This year, the Colorado Times Recorder team covered the happenings in a handful of Colorado’s contested school districts. Since 2021, when the “parents’ rights” movement erupted in school districts around the country, the task of educating the nation’s children has often played second fiddle to a host of cultural and political grievances. Last night, after four years of storm, stress, and slipping scores, voters finally got to choose whether to continue the crusades or get back to basics.
With less than a week left until ballots are counted and with none of them seeking re-election, the four-member conservative bloc of Woodland Park’s controversial School Board is making plans to go out with a bang. After years of accusations that they have shown favoritism to Merit Academy, the district’s only charter school, the outgoing Board is now attempting to lease the district’s middle school building to the Merit Academy Building Corporation for 30 years. At least two members of that Board, however, may be ineligible to cast that vote on account of allegedly having moved out of state.
The spend-down has begun. If you live in one of Colorado’s hotly contested school districts, you have probably noticed by now. The banner ads attached to web pages like this one. The commercials inserted into your Facebook feed. The glossy 8x11s filling your mailbox with virtue and venom, some brightly colored and peppy, others black and gray with yellow text. After months of raising money, school board races are now in the few short weeks of spending it.
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.
The phone call came through around 9 p.m. while Cyndi Eldredge was watching television with her husband. On the other end of the line was her boss, Montezuma-Cortez School District superintendent Tom Burris, launching immediately into one of his frequent tirades. Eldredge thought he sounded impaired. Given everything that had been going on in the district, and her own increasing discomfort with it, she decided to listen to her intuition: she recorded the call.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the unusual happenings in the Woodland Park School District over the last four years. The dramatic conservative takeover in 2021, the immediate Open Meetings Law violations, the controversial chartering of a new school, the even more controversial hiring and tenure of superintendent Ken Witt. The American Birthright curriculum. The nexus with the growing trend of Christian nationalism and the troubling ties to the charismatic Seven Mountains Mandate. Despite the desperate wishes of locals, the district has not seen many dull moments since the current crop of seniors were in eighth grade.
I was around 15 years old the first time I was forced to think about political violence, when I realized that the stick poking me awake as I slept in my seat near the back of the bus was not a stick at all, but the barrel of a rifle. Fabrique Nationale, bullpup style, held by a man in a balaclava demanding to see my passport. Suddenly, I was wide awake and wondering if this mission trip to the mountains of Peru was about to take a dire turn. Thankfully, it did not: the armed men – members of the Shining Path insurgency, I figured out later, based on when and where we encountered them – were maintaining a checkpoint in their ongoing struggle against the central government, and we had blundered into the middle of it. Eventually, they let us go on our way, but I have never forgotten waking up to the barrel of a rifle.
Four Republican candidates vying to be Colorado’s next governor came together over the weekend for the first official forum of the campaign to replace term-limited Jared Polis next year – and put on the strangest, bleakest performance I have seen in my decade-plus political career in the process. As the candidates took turns painting a vision of what they see as wrong with Colorado and how they hope to make it right again, each provided a glimpse into a dark fantasy world which bears little resemblance to our own.
School board elections are gearing-up around the country right now, set to take center stage on an off-off-year ballot . Here in Colorado, there will be no statewide races sucking up time and attention, there will be no statewide ballot initiatives flooding the airwaves with advertisements. School board races will get top billing. And, if the past is any indicator, that means things in districts around the state are about to get…rowdy.
The fire took hold in the camp around 7 P.M., set by the anti-union militias working alongside the National Guard to crush the mine strike. As women and children attempted to flee, gunfire from the troops surrounding the camp forced them back into the flames. By the time the chaos subsided, 19 civilians were dead: 12 children, two women, and five of the striking miners. More would die in the coming days, in a conflict which the U.S. Congress’ Commission on Industrial Relations said sparked “danger of a national revolution.”
