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.
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.
Last month, supporters of a would-be charter school made their case to the Montrose County School Board, hoping to receive an official charter which would allow it to open in the district. The meeting on May 20 was not the first time the leaders of Montrose Classical Academy sat before the county school board to discuss their charter application: this whole saga played out last year as well, and ended with the school board rejecting the classical school’s charter application.
I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re back in high school. You were a child pretty recently and you’ll be an adult pretty soon, but for now, things are weird. Your body and brain are both changing, you smell weird sometimes. You’re in the years-long process of both creation and discovery, carving your own identity out of a formless block of stone, trying to separate what you really like from what you think it would be cool to be seen as liking. Sometimes, you worry that all of your friends might secretly hate you, or that you’re ugly, or that you’re the only one who occasionally smells weird.
Last week, dozens of Colorado school board members and administrators issued an open letter to the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), making what they called “an urgent and resolute demand” that the organization “immediately adopt rules” to ban trans-identifying teens from participating in high school athletics in Colorado. Signed by 80 signatories representing 14 public school districts, ten charter schools, and one BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), the letter references President Trump’s February 5 Executive Order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and suggests that CHSAA will be subject to federal investigation if it does not comply with the letter’s demands.
