I haven’t published weekly updates for a couple weeks now…because the school district has been pretty quiet, with all the focus on campaigns for the three out of five school board seats up for grabs. Here’s what’s been going on:

Last week(s):

• Here’s an update on the candidate forums. Note that WPHS were refused their request to hold a forum jointly organized and moderated by WPHS and Merit students.
• Here’s a timeline of events related to all these candidate forums.
• Thursday was a big day for teachers and staff in this district, with 81 of them signing a letter and many speaking out to media at an event at the Ute Pass Cultural Center. They’re doing this knowint’ it’s in violation of district policy and could get them fired (like what happened to Mary Ward last March). More covered at KKTV, Colorado Sun, Colorado Public Radio, KRDO, Fox21
• KKTV looked at school security in local districts. In Colorado Springs, they found districts willing to talk about the training their school security receive…in Woodland Park, they were met with silence and an unwieldiness to share any information.
• The Courier published some new letters to the editor (link, link, link)
• Contrary to what our board says, enrollment in our district is on the decline, and did not see any boost as claimed. Read the numbers here. The data for the current school year won’t be official for a few more weeks, but the latest numbers are already lower than original estimates from August.
• Here’s a summary of the fundraising results for all six candidates. Seth Bryant, Mike Knott, and Keegan Barkley are out-raising the incumbents, despite having a significantly smaller average donation size.
• The Colorado Sun featured an opinion piece about our district, written by Diane Carmen.
• Read this guest column from candidate Mike Knott.

Here’s what’s coming up this week:

• Monday, 10/9, is a busy day in town. There are two candidate forums (incumbents at Columbine at 6PM, challengers at the cultural center at 5:30PM), plus the Academic Awards Night at the High School (6PM).
• The last school board meeting before the election is this Wednesday, 10/11, at 6:00PM (read the agenda here). They’ve decided to hold this meeting in the district conference room, which only seats about 90 people. This means that if the 81 staff members who spoke out against this board want to attend this meeting, they won’t all be able to, there won’t be enough space. The only action item in the agenda is for the board to pick the members of the SAC and DAC committees.