The May 10th Woodland Park RE-2 school board meeting was absolutely crazy. With schools earlier being on ‘shelter in place’ status due to a tornado warning (later downgraded to a tornado watch), a record crowd still turned up for this meeting. An hour ahead of the meeting’s 6PM start time, there was already an estimated 90 people in line (doors typically open 30 minutes prior)! I showed up just after 5:00, found some friends, and we very quickly ascertained what was going on. The common thread with the people we saw and talked to was a connection with Charis Bible school. We all gathered in a huge line, waiting in the rain for the doors to open.

But I need to take a step back…why the fuss? We knew that in this meeting, the board would vote to extend Ken Witt’s contract for another year, and change his job title from Interim Superintendent to Superintendent. The crowd was not there for that though…the board had caught wind that NBC Nightly News was sending a camera and crew to cover this meeting. A Fox21 reporter was told that a board member had told the Charis students to come (by the time of the meeting, I’d estimate about 200 people had showed up). That NBC camera crew was joined by cameras and reporters from two local TV stations, KOAA and Fox21 (follow those links for their stories of the evening).

What followed was…unprecedented for this small town.

So, the board knew to expect a crowd. The main conference room, the planned location for this meeting, had a 90 person capacity. In the past, they’d often open up overflow rooms, other conference rooms in the same office, where those people watched the livestream on TV. Larger past meetings have been held in the Middle School commons room, or the High School auditorium (which is the building adjoining the district offices hosting this meeting).

Given the anticipated record crowd, what would you expect the WPSD RE-2 board of education to do? This board chose to handle that crowd by, for the first time ever, reducing capacity and limiting participation to only the 90 people that could fit in the main conference room. Once those people had entered the building, the doors were locked with around a hundred people waiting outside in the rain.

While refusing to open the overflow rooms, move to the adjacent auditorium, or even reschedule the meeting, the board allowed people outside to sign up for public comment, though those people still had to wait outside to see if their names would be called (this board chose to limit public comment to 3 minutes per person which is fine, but only 30 minutes total, so typically a LOT of people do not get a chance to speak). Sometime around the middle of public comment, the board opened the doors to the high school for people who wanted to seek shelter from the rain in there (it’s still not clear why we couldn’t enter one of the vacant other conference rooms in the district office).

The meeting moved into executive session at the end; this is done in private and most of the audience shuffled out. At that point, myself and other parents were able to escape the rain and go inside to await the board’s return from executive session (they need to return to the conference room to officially adjourn the meeting). We had the chance for a brief interaction with board president Rusterholtz after the meeting (the others all fled immediately after the meeting was adjourned, none of them would talk to us).

The board put on a show for the cameras…rants about socialism, capitalism, prayer, guns, etc. They passed a resolution about economic freedom, and of course approved Witt’s contract.

At the 26:55 mark, you can hear Rusterholtz ask Kelly how many people signed up, she said 30 had. 9 were given the chance to speak and be heard.