Category Archives: CORA requests

Ken Witt’s contract details

In the interest of transparency, we wanted to make available Ken Witt’s contract with the district, and to summarize some key points here.

  • Salary: $155k (on an annual basis) from our district (Neal was compensated at $152k)
  • Cell phone allowance: $100 per month
  • Auto allowance: $500 per month
  • 15 days of paid vacation per year
  • Termination without cause requires 120 days advance notice and financial compensation equivalent to four months of base salary.
  • Contract allows Witt to continue to work as Executive Director of ERBOCES.
  • $4000 annually provided for professional growth/development

In addition to Witt’s contract with Woodland Park RE-2, his contract with ERBOCES remains in effect. Under the terms of that contract, Witt receives:

  • Salary: $155k (annual) plus up to 12% bonus (his bonus paid in May 2022 was $15,500).
  • Auto allowance: $500 per month
  • Cell phone to be provided at ERBOCES’ cost
  • 22 days of paid vacation per year, plus 10 days of paid sick leave per year
  • Termination without cause requires 30 days advance notice and financial compensation equivalent to 90 days.
  • $2400 annually provided for professional growth/development

So combined, taxpayers are paying Witt:

  • $310k annual salary, plus a bonus of up to $18,600
  • Free cell phone, plus $100 a month
  • $1000 monthly auto allowance
  • $6400 for professional growth/development
  • 37 paid vacation days per year (though it’s not really 37 total days, as it’s combined between two full time jobs…), plus 10 sick days

Sources:

Ken Witt uses American Birthright standard to censor class

As previously discussed here and elsewhere, The Woodland Park school district recently removed the book, “Between the World and Me” from the high school election course, “Civil Disobedience.”

This action was taken after a resident, Jameson Dion, filed a complaint about this material on January 7. The district has a very clear policy for review of instructional material, policy KEC, and did not follow it in this case. Rather than form an appropriate review committee, Witt made a unilateral decision (which you can read here) to remove the book from the class on January 22.

So this is what we’ve come to. A single man making the decisions of what should and should not be used by teachers as instructional materials in class, disregarding policy and debate.

Update on Merit contract status

Since the board isn’t updating us on this process, I’m learning what I can via CORA requests. The latest is that Brad Miller sent a draft of the contract with Merit to another attorney after a brief one week review with Gustafson, Neal, and the outside consultant Tom Weston. This draft contract was sent on February 22, along with a document outlining benchmarks (source). The other attorney is Barry Arrington (arringtonpc.com), the person who signed the MOU on behalf of Merit (so we can assume he’s their legal counsel in this matter). My CORA request was focused on conversations between Gustafson and the Weston, and those conversations really dropped off after the draft contract was sent. So, I’ll need to submit a different CORA request to learn what’s been happening since.

If you’d like to read the results of that CORA request detailing talks between Gustafson and Weston, you can find all the documents here.

CORA request – Illingworth requesting ‘list’ from Neal

On January 29, 2022, David Illingworth sent Dr. Neal and email where he requested
that Dr. Neal “use your best judgement in preparing a list of positions in which a change in personnel
would be beneficial to our kids, and would likewise help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather
than conflict.”

A CORA request on 3/7/2022 for more information on whether such a list was ever created, yielded this response:

Findings: Per Superintendent Dr. Mathew Neal – no list was ever created, nor has a list been received by the Superintendent. No further emails were found.

(source document)

Analysis – this is encouraging, though it is unknown if there have been verbal discussions regarding this topic, if people may have been named outside of an official list.

Speculation – Illingworth has been a vocal critic of the WPEA union, especially in last night’s board meeting. However, he previously advocated chartering Merit as the priority along with a ‘flood zone’ tactic of other issues to reduce the effectiveness of opponents (read source email here). Considering how strong his anti-union rhetoric was in last night’s board meeting (see video, part 1), is this all just an attempted distraction from his admitted top priority of Merit Academy? I think this very likely.

CORA request – Merit MOU

We have obtained a copy of the MOU with Merit, and it can be viewed here.

Regarding people hired to help with this process, the response about a CSI liaison is here. While not technically a CSI liaison, an outside consultant has been hired and a recent invoice can be viewed here ($2k). The invoice itself is not a lot of money, but the items billed for do shed some light on the overall timeline here.