The Woodland Park school board, and interim superintendent Ken Witt, have made several moves to clamp down on the speech of teachers and other staff in the district.

First was last December…the board blamed Sara Lee, a teacher at the High School, for the student-led protests. After placing her on administrative leave for about a month, they finally just cut her position at the highs school and moved her to Gateway Elementary (but then had to hire someone to do the position she was cut from…).

In January, the board adopted the American Birthright Standards. The Colorado Sun reached out to social studies teachers to learn more about this; one Middle School teacher asked district administration if it’d be OK if he talked to the Sun about this and Witt used policy KDDA to prevent him from doing so. Later, Witt used the newly adopted American Birthright standards to ban a book from a high school elective class.

What does policy KDDA say? Or rather, what did it say in January (it later changed…)? Here’s the January copy:

Also in January, the board reduced the public comment section in regular board meetings from 60 minutes, to 30 minutes.

Next up was the news about moving sixth grade to the elementary schools. After the middle school teachers protested this by staging a sick day protest, following by a massive public protest the following morning, Witt took charge. First, he fired a Middle School staff member, again citing policy KDDA and seeming to point blame at her for the sick day protest:

Next, Witt sent an email to Middle School staff warning of further retaliation if staff were to do something like this again:

Finally, we received word that policy KDDA had been updated…or rather, expanded, to silence teachers from saying just about anything about the district. Here’s the latest copy (we’re not sure if the 2/28/23 revision date is accurate or was back-dated; no announcement of this policy change was made):

So if a teacher has a kid in the district…they can’t talk to the press about their own kid even.

Is this legal? There are, naturally, differing opinions on this topic. If you read about the Supreme Court’s decision in Pickering v. Board of Education, though it really makes this seem like an unconstitutional move on the part of the board and Witt. The Brechner Center studies this issue more in this link. It’ll be interesting to see if our board ends up in the courts over all this.