While conservatives are celebrating the victory and impending inauguration of Donald Trump, they are also preparing for 2025’s school board elections. Recent media appearances from some of Colorado’s most vocal conservative education activists indicate that the playbook for 2025 will focus on three tried and true issues — diversity programs, transgender people, and unions.
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.
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.
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.
Jimmy Sengenberger is best known as a far-right opinion monger on talk radio station KNUS and as a right-wing contributor to Colorado Politics, which is owned by billionaire GOP donor Phil Anschutz.
The Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN) is the latest addition to a group of conservative, anti-LGBTQ, pro-charter school activist groups in Colorado that include the Independence Institute, FAIR [Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism], and FEC United.
