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Oct 5, 2023 · Elementary School, pictured Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023, is among the Woodland Park schools that suffered high teacher turnover last year amid rising political tensions in the Teller County district, largely sparked by a conservative board elected in 2021.
- Overview
- A culture shift on the board
- 'Everyone has their line'
- Discouraging civic engagement
- A contentious meeting
- 'A very important step'
WOODLAND PARK, Colo. — When a conservative slate of candidates won control of the school board here 18 months ago, they began making big changes to reshape the district.
Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.
As teachers, students and parents began protesting these decisions, the administration barred employees from discussing the district on social media. At least two staff members who objected to the board’s decisions were later forced out of their jobs, while another was fired for allegedly encouraging protests.
These rapid and sweeping shifts weren’t coincidental — instead it was a plan ripped from the MAGA playbook designed to catch opponents off guard, according to a board member’s email released through an open records request.
“This is the flood the zone tactic, and the idea is if you advance on many fronts at the same time, then the enemy cannot fortify, defend, effectively counter-attack at any one front,” David Illingworth, one of the new conservative school board members, wrote to another on Dec. 9, 2021, weeks after they were elected. “Divide, scatter, conquer. Trump was great at this in his first 100 days.”
The leaders of the Woodland Park School District are enacting an experiment in conservative governance in the middle of a state controlled by Democrats, with little in the way so far to slow them down. The school board’s decisions have won some praise in heavily Republican Teller County, but opposition is growing, including from conservative Christians and lifelong GOP voters who say the board has made too many ill-advised decisions and lacks transparency.
The four candidates who won nonpartisan positions on Woodland Park’s school board in 2021 had to say little but that they were conservative to win. The mostly white, middle-class city of 8,000 people up the mountain pass from Colorado Springs had voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 2-to-1 a year earlier.
But while many conservatives running for school boards across the country recently were swept into office on a wave of parent complaints about critical race theory, library book content and policies supporting transgender youth, Woodland Park had no such activism in 2021. In fact, few people bothered to attend board meetings, according to Chris Austin, a pastor and the lone board member who was not up for re-election that year.
“It was a culture of collaboration,” Austin said. “You had freedom to bring forward your thoughts and evidential data, people listened, we did not even know each other’s political affiliations. That’s the way I experienced it for the first nearly two-and-a-half years. Then it shifted abruptly with the first meeting with the new board.”
Newly elected conservatives on the board acted quickly to approve an agreement with Merit Academy to become the district’s first charter school.
Yet, the vote, at a special meeting on Jan. 26, 2022, caught community members by surprise because the agenda made no mention of Merit — it had been listed instead as “board housekeeping.”
The district’s teachers union complained in an email to middle school staff that the board’s action was “underhanded, and at worst illegal.” A parent sued, aiming to force the board to follow open meetings law. A trial court judge did not rule on the legality of the board’s actions but ordered the board to list agenda items “clearly, honestly and forthrightly.”
A week before Witt was hired, on Dec. 13, students in a class called Sources of Strength, which is part of a national suicide prevention program, asked their teacher what should they know about him as the sole finalist for the superintendent job.
Sara Lee, a longtime teacher at Woodland Park High School, responded, “You should Google him.”
The students did, and they didn’t like what they learned.
They discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in neighboring Jefferson County, supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union. After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy.
Woodland Park students staged a protest against Witt’s hiring on the morning of Dec. 14. An hour later, the administration placed Lee on leave. The district said she was “inappropriate and insensitive” for sharing information about Witt, according to a letter of reprimand she shared with NBC News, and forbade her from talking about the board and its decisions with students.
The following month, the district transferred Lee to an elementary school, even though she’d worked in a high school setting for 25 years. She quit, and got a job at a school that’s 45 minutes away.
At the first board meeting in January with Witt as superintendent, the board voted to adopt the American Birthright social studies curriculum standard. No social studies teachers had been consulted prior to the vote, according to three current employees and an administrator who asked to speak anonymously to protect their employment.
American Birthright materials emphasize patriotism, argue that the federal government should have no authority over public schools and say teachers should not encourage civic engagement, such as registering to vote or petitioning local lawmakers on issues students care about.
“It is terribly important to be a disengaged citizen, and indeed, a disengaged student,” said David Randall, research director at the National Association of Scholars, a conservative organization that created the standards last year.
Randall said American Birthright was modeled off state standards in Massachusetts and Florida. The group received input from dozens of right-wing groups and activists, including the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council and Moms for Liberty. Randall sees it as a bipartisan alternative to coursework that he described as hijacked by liberal concepts. Critics, though, say it’s biased toward the right — for example, it includes Bill Clinton’s impeachment but not Donald Trump’s.
The Colorado State Board of Education rejected American Birthright in October. The National Council for the Social Studies, a professional trade group for educators, issued a rare warning against using it.
“They’re trying to push a certain agenda down to these kids,” Amy Schommer, a mother in Woodland Park, said of the school board’s adoption of American Birthright. “I’m a conservative but I’m not against my kids learning something they disagree with. They’re trying to fix problems that don’t exist here.”
By the time Witt arrived at Gateway Elementary School on March 2 to meet with the staff, emotions were running high.
The teachers had heard that Witt was questioning the need for mental health support for students, and they were worried.
During the meeting, Witt would not commit to keeping the same number of guidance counselors and social workers for the next school year. He said that his focus was on “academic success,” according to the recordings obtained by NBC News.
Staff members tried to explain why it was critical to address students’ emotional issues so that they could learn. One employee mentioned recent familial homicides in the community as an example of the kind of trauma children are facing, including a murder-suicide that left a student dead.
Witt asked if the school had a social worker. The employee replied affirmatively, and then Witt asked, “Did the murder-suicide still occur?” Several people in the room gasped.
That same week, Laura Magnuson, the district’s mental health supervisor, had a call with Witt to press him on reapplying for grants for mental health professionals. She had emailed him to warn that due dates were coming up, and a couple had already passed. If the district did not reapply, it would lose $1.2 million in annual funds that covered the salaries of 15 positions, such as counselors, social workers and career and college readiness specialists.
At the Woodland Park school board’s most recent meeting on April 12, only a handful of the 50 people packed into a conference room under fluorescent lights voiced support for the board.
One was a man who’d brought a red leather-bound Bible with him. He gave a short speech during the public comment session in which he called teachers “insurrectionists” and implored the board to stand up to them to “stop the next Reichstag that is bound to happen in the Woodland Park school district” — referring to an arson attack on the German parliamentary building in 1933 that Nazis blamed on Communists.
But the hot topic that evening was students’ mental health. The board had proposed a resolution declaring opposition to a bill in the Colorado Legislature to offer voluntary annual mental health screenings of students in sixth grade and above.
Amber Hemingson, a sixth-grade teacher and mother, described how supportive colleagues and previous administrators were when her husband died of cancer in 2020, and her family struggled with depression in the aftermath.
Standing at a podium a few feet away from the board members, Hemingson said the district had provided vital counseling services so she could continue working and her children could function in class. She recalled how Lee, the teacher who recently left the district, once found Hemingson’s suicidal daughter crying in the bathroom and comforted her.
“Selfless WPSD employees cared for orphans and a widow in their distress,” she said, trying not to cry. “Will you look after orphans and widows in their distress, or will Christ say to you, as he said in Matthew 25:45, whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.”
Jan 23, 2024 · WPSD Superintendent Ken Witt said the reason for the merge is because of growing enrollment at Merit Academy, a charter school that operates inside a portion of the middle school.
- maggie.bryan@koaa.com
- September 7, 2024
- Multimedia Journalist
Oct 9, 2023 · Over 80 former and current Woodland Park School District teachers and staff publicly released a letter Thursday condemning a spate of controversial policies passed by the school board, defying what they say is an unconstitutional district policy restricting free speech.
Mar 7, 2024 · (WOODLAND PARK, Colo.) — Woodland Park School District (WPSD) announced on March 1 that it would be consolidating elementary schools in the fall of 2024–a decision that was met with...
Mar 4, 2024 · The Woodland Park School District is shutting down Gateway Elementary, and dividing its students between two other schools. The change begins next school year.
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