading edge of conservative efforts to reshape the public education system. I have covered Miller and his firm’s role in local dust-ups from Woodland Park to Montezuma-Cortez, as well as their ambitious efforts to take a Colorado school district all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Miller is very good at what he does, and what he does is push the envelope: around open meetings laws, around statutory authority, and around previously established practices which do not further his larger aims. The most recent envelope Miller pushed was the one around public funding for private and religious schools, when he teamed up with the Alliance Defending Freedom last year to launch Riverstone Academy, branded as the state’s “first public Christian school.” Riverstone was ordered to close last month over health & safety concerns.
According to the document I was sent, which was signed by D20 board president Amy Shandy and district superintendent Jinger Haberer on January 20, Miller’s firm took over representation of the district beginning on February 1, 2026. The letter of engagement provides for up to 80 hours per month of legal work at a rate of $18,000 per month (or otherwise billed hourly if a month comes in substantially below 80 hours).
When I reached out to Miller to confirm the veracity of the document and ask how the arrangement came to be, he told me that the district had been looking to cut costs from its previous model for legal counsel, which consisted of two in-house full-time employees. Miller’s firm has done work for the district on smaller matters in years past, but the new arrangement will make his firm the district’s go-to representation. Miller told me that “each party will continue to monitor and evaluate” the arrangement, but that he believes it will ultimately be a cost savings for the district.
While the mixture of one of the state’s culture-warringest school districts and envelope-pushingest attorneys is bound to have headline-grabbing results, it’s how the partnership came about which interests me most.
Just last year, District 20 extended its legal representation, signing general counsel Tonya Thompson to a three-year contract. According to documents obtained by district activists via the Colorado Open Records Act last fall, Thompson signed a contract last June which would see her employed with the district through 2028. Then, on September 30, just three months after the contract was signed, Thompson and the district parted ways for unexplained reasons, under an agreement which requires the district to pay Thompson more than $500,000. Almost none of this would be known if the local activists behind the D20 Accountability Project had not filed records requests and published the findings on their blog.
According to documents, the district contracted with Thompson for an annual salary of $276,678.51. The arrangement between the district and Miller Farmer Carlson pencils out to about $216,000.00 per year, which saves the district about $60,000 per year, but only if they don’t attract any litigation. Other districts represented by Miller have found themselves enmeshed in legal drama.
Though the blog implies that disagreements between Thompson and the board over the Miller-orchestrated lawsuit against the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA) regarding the participation of transgender student athletes may have led to Thompson’s departure, there is no indication that Miller or his firm had anything to do with the separation: records obtained by the D20 Accountability Project show that a firm named Taft, Stettinius & Hollister helped facilitate the separation between Thompson and the district, and show no trace of Miller Farmer Carlson waiting in the wings. Miller, when we spoke for this piece, told me that he was not aware of discussions within the district about hiring a new firm until around Christmas.
While the unanswered questions around Thompson’s departure make the emergence of any replacement an event of interest, the quietness surrounding Miller Farmer Carlson’s onboarding by the district is also noteworthy. School boards in Colorado are not required to publicly debate and vote on things like contracting professional services. State law requires boards to adopt their own policies regarding things like contracting, and D20’s contracting policies do not apply to “professional services or instructional services or materials.” The board discussed the possibility of hiring a new firm at a January 8 meeting, but never held a public hearing about the choice of Miller’s firm. That the district chose not to announce the hiring even after the contract was signed, though, is odd.
Though some boards in recent years have chosen to handle the selection of an attorney as a public matter, seeking public feedback and holding discussions at open meetings, doing so is a voluntary exercise in transparency, and is often a form of political cover for boards who worry that the decision they intend to make will be unpopular. Notably, many of the instances in recent years in which Colorado school boards have chosen to handle attorney selection as a public matter have involved – well – Brad Miller.
That to say, though decidedly and intentionally untransparent, it is neither unprecedented nor technically improper for D20 to hire Miller without public hearings, but it does represent an evolution in strategy from a man who remains on the front edge of a personal crusade to remake education, and the districts who seek to employ his services. As Miller’s work attracts more press attention, and more attention from activists, flying below the radar might serve him well.
Right now, Miller is a subject of contention in at least two other Colorado school districts: Pueblo District 70, and the Montrose County School District on the Western Slope. In D70, which Miller Farmer Carlson represents, there has been public backlash at recent meetings, with one board member saying that they have received “many, many emails” and that a request-for-proposal for new legal counsel was under consideration. In Montrose, which Miller does not yet represent but where his firm is under consideration by the board to be the district’s new legal counsel, activists have rallied against his hiring. One local outlet referred to the furor around Miller’s potential hiring by the district as “hysteria.”
If either D70 or Montrose had gone about making their Miller decisions through the quiet administrative channels employed by D20, they might have saved themselves “many, many emails” and a whole lot of public comment. They should at the very least be commended for their transparency in not doing so. How long will it be, though, before other culture-warring, right-wing school boards take a page from D20’s playbook and realize that closing the shades on transparency and hiring Miller in the dark will save them a lot of heartburn, and systematically disadvantage any local parents who might want to speak against the hire.
Miller is a central animating force in a coordinated effort between conservative think tanks, right-wing activists, and Republican elected officials to use Colorado school districts as a testing ground for a nationwide revamping of the public education system. In recent years, local networks of activists have formed in opposition to his campaign of transformation, first in Woodland Park, then in Elizabeth, in Montezuma-Cortez, in Montrose, and in other corners of the state. They have had an impact. They filed records requests, they set up blogs, and they changed the information environment, putting a spotlight on him, making it harder to go unnoticed. They have spurred the headlines which are causing D70 to reconsider Miller, the same headlines sparking “hysteria” against his hiring in Montrose. Last fall, as moderate and even progressive challengers took control of school boards around the state which had been in the hands of Miller-aligned conservatives, their work bore serious fruit.
Now, as it always does, the game has changed again, and the activists will have to catch up. They have done it before; I imagine they will figure out how to do it again, but it will require new thinking, new techniques. It will require the writing of a new chapter to the story they have been plotting and participating in for five years, and I am not sure what it will look like yet. I doubt they are either. With the evolution of strategy seen in the quiet hiring by D20, though, one thing is clear: for now, the ball is back in Miller’s court.
Read the letter of engagement between D20 and Miller Farmer Carlson here.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to better reflect the timing of Tonya Thompson’s hiring by the district, and to note that the D20 board did briefly discuss new legal representation on January 8, 2026.
