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.
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.
Right wing activist and self-proclaimed “America’s Mom” Sherronna Bishop and Kelly Kohls, director of school board leadership for Moms for America, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center deems an anti-government extremist organization, outlined their strategy to end the community-led effort to recall Garfield School District RE-2 board member Tony May during a secretly-recorded Zoom call obtained by the Colorado Times Recorder earlier this month.
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.
Over the past three years, Garfield and Weld Counties, in northern Colorado, spent nearly $2 million total to fight government regulation on oil and gas pollution, the bulk of it doled out by Garfield County to lobbyists and lawyers, according to an analysis of county budgets by environmental groups and the Colorado Times Recorder.
Bud Demicell, who will remain a candidate for Rifle, Colorado, City Council despite documentation disputing his affidavit — signed under the penalty of perjury — that he met residency requirements, has posted misinformed and Islamophobic content on Facebook in which he challenges the legitimacy of Muslims to hold elected office in the United States.
