The five-member Elizabeth school board is facing its second lawsuit in less than six months for allegedly flouting Colorado’s open meetings laws (COML) by adding last-minute agenda items and failing to properly disclose its reasons for adjourning in executive session.
Andy Jones, who is running for the Douglas County school board with a slate of conservative candidates, has received two campaign violation complaints in the span of four days.
For the second time in less than a month, organizers of conservative school board candidate forums in Douglas County asked reporters to leave. In the most recent forum, an organizer for the “We the Women” candidate round-robin asked this reporter to leave shortly after arriving, saying she didn’t want the event reported.
Whomever voters elect to Cherry Creek’s school board next month won’t change the majority opinion one way or the other. Still, two Republican-backed candidates, Steve McKenna and Scott Graves, hope to shake up the conversation around what’s taught in Cherry Creek schools and the district’s responsibilities to parents.
Standing on a truck bed in a parking lot outside a recent Cherry Creek school board meeting, the so-called book-banning pastor John Amanchukwu shouted through a microphone to around 50 onlookers to vote out supporters of “drag queen story hour” and restore parent voice in education.
Earlier this month, the popular anti-LGBTQ Libs of TikTok social media account put out a call to its members asking them to email the Cherry Creek superintendent, school board, and district leadership team about the district providing what they called pornographic books to children.
Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN), a conservative parents’ rights group, hosted a school safety summit this past weekend at St. Thomas More Catholic Parish in Englewood, asking for members to advocate for armed security teams, including teachers and staff, at their schools.
Three weeks after the far-right group Moms for Liberty posted a call to action for members to ask their districts to commit to full in-person learning, Elizabeth school board members passed a resolution that matches nearly word-for-word the language provided by what the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an “anti-government extremist” group.
