As this email shows, board director Sue Patterson is trying to start a student club at our high school (yeah, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be started by actual students), a branch of the national organization Turning Point USA. It’s a pretty extreme-right political movement working to indoctrinate kids in the new version of ‘conservative’ political ideals. Oddly, they refer to themselves as a ‘grassroots‘ effort, though NBC reported they brought in around $55 million in revenue in fiscal year 2020.
Category Archives: News
WPSD decides to opt in to Colorado Free Lunch program
Last November, voters in Colorado passed proposition FF, which was a tax on high earners (above $300k) to fund a statewide free lunch program for public school students. Ken Witt expressed his opposition to this program in discussion with teachers at the beginning of March, but that just mobilized the public to speak out in support of this program. The pressure on the district appears to have worked…they announced that Woodland Park schools will opt in to the free lunch program! A great victory for the kids.
Parents protesting ‘critical race theory’ identify a new target: Mental health programs
As school districts struggle to address accusations that administrators are indoctrinating students in progressive ideas about race, gender and sexuality, the same parents and activists making the claims have begun targeting school initiatives centered on students’ mental health and emotional well-being.
— Read on www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parents-protesting-critical-race-theory-identify-new-target-mental-hea-rcna4991
Witt modifies Policy GDQA – Support Staff Reduction in Force
Earlier in March, interim Superintendent Ken Witt modified administrative policy GDQA, ‘Support Staff Reduction in Force’. I’m not sure if there’s been any notice to staff of these changes; so far we’ve just depended on sharp-eyed team members. I’ll post the original and modified below, but here are the changes I found:
- Reduction in Force section
- Item 2, removed “however, the employee with the last employment date within a classification (i.e., teacher assistant, custodian, secretary, etc.) will be the first to be cancelled.”
- Item 3, changed notice from 30 days to 14. Removed “The Board will forward a list of those employees being reduced to the Classified Association on the same date that the notice of cancellation was sent to the employee.”, added “The employee may be instructed not to return to work if the Superintendent, or designee, deem it in the best interests of the District.”
- Recall section
- Very minor rewording of header
- Item 1, removed “In the best interest
sof the District, the Superintendent or designee will recall support staff employees from the list based on seniority.”, and added “When deemed in the best interest of the District, the Superintendent or designee may recall support staff employees from the list.” Note the change in language from ‘will‘ to ‘may‘. - Item 2, changed from 2 years to 1 year.
- Item 3, removed “When a job opening occurs within the District, the former employee eligible for re-employment according to the recall list will receive written notice sent to the last known address by certified letter. The former employee must respond within five (5) days of receiving such notice.”, added “It is the responsibility of the former employees to maintain awareness of when a job opening is posted by the District for which the employee is qualified to apply.”
https://z2.ctspublish.com/casb/browse/woodland-casb/woodland/z20000216
Woodland Park School District expands bus route for Merit Academy students | KRDO
Woodland Park School District (WPSD) is now offering students at Merit Academy the same district school bus transportation offered to all other WPSD schools.
— Read on krdo.com/top-stories/2023/03/21/woodland-park-school-district-expands-bus-route-for-merit-academy-students/
We’ve submitted a CORA request to learn to what extent Merit will be paying for this service.
The WPSD exodus begins
We’ve feared what impact this board, and especially interim superintendent Ken Witt, would have on staff in the Woodland Park School District RE-2. Last year, we saw the beginnings of that…and this year, we need to call this what it is: a mass exodus of instructional talent leaving this district.
Having a student in the High School here I’m a bit biased and focused on that school, so forgive me that, but let’s talk about that High School. Normally, staff turnover would be no more than 5%. We’re in mid March, and already, turnover is at 25% (where will we end up by summer?). The overwhelming majority of those leaving mention the board and interim superintendent are creating an untenable circumstance for them to continue. It is possible that seven different AP courses are affected by these resignations…replacement teachers for those are not straightforward and will require extra training ($$ for the AP side of things, and the college MA degrees that would yield concurrent and dual credit for students).
How will the district attract qualified teachers to fill these open positions? How many teachers will want to accept a position in a school district that is, by anyone’s measure, chaotic and unsettled (to put it mildly)? The board states that one of their core beliefs is, “Developing professional educators that engage and inspire students through positive ethical leadership.” They are not developing professional educators…they are driving them out.
This school board and superintendent have massively failed at their most important task, managing the public schools to foster a safe, stable place of learning for our students.
Baby We Were Born for War: To Dominionist Christian Groups, No Election is Too Small — and Colorado is Just the Beginning | Religion Dispatches
What had been, until recently, sleepy school board races across the state and the country, this year became political hot potatoes. The Colorado media generally cast these contests as battles between conservative groups and teachers unions, and that the results were mixed. But lost in this framing was the quiet electoral pilot project of the Truth and Liberty Coalition, the other arms of Wommack’s political and educational empire—and their out-of-state partner, the Texas-based Wallbuilders organization.
— Read on religiondispatches.org/baby-we-were-born-for-war-to-dominionist-christian-group-no-election-is-too-small-and-colorado-is-just-the-beginning/
Liberals push back on Republican activism in school board elections
“There’s going to be more book bans, there’s going to be a broader pushback and they’re going to demonize LGBTQ-plus kids more than they already have,” Cousins said. “It’s an absolute right-wing radicalization of public education, and their mission is to make public education fail.”
— Read on www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-republicans-school-board-elections-parents-rcna52698
Here in Colorado, this right-wing effort is led by graduates of the Leadership Program of the Rockies like Brad Miller, Ted Mische, Bob Schaffer, Curt Grina, and Ken Witt.
Woodland Park School board operating in the shadows
The Washington Post’s famous tagline is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’, and those watching events in Woodland Park this last year or so should have a good idea of what they mean. We have a school board that operates in the shadows, making decisions outside of board meetings and doing their best to stay out of the public eye. The result, is a school district in turmoil under the rule of an autocratic interim superintendent Ken Witt, a complicit board of education, and behind it all, in the deepest of shadows, figures like Brad Miller and other alumni from the Leadership Program of the Rockies attempting to remake school districts across the state.
There’s no shortage of violations of their own governing policies they each swore to uphold. Our last superintendent, Dr. Mathew Neal, pushed back to try to maintain some order, and was cut loose as a result. Most recently, Ken Witt modified the district’s contract with charter school Merit Academy, in apparent violation of that same contract.
The Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) is designed to enforce at least some level of transparency in state government. Both supporters and detractors of this school board have taken advantage of CORA to learn more about what’s been going on in our district. As a result, we’ve witnessed some board members use district email less, and when we’ve shown them to use their personal email address for district business, they refuse to comply with CORA requests for district emails from that account. One CORA request from December was refused more than once, and a new lawsuit has been brought against the district for this…here’s an excerpt from that court filing:
Around a week ago, Witt deemed ‘unnecessary’ the IT position responsible for managing CORA requests submitted to the district. CORA results were already occasionally late…and since then, the district has failed to provide results in the timeframe explicitly required under Colorado Law (3 days for a single document, up to 10 for anything else). Additionally, after submitting a new CORA request, the district no longer acknowledges the submission like it had previously. These are disappearing into a black hole. The district knows that the CORA law doesn’t have any penalties for non-compliance, so we’re witnessing them exploiting this loophole to hide information from the public.
We’ve learned that at least recently (we don’t know when this started), Brad Miller will, instead of redacting a particular document, withhold it from the CORA results entirely, with no notification to the requestor. We’ve since learned that if we specifically ask about this, we’ll be told the number of documents withheld, but these are never provided to us, not even in heavily redacted form.
The CORA lawsuit above showed another issue with our district – violations of Colorado Open Meetings Law (OML). Designed to ensure transparency in governance and enable public oversight of elected officials, it prohibits (for a local body) three or more board members from meeting without notifying the public at least 24 hours in advance. The district violated OML first in January of 2022, for which a preliminary injunction was granted. That particular court case was resolved last November when the judge said the district cured the previous violations in their actions in an April meeting of that year. In that link above, Director Illingworth described the suit as ‘political’, though the board’s violation the following month (reference the CORA lawsuit above) casts question on that statement.
In the January 25th board meeting, the board interviewed three candidates to occupy the vacant board director seat. With three good candidates speaking that night, one might have expected some deliberation amongst the board members. Instead, as the video below shows, there was none…the board had obviously already discussed this, outside of board meetings, and made their decision even before they interviewed the board candidates!
In a March meeting, Ken Witt explained how he uses one on one or one on two meetings to discuss issues with the board, or as he put it, to ‘share ideas.’ For example, the picture here shows Witt and Patterson meeting for breakfast one morning. That in itself might be normal, but when you look at the decisions being made without zero public board discussion (like the sixth grade middle school decision), it’s clear that decisions ARE being made through this serial communication process (which we believe is technically legal in Colorado, for now, but in violation of the spirit of the OML).
Witt explained this process himself to teachers recently:
Last but certainly not least, is the the board and Witt’s effort to clamp down on freedom of speech, initially even prohibiting teachers from using social media (later backtracking on that slightly). One staff member was fired, read more about it here.
Board President David Rusterholtz frequently speaks of transparency. Their actions speak louder than those words of his.
An (unofficial) update on the Middle School partitioning plans
Yesterday, interim superintendent Ken Witt toured the Middle School after school hours with administration staff from both the Middle School and Merit, looking at how the space would be re-divided to give Merit more room. Today, we received this anonymous update:
I have it on good authority that merit is taking over the severe special needs room with their required by law apartment set up. They will also get a staff bathroom, a boys bathroom, conference room(used for students hearing and speech needs, a book room and 4 6th grade classrooms. In order to stay in compliance they will have to rebuild the required by law special needs facilities in a different location. This will be major construction and extremely costly. This board can turn down over a million dollars in grants so im sure we can afford more construction costs. The second year in a row teachers will have to box up and move theor entire classroom. As of now, the enrichment spaces will stay in tact though merit wants access to the ensemble room. In addition they have applied for a contract with chartwells to be able to conduct linch service but they want to share the commons in order to do this. All of these changes are unnecessary, beyond costly and detrimental to the safety and well being of the middle school students. Witt refuses to meet with parents about concerns unless it is documented in writing through email. If you disagree with these decisions then please email him directly!
Some bonus info: academic successes were presented at the dac meeting showing specific test scores and academic measurements in which merit scored below wpms across the board. Considering this regime is academic focused, youd think they would present some results to back up theor interventions. Rather they just shit all over the districts successes while taking away all the amazing people and programs that got the district to where it is. One of the only districts to raise academic success through the pandemic in the region and state. But lets change everything to match a school model that is producing worse results. Ok rant over but this is egregious at best.
anonymous
Merit’s in-person enrollment is currently 289 or 292, depending on which source you listen to, in a space that can handle up to 471 students (but let’s be fair, the actual usable number would be a quite a bit less). How is Witt justifying this change? And why will the district be paying for this? This decreases funding available for our traditional public schools…WHY?
You can email Ken Witt at kwitt@wpsdk12.org.