Author Archives: admin

10/8/2023 Weekly Update

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 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.

Candidate Forums Update

So far, all six candidates have not agreed to appear in the same public forum…and we have more to share on that. First though, on Monday 10/2 the Victory Life Church (founded by a member of the board of Andrew Wommack Ministries, and who also teaches at Charis) held their candidate forum at the High School auditorium, moderated by state senator Baisley (who recently wrote a guest column in the Courier praising the three incumbents). Turnout was sparse, and the questions were focused on talking points we’ve heard plenty about already (especially LGBTQ+ issues). This picture was taken shortly after the event started.

Next up with the forums are the competing forums on 10/9…the one organized by the Chamber of Commerce being held at the Cultural Center, and the one organized by Ken Witt’s administration, being held in the Columbine Gymnasium. The gym, you ask? Why not the auditorium? Because the High School is holding its Academic Awards Night in the auditorium, having secured that venue long before the district decided to create their own forum.

Seth Bryant, Keegan Barkley, and Mike Knott all declined the invite to the district forum. Seth emailed expressing interest in that forum and asking if the date for the Columbine forum could be changed. One of their campaign managers reached out the district on behalf of all three candidates, seeking compromise on choice of moderator (the district’s choice, Peter Hilts, has close ties to Brad Miller and has previously acted as a paid consultant for this board). She suggested four possibilities and a willingness to entertain other ideas, but my CORA request yield zero replies to this offer, apart from acknowledgment of receipt. So, with the district not willing to compromise, and likewise not making any requests to the Chamber of Commerce regarding that forum, we’ll be seeing the three incumbents take the stage at Columbine on Monday (starting at 6:00), while Bryant, Barkley, and Knott attend the forum at the cultural center (starting at 5:30). Meanwhile, parents of students receiving academic awards will not be able to attend either forum, they’ll be at the awards night.

Once we get past these dueling forums, the next question becomes the student-led forums. Plural? Yeah. Merit Academy announced one on 10/17, one for which they were originally going to restrict attendance to Merit families only but have since opened up to all (though questions are still limited to those submitted by Merit families). Woodland Park High School students wanted to organize a similar forum, which would make sense as this school board oversees that school, not Merit Academy. However, the Woodland Park School District refused the request of their high school students to hold such an event. The WPHS students even reached out to Merit Academy seek joint participation, asking Merit students to help organize and moderate a joint event. Headmaster Gwynn Pekron refused that request.

Woodland Park teachers speak out against school board

Teachers and community members (and I believe four press cameras) crowded the Ute Pass Cultural Center this evening to protest the actions taken by the Woodland Park School Board and the Superintendent, Ken Witt. 81 staff members signed a letter of protest, which you can read here (page 1, page 2).

KKTV’s article can be read here, along with video of most of the speaking.

The Colorado Sun wrote a very long article about this, read it here

CPR also wrote a great article about this story, read it here

What the teachers did by speaking out appears to be in direct violation of district policy KDDA, and is similar to what Mary Ward was fired for earlier this year. The district is currently involved in a lawsuit brought against them by the WPEA regarding, among other things, that policy. Staff I spoke to expressed uncertainty and even fear about how Ken Witt and the school board will respond to them speaking out like this.

Full video:

The next board meeting (and last scheduled one before the election) is Wednesday, October 11th, 6:00PM.

Letters to the Editor – First Amendment Rights

First Amendment Rights (from the Gazette)

Imagine a local social studies teacher assigns an essay. Why does the First Amendment matter right here? In your town, in your high school, in 2023?

You might coach your child that afternoon over your kitchen counter. The First Amendment flings open the door for participation in our own government. It means your voice (yes, yours) matters. It allows dissent to those in power. So it’s the backbone, Johnny, of democracy.

Without that amendment, you’d explain, protests and marches could be squashed by officials or current trends. Members of certain groups could be punished. But how would you tell him about our local school district?

Twice this spring, Woodland Park School District changed their policy, prohibiting employees from speaking about the district to the press or on social media without the superintendent’s permission.

Violation meant insubordination; evidence in the form of strategic staff terminations supports this grievous reality.

U.S. District Court Judge Gallagher recently indicated portions of the policy “do have problems,” and proposed mediation between the teacher’s union and the school district.

Both parties agreed. Yet a response from the school district warned that dialing back the policy would embolden “dissident” teachers in an election year.

Hmm. Let’s look closer, Johnny. Wouldn’t those supporting the district be heard, too? What would the district want people not to say?

You might explain the employees are taxpayers with rights to articulate their views of this government institution. Some are parents, now with no option to speak on behalf of their kids—despite the board’s purported value of parental rights.

During my own service on the Board of Education, it never occurred to the board to censor employees.

Why would we? We can think critically about opinions that we encounter. We can ask for evidence of statements we question.

We conservatives have been focused on teaching the Constitution. And correctly pushing back against what we see as impingement to free speech. How can we specifically support this constitutional right?

The specific policy reasons they must “create and maintain a dignified and professionally responsible image for the school district.” Perhaps our students would ask us about board members who speak freely without any ability for staff to rebut their views, even with facts. And perhaps image-driven

motivations should concern us less than created space for truth, integrity, and the value and freedom of every voice.

We must ask our kids, “In a democracy, are only those in powerful positions allowed to speak freely?” Johnny, when it is stifled, we must ask: for what purpose?

Carol Greenstreet
Woodland Park

Letters to the Editor – Educators with limited resources

Educators with limited resources (from the Gazette)

Oh, absolutely! Let’s not “reverse course!” In case you missed it, we already did.

Better I guess to “go forward” to a 19th century educational model. Or…let’s all be reactionaries and go back to the early and mid 20th, when “the Greatest generation” and the “Boomers” came of age. The same septuagenarians and octogenarians that succeeded, slammed the door in everyone else’s face, and twisted American culture into what it is today now want to pass the blame for it onto educational institutions. They’ve been doing this since the ‘80s.

Kids’ social media addiction didn’t come from a classroom. They watched their parents. Everyone likes to quote Mark Twain. He also said, “always obey your parents, when they are present.” It’s not educators who send kids to school hungry, mal-clothed, psychologically traumatized, “weak” with “feelings,” or any of a number of other pathologies that would discomfort you to experience even once, much less daily. Yet, always, the educators everywhere do their best to take care of them with limited resources while experiencing ill-intentioned political headwinds.

It’s not a shortcoming of the schools to adapt to the times, especially when they primarily have the kids’ interests at heart. Maybe what you need to get through your coon-skin hat, is that the world beyond your “trespassers will be shot” yard sign has changed and always will.

If you think “counting change” is the metric, just wait until you hear about AI singularity, quantum computing, autonomous robotics, digital surveillance, and more. Teaching kids to fear the future and that they’re already victims of it isn’t helping them.

Andrew Pappadakis
Woodland Park

District enrollment decline data (10/5)

We repeatedly hear David Illingworth and Ken Witt talk about enrollment increases in the district. The only way they can make that claim is if they count Merit Academy kids as NOT being part of our district the year that school opened in the ’21-22 school year. From a legal standpoint that’s correct, but it ignores the fact that Merit Academy was physically located in city limits that first year. So I’m going to count them as part of the district, but I’m including all the data at the end here if you want to interpret it differently.

District-wide enrollment

  • 2021-2022 school year: 2036 students
  • 2022-2023 school year: 2007 students
  • 2023-2024 school year: 1904 students

Note that the 2023-2024 numbers are not yet final and won’t be until closer to the end of October, though are showing a 5% decline in enrollment. I have not included pre-K in these numbers due to the universal pre-K program new to Colorado this year – comparisons to past years are not applicable as a result.

When Merit Academy opened for the 2021-2022 school year, we did see a 2.6% enrollment boost – that school helped fill a niche here, though Covid is also credited with driving people out of cities and to the suburbs. Note though this was before the current board was voted in.

2021-2022 school year (data per the CDE)

1832 students in the district schools, 1749 if you don’t count pre-K. Merit had 287. Total is 2036, or 2119 with pre-K.

2022-2023 school year (data per the CDE)

Total is 2007, or 2122 students with pre-K.

2023-2024 school year (preliminary data from 9/25 district count)

Total is 1904, or 2026 with pre-K.

Campaign Donation Summary (10/4)

Colorado does a great job of managing elections, with so much data made available to the public. Financial data is tracked via TRACER, a great website with comprehensive data on donations and expenses for campaigns. The most recent filing was due yesterday, so with this new data, here are some observations.

The fundraising leaders are clearly the three challengers; here are the fundraising totals from highest to lowest.

  • Seth Bryant: $24,975.65 raised
  • Keegan Barkley: $22,682.38 raised
  • Mike Knott: $22,613.29 raised
  • David Illingworth: $14,971.03 raised
  • Mick Bates: $10,978.24 raised
  • Cassie Kimbrell: $9,622.36 raised

Each side is running as a slate of three candidates, so another useful comparison is the total per slate. In that case, the three incumbents (Bates, Kimbrell, Illingworth) have raised $35,571.63, while the three challengers (Bryant, Knott, Barkley) have raised almost double that, $70,271.32!

The other interesting data point is the average contribution. Despite Bryant, Barkley, and Knott raising nearly twice what the incumbents (Bates, Kimbrell, Illingworth) they’re trying to defeat this election have, their average contribution was around half of the incumbents’. Here are the average contributions, again ranked from highest to lowest:

  • Mick Bates: ~$168 average contribution, from 58 individual supporters
  • David Illingworth: ~$161 average contribution, from 87 individual supporters
  • Cassie Kimbrell: ~$129 average contribution, from 66 individual supporters
  • Seth Bryant: ~$80 average contribution, from 215 individual supporters
  • Keegan Barkley: ~$77 average contribution, from 225 individual supporters
  • Mike Knott: ~$75 average contribution, from 220 individual supporters

(note – these averages are approximate and do not account for donations from the candidate themselves to their election committee)

So in summary, the three challengers (Seth Bryant, Keegan Barkley, and Mike Knott) are raising nearly double the amount of money the incumbents are, and doing so through a large number of smaller donors. The incumbents are relying on a small number of larger donors to fund their campaigns.

There are two Independent Expenditure Committees registered to support the incumbents. The only one reporting donations currently is Teller County for School Choice. They’ve raised $3,700 so far, and while they are not yet reporting any expenses, they do owe the state of Colorado $550 in late fees for not filing their reports on time (that’s 15% of their total raised so far). David Illingworth himself has racked up a large quantity of fines for late filing; we’ll dig into and summarize that at a future date (but it’s all visible on the TRACER website if you want to explore it yourself).

Numerous times, the board has declared the opposition to their actions to be the part of “a small group of radicals”. They’ve downplayed the magnitude of opposition and repeatedly talked about having widespread support. These fundraising stats do not appear to support those claims.

Ballots are mailed out around the middle of this month, and due November 7th. You can track the status of your ballot, from mailing to being accepted, at this website. VOTE!

WPHS Academic Awards Night

The WPHS Academic Awards Night was scheduled for…the same day and time as TWO competing school board candidate forums. I’m told this award night was scheduled long ago, before the forums. Which means, the school board which supposedly prioritized ‘academic success’ chooses to celebrate the academic success of the high school students by skipping the awards ceremony for a campaigning event instead. I suppose this explains why the board is holding their candidate forum in the Columbine gym instead of the high school auditorium!

Of course, the big question is, will Witt be bothered to make an appearance this time (he was a no-show at the May event)?

Timeline of candidate forum controversy

As you’ve probably heard, instead of the one traditional school board candidate forum, there are currently FOUR scheduled, and a FIFTH was in the works until shut down by the school district. They are:

  1. Chamber of Commerce Forum (10/9)
  2. Victory Life Forum (10/2)
  3. Merit Academy Forum (10/17)
  4. Woodland Park school district forum (10/9)
  5. Woodland Park student-led forum (CANCELLED)

I’ve had some help from community members piecing together a timeline of events, and am summarizing it below:

  • September 5th: Chamber Forum invitation sent to incumbents and candidates.
  • September 12th: District Forum Invitation sent to incumbents and candidates.
  • September 13: Email to District by candidates requesting alternative moderators with neutral suggestions. 
  • September 13th: Receipt of email from candidates confirmed by District.
  • September 18th:  Invitation sent from Merit for a Merit community exclusive forum to incumbents and candidates.
  • September 19th: After no response, candidates decline District’s competing forum.
  • September 19th: WPSD HS students invite incumbents and candidates to the student led forum. 
  • September 21st: Candidates respond requesting that WPHS students include Merit students on their moderation team
  • September 22nd: HS students email Gwynn Pekron (Headmaster), Mrs Hanson (Head of Upper School), and Mrs White (secretary) asking if 3-5 Merit students would moderate with them.  
  • September 22nd: Mrs Hanson responds favorably but Ms Perkron politely declines as they are doing their own forum. 
  • September 26: David Illingworth posts a joint statement that the incumbents will attend the District forum, the Church forum and the Merit forum. 
  • September 26: Kevin Burr (HS Principal) informs incumbents and candidates that the HS Student forum has been canceled by the District. 

At this point in time, there is no forum scheduled with all six school board candidates present.

Also scheduled for October 9th, is the WPHS Academics Night at the high school, awarding students for academic excellence (which, it seems is actually not the priority the board claims it is as they scheduled their forum for that evening).

Candidate Forum Update

The candidate forum chaos continues, but with a little clarification. Yesterday, the Woodland Park School District sent this email out to parents:

Dear WPSD Families,

We want to inform you of an upcoming event – the School Board Candidate Forum on Monday, October 9, moderated by Peter Hilts. Mr. Hilts currently serves as Superintendent of District 49 in Falcon, CO, and provides consultation to education leaders around the state. This event offers a valuable opportunity to engage with the candidates running for our school board and gain insights into their visions for our schools.

Event Details:

Date: Monday,  October 9

Time: 6-8 p.m.

Location: Columbine Elementary Gymnasium

During this forum, candidates will address your questions, share their perspectives, and discuss their plans for our school district.

Forum Format:

Questions solicited from the community will be reviewed to identify common themes, and a selection will be made by the moderator, ensuring their appropriateness for a 90-minute forum. The forum will be conducted in three 30-minute segments. Ballot opponents will be asked the same questions during their allotted 30-minute segment. The remaining 30 minutes are reserved for opening and closing statements.

How to Participate:

Your active participation is essential in making this event a success. To submit your questions for the candidates, click here or visit the homepage of our district website at wpsdk12.org. 

We look forward to your presence at the School Board Candidate Forum on  Monday,  October 9 , from 6-8 p.m . 

Thank you!

We learned the moderator selecting questions is Peter Hilts, the CEO of District 49 and a consultant the WPSD board hired to lead their retreat in Black Forest in the spring of last year. He helped Ken Witt and Brad Miller start up Colorado Digital BOCES (later becoming ERBOCES), and has worked with Brad Miller quite a bit apart from that, including in his current role at D49 where Brad Miller is the attorney (if you’re new to all this, Ken Witt is the Woodland Park superintendent, and Brad Miller was brought in by our current board to be our attorney).

Of course, it’s worth noting that this district candidate forum is at the same date and time as the one organized by the Chamber of Commerce (to be held in the Ute Pass Cultural Center). The district has not answered questions about why they chose this date/time, though it seems clear from their supporters on social media that they did not approve of the moderator of the Chamber event. Questions for the chamber event are drafted by a non-partisan group of Chamber members, and the audience is allowed to submit questions (direct attacks will not be allowed), so the moderator seems to have less influence here than at the district event (the moderator will not edit any questions).

The three challengers all posted statements about this to their Facebook pages today:

I am confirming my attendance at The Greater Woodland Park Chamber of Commerce candidate forum on October 9, 2023.

All candidates were asked to save the date of this forum back in June.

Two days after we received our official invite we were informed the district scheduled their own forum with a hand picked moderator on the same day and time.

Keegan Barkley, Seth Bryant and I reached out to the district in good faith to see if we could agree on a moderator for their forum but did not receive even a courtesy response. Total crickets from the incumbents.

I hope they will reconsider and attend this important event for our community.

Mike Knott

…

Disappointed but not surprised.

Disappointed in the decision to intentionally schedule a conflicting candidate forum with a moderator who is not a stakeholder in our community, but not surprised with the track record the district leadership has placing politics and personal agendas above the best interests of students and families in Woodland Park School District. Deliberately creating conflict instead of trying to negotiate or collaborate in the best interest of the community is not good leadership, it is not good public service.

In an effort to try and give the community a forum that would have all six candidates I requested a date change, I was met with silence. In an effort to get a moderator who understood the complexities of our community, I asked for an impartial local conservative and provided names for consideration, again silence. It was only after officially declining did the district publicize the event. I think it is shameful to use a position of power to deprive the community of the opportunity to compare and contrast the candidates.

I look forward to participating in a long-standing Chamber of Commerce forum for the elected officials of our community. My campaign was, as was the district and other candidates, notified in June to reserve the date. We confirmed upon receipt of my invitation and I will be honoring my commitment. I look forward to seeing you there.

Seth Bryant

…

I am excited to announce that I will be participating in the upcoming Chamber candidates forum! This is an incredible opportunity for the community to hear our plan for the future and have your remaining questions answered.

It is disheartening that the incumbents decided to hold their own forum at the same date and time, despite knowing about the Chamber event since this summer.

We reached out to the incumbents in an attempt to create one event where all 6 candidates could come together, but they were unwilling to even respond.

This is just another example of this board not listening to the will of the people and catering to their own personal agenda. We deserve better from our elected officials and it is time for a change!

True leadership and public service involves open and respectful dialogue. It is about working together for the betterment of our schools and community.

I am committed to being a school board member who listens, engages, and works tirelessly to represent YOUR interests. Together we can bring about the change Woodland Park actually needs!

Keegan Barkley

This is yet another example of how this current school board has fostered division in this community rather than unity and healing. If even one of those three gets reelected this November, we can see exactly what we’ll get…more of the same. Voters have a choice.