FFRF is strongly urging the board to reject the adoption of American Birthright standards and uphold its duty to provide standards grounded in current scholarship, reflect best practices in social studies education and be inclusive for all student backgrounds and ability levels, as recommended by experts such as the National Council for the Social Studies.
“Public schools have a duty to ensure that instructional materials do not promote a particular religious viewpoint,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes.
Social studies standards that falsely teach that Christian history and Christian traditions are inherently American and/or that religion makes up the fabric of ethics and morality (under the guise of secular history and moral philosophy) blatantly promote Christianity and violate the rights of district students and parents.
This school board election campaign is heating up on social media, with collaboration becoming more and more apparent. Take this example from a recent Facebook thread on the Teller County Community Page. Local SAC member Heather Scholz dove into the debate about mask mandates in schools, and posted this screenshot…which happened to catch Katie Illingworth (David Illingworth’s wife) texting her with advice on making this an entirely new message thread instead of just a reply on September 9th:
This has been a recent topic of debate…Dave Illingworth posted this on his campaign page on Facebook:
Given this, it wasn’t surprising to see Dave’s wife Katie step in to help guide this conversation elsewhere on social media.
What appears normal on the surface though, has one serious problem.
In July, Heather Scholz formed an Independent Expenditure (IE) committee called “Teller County for School Choice”, with the stated purpose of:
TO UPHOLD EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM IN TELLER COUNTY’S WOODLAND PARK RE-2 SCHOOL DISTRICT, OUR COMMITTEE ENDORSES SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATES WHO PRIORITIZE SCHOOL CHOICE.
After September 1st, it is illegal for any candidate or candidate commitee for public office to collaborate with an IE. In this Facebook thread, Katie Illingworth attempted to collaborate with Heather Scholz on messaging regarding mask mandates in the district, an issue her husband was promoting in his own Facebook page. Yes, in this case it’s Dave’s wife collaborating and not Dave himself, but the question then becomes, is his wife working on his campaign in any way? As someone who has shown a keen interest in our school district, being one of Merit Academy’s co-founders and later a Merit Academy board member, it is unreasonable to expect she would not be a participant in her own husband’s re-election effort. There’s a chance this level of collaboration *might* be OK…but if it can be influencing any expenditures of that IE (advertising messages, etc), it would definitely not be OK.
As a side note, Heather’s IE is currently delinquent, having not filed their 9/5/2023 report of donations and expenditures. She’s being assessed a penalty of $50 per day for this.
She may perhaps find some success in requesting a waiver of fees…David Illingworth himself has faced fees multiple times for filing his paperwork late (though his requests for waivers were typically denied). Go dig around the Tracer website if you want to learn more (search for either ‘candidate’ and then Illingworth, or choose ‘committee’ and then ‘Teller County for School Choice’.
In their latest campaign expense filings, both David Illingworth and Mick Bates list a $250 expense to Crimson Central Services in Colorado Springs, for “Canvassing Services” (you can find all this info on TRACER). Let’s dig deeper. Here’s a list of all election campaigns that had similar expenses with that company for last month:
Six expenses of the same amount for various school board campaigns in different cities…it seems likely these are for the same purpose. We at first thought this was for door knocking, as that’s the traditional definition. However, those two Canon City BOE candidates list a different purpose for their $250 expenses…one lists ‘software expense’, the other lists ‘voter data’. If you look at the past history of this particular company, they have a very large number of expenses of $1,250 for consulting and data. It seems most likely that Bates and Illingworth are paying Crimson Central Services for voter data, which is a normal thing for a candidate to seek out anyway.
Who is Crimson Central Services?
Crimson Central Services is an LLC filed in Wyoming – a state which allows LLC owners to mask the identity of their owners. But the records on Tracer list business addresses, and 6140 South Gun Club Road, Unit K6-354 in Aurora, a UPS store where I presume the 354 is a mailbox number. So, bit of a dead end there. These days though, their address is listed as 100 East Saint Vrain Stree, unit #105, in Colorado Springs. Who else is at that address? Victor’s Canvassing.
Now, Victor’s Canvassing is not a company I’d expect you to have heard of. However, they identified themselves when handing out this flyer to teachers’ homes:
The return address on that flyer (some were mailed, some delivered in person by Victor’s Canvassing) lists the Freedom Foundation in Washington…a right-wing group known for attacking unions and public education (link1, link2, link3, link4, link5…you get the idea). So, no surprise to see them involved here, and not surprising to see Bates and Illingworth using a similar canvassing company as the Freedom Foundation.
But we’re not quite done digging! Who is behind Victor’s Canvassing? The Chief Operating Officer is Daniel Fenlason:
So, in summary – Bates and Illingworth appear to be using the services of a canvassing company that’s closely linked to the Truth and Liberty Coalition and Andrew Wommack, as well as the Freedom Foundation.
I want to believe Seth Bryant but his words do not ring true. Calling the Teachers Union support he, Barkley and Knott received in his column a “website login” while leaving out the Teachers Union also supplied him and the other candidates “platform vans to perform canvassing and communications scoping” is a big omission. Who helped him knock on doors in those Teacher Union supplied vans?
The Teacher Unions in this country kept our children out of school during Covid 19, and wasted years of their education on indoctrination efforts.
They’re one organization I would not want support from if I were running for school board as a conservative, but he and the other 2 have accepted their help anyhow.
Marvin Logan, Woodland Park
This highlights just how crazy social media is these days, especially the online platform Nextdoor, where Marvin and other have been quite vocal in their anti-union rhetoric.
But to the point – this is FALSE. ‘VAN’ is the computer system the candidates were given access to, a voter database that helps them more efficiently target their outreach efforts like door to door canvassing. NOT this:
With the sixth graders being moved from the Middle School building to the three elementary schools, some of us were wondering, what will be done to give them access to library books in these new locations? We’ve learned a bit here so thought it’s worth sharing.
Columbine – 6th grade students were given the opportunity to create a 6th grade library wishlist last year. [Columbine staff] used their list as well as several 6th grade book lists, including one from the National Library Association to create a higher level library. 80% of the books in the 6th classroom are new this year and only available to 6th graders.
Gateway – parents were given the chance to sign a permission slip to allow their sixth graders to walk (as a group) to the public library every other Friday to check out books there.
Summit – we have not heard of the plan there.
It’s great that something is being done though allowing the kids to peruse the shelves of the public library, while simultaneously creating a ‘controversial topics’ section in the high school library requiring specific parental approval to check out, is odd.
Great TikTok video that talks about what’s going on with the attack on public education at a national level…and it helps explain many of the actions in the Woodland Park school district:
As you can see, all schools ranked as ‘performance plan‘ (the only higher level is ‘distinction plan’), except for Merit Academy which saw its score knocked down one level to ‘improvement plan‘ due to their lower test participation rates. This highlights the issue that while test scores are important, if a significant number of students aren’t taking those tests, it becomes more difficult to truly judge the performance of a school.
The Gideons were handing out copies of the New Testament on sidewalks outside of our schools yesterday. Legal, but pretty creepy for strangers to be giving stuff to our kids, and inappropriate for any religion to be pushing itself on our children like this. Imagine if copies of the Koran were being given to kids in this town?
The Woodland Park school district back to school night is traditionally a student-focused time, where parents and kids get to meet their teachers and check out the schools before school starts a couple days later. While that was still the schools’ focus, the three school board incumbents – Mick Bates, Cassie Kimbrell, and David Illingworth – took advantage of this opportunity to campaign for re-election this fall. They made the rounds at each of the district schools, working the crowds (the two board members NOT up for re-election were not seen at the schools). The three challenging these incumbents were sighted at the schools where their children attend, but not the others.
Traditionally, the district has declared a Work Session whenever three or more board members gather at a school, as this would potentially be a violation of Open Meetings Law if they discuss district business. No such declaration was made this time though.
When they appeared at Merit the previous Friday, they even met with the two Deans of that school…and Illingworth’s Facebook post made it clear they were there acting as board members in support of Merit. So, it was communicated not as a campaigning event, but as board members meeting with the Denas to show their support (ie, district business). Here’s the post, along with a picture of them posing with the two Deans:
On August 22nd, 2023, Ken Witt and Brad Miller addressed the district staff in the annual convocation. Ken Witt talked about updates to benefits, PACE, universal pre-K, their partnership with Mindsight (counseling company), SROs and security, and introduced his administrative staff. At timestamp 14:30 in the audio recording below, he handed it off toe Ariel Elliott, regional director of PACE (Professional Association of Colorado Educators), to discuss that program.
Brad Miller takes the mic at about 25:15. He talked first about policy KDDA (which the district is being sued over). He says the point of it was simple things like if there’s a snow day, they didn’t want misinformation going around about whether school was canceled (note that KDDA was cited when Witt fired a staff member last spring).
The most important part to listen to starts at 35:06, where Miller outlines the district’s new policy for ‘students who want to express or identify their gender differently than what they were born.’ He acknowledges Colorado law on the matter and says they’ll comply (he calls it ‘unavoidable law’), but it won’t be a slam-dunk for kids who fall into this category. Before the school will respect the kids’ wishes, administration will hold a meeting with the parents of that kid because, as Brad Miller put it 37:50 into this audio recording, “it’s the parents’ decision to make” (not the kids?!). I’ve heard too many stories about kids in families where they’re not free to talk about such things…I worry for the mental health and safety of kids that are facing these conversations.
