At age 100, after decades of fame, fortune, and acclaim, Henry Kissinger has finally died. While etiquette traditionally discourages dancing on graves, I believe that an exception should be made in this case: Henry Kissinger was not a good man. He was not a genius. He was not a public servant. Henry Kissinger was a paranoid, narcissistic, egomaniacal warmonger. He was a man unbothered by the buckets of blood on his hands; an avatar of unrepentance.
The floor of the Ute Pass Cultural Center quaked in time with the bass drum on Tuesday night as hundreds of Woodland Park citizens crowded into the room to await election results. By 6pm, an hour before polls closed, the venue was packed, the sounds of laughter and conversation competing only with the soulful voice of the band’s singer – who I finally realized was Erin O’Connell, the local parent-turned-activist who has led much of the charge against the town’s controversial school board. The anxiety and anticipation which grips the first hour of so many election night parties was absent, replaced by the palpable relief the community felt at having finally made it to this point.
The process for founding a new charter school in Colorado is not exactly simple, but it is straightforward. Interested parents and community members come together, get some ducks in a row, and then file an application with the local school board, which has the legal authority to approve or deny charters. If a charter is granted, the process of opening the new charter school in the district begins. If the school board denies the charter, that’s the end of it.
The most important school board races in Colorado this year are not on the Front Range, and are rarely in the press. They are tucked into high valleys beyond the curtains of peaks, attracting little notice and even less money. While school board races in Denver routinely attract tens of thousands of voters and millions of dollars in outside spending, the races carrying the real stakes of the November elections could be decided by dozens of votes, or a few thousand dollars. Rural school board races have never been as important as they are this year, and their ramifications could be felt statewide.
This is the final installment in a 7-part series about the Woodland Park school board. This piece can stand alone without reading the other six pieces.
If a germ touches me, it dies,” the faith healer proclaimed at the height of the pandemic. Not everyone was so lucky: though he personally claimed to be protected by faith-based immunity, Andrew Wommack’s constant flouting of local health ordinances, his desire to pack the sanctuary at Charis Bible College with hundreds of people at a time, led to multiple fatal outbreaks of the virus in Teller County. Now, three years later, Wommack’s ministry empire has infected Woodland Park with a new strain of contagion, this time through the ballot box.
The other thing we ask is no recording,” the Freedom Foundation moderator can be heard saying on the recording I recently obtained. The recording, which was provided by a source who wishes to remain anonymous, is of a panel discussion at a recent conference and prominently features Brad Miller, the controversial attorney for the Woodland Park school board. “If you guys want these guys to be frank, to be open with you guys, they don’t want to be on YouTube. I don’t want to be on YouTube. So if we can, just make sure that there is no recording.”
The Woodland Park-based effort to fundamentally alter public education in America is being funded by the zombie fortunes of long-dead conservative industrialists, according to a review of hundreds of tax documents associated with the members of Civics Alliance, the coalition which produced the American Birthright social studies program.
