A judge Wednesday ordered the Woodland Park School District to disclose video surveillance footage showing three school board members talking with a candidate for superintendent after a public meeting last December.
Teller County District Court Judge Scott Sells said he was not persuaded by the school district’s argument that the recordings either aren’t public records as defined by the Colorado Open Records Act or could lawfully be withheld under CORA’s discretionary exception for records revealing “specialized details … of security arrangements or investigations.”
— Read on coloradofoic.org/judge-orders-release-of-woodland-park-school-district-surveillance-footage-to-parent/
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.
We discovered that the contract with Merit was amended to take more money from the public schools, shifting the cost of the charter liaison from Merit to the district.
We talked about Aaron Salt, who we believe the district is hiring to a senior role in the administration.
Our network passed along details of the plan being worked out to give Merit more space in the Middle School once sixth grade is kicked out after this school year.
To help answer the question of what impact Witt’s refusal of grant money will have, we showed a presentation from December of 2021 talking about exactly what that grant money is used for.
There’s a special board meeting this Wednesday, 6:00 (agenda). No public comment.
This week is when schools typically find out what their staffing allowance is for the next year and can start figuring which positions need to be cut, and which need to be filled.
There’s been a rumor floating around that seems to be true – so take this for what it is, an confirmed rumor at this point – but it looks like Ken Witt is hiring Aaron Salt into a senior level position in the district. I’ve had more than one source confirm this, though there has been no district announcement yet. It’s not clear if that will be a new COO position, or the the existing vacancy created by Del Garrick’s departure (Executive Director of Business Operations). But let’s ignore the title for a minute…who is Aaron Salt?
Let’s start with his LinkedIn Bio. He labels himself as a consultant who will ‘help you solve employee turnover problems.’ Sadly, that seems applicable to our district (though I don’t think we need a consultant to tell us how to retain employees here).
Salt goes on to describe his focus on what I think we could summarize as restructuring an organization. All this is sounding very business like and potentially even beneficial to any organization. But what motivates him…what is his focus? Let’s look at his volunteer work to gain some insight there.
Salt believes in parent choice, and that “what and how our students are taught” will determine the direction of the company. He was a founding board member for New Summit Charter Academy, and served as board chair until September 2021 (link).
About a year ago, in February of 2022, Salt was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) and is currently the president of that board. He was previously rejected due to not getting two thirds of the vote, but the new city council voted him in 6-3.
Salt told Council last fall, according to The Gazette, that he wanted to remove certain materials from the juvenile and children’s sections that he found objectionable.
Days after the vote on Salt, PPLD Chief Librarian and CEO John Spears resigned, and gave this statement to local media:
“The process surrounding how these appointments occurred was extremely contentious and pointed to the changes that are happening in our community such as the recent school board elections. It is my hope that the values that define a library such as freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech will continue to be honored. I look forward to moving to a community where they are not under threat.”
Councilor Nancy Henjum called the appointments “concerning” and may undermine the library’s core values of accessibility, inclusivity and First Amendment protections, she said.
In 2021, in a school board election campaign that saw dramatic increases in ‘dark money’ donations, voters elected Salt to the District 20 (D20) school board. That link above mentions that, “Salt is against mandatory masks and vaccines, hiring an equity director, and CRT and other anti-american rhetoric/indoctrination.” In the spring of 2022, Salt attended the evangelical Christian ‘Hold the Line’ event in Colorado Springs. From an article linked to below:
Someone who attended the “Hold The Line” event, who wishes to remain anonymous, provided 13 Investigates with a video of what was said on stage. The video shows Salt being introduced as an Academy School District 20 Board Director before speaking, making it clear who he is in the community.
In the video, Salt described his time on the D20 board as a fight to represent his own values and asked people to pray for board members trying to hold onto Christian values.
“This is a spiritual battle,” Salt said. “Make sure that we’re covered in fairness, we go into fight for you and for your children.”
A Bible and newspaper in every house, a good school in every district – all studied and appreciated as they merit – are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty
Benjamin Franklin
And naturally…Aaron Salt is connected to Brad Miller, in this case through (at a minimum) their shared time at New Summit Charter Academy.
Not yet published on this website as we’re getting more details:
Ken Witt fired Logan (IT) and Morgan (payroll) from district staff, saying their positions were no longer needed.
With Logan gone, some CORA requests are already overdue (beyond the max of 10 days); the Woodland Parks school district is in noncompliance with Colorado Open Records law.
Also Friday, we received confirmation that a senior staff member of the district admin staff submitted their resignation Friday, we believe in connection to those two firings. We’re under the impression not all staff have been informed of this decision yet, so we’re withholding details for now.
Episode 2 of the locally produced podcast ‘Voices of Reason’ is out, check it out here.
The board had their regular monthly board meeting on the 8th
The board struggled a bit with policy changes…they were going to do a second reading on GP-5 and approve it, but instead chose to revise it further, necessitating a second reading and vote to be held in the next meeting instead. This policy change is to help remove any focus on non-academic details, removing the emphasis on things like counselors and mental health programs.
Video of the public comments from the meeting can be viewed here.
We provided an update on the Curriculum Review status in the district driven by adoption of the American Birthright standards.
Efforts by the Board and Ken Witt to restrict freedom of speech in the district were summarized in this post.
We reviewed the numbers behind Witt’s claim that the Middle School is overcrowded and thus the sixth graders need to move out.
Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Wednesday will be a meeting for parents and students about the Career Start program. There’s been concern that the district’s rejection of any grant money will impact that, but what we’ve heard suggests this program is safe as it’s state funds, not grants. We’ll find out more Wednesday.
Our board has traditionally ignored and violated their own governing policies, but seems intent now on instead of violating policy, changing it to align with what they’re going to do anyway. The latest policy under examination is GP-5. Proposed changes are to the first sentence of the policy, which currently reads:
Board members must represent the interests of the citizens of the entire school District.
In the last board meeting on 2/8/23, Witt did a first reading of the proposed change, which he suggested should read:
Board members must represent the educational interests of the students and families as first priority, as well as the citizens of the entire school District.
We expected the board to do their second reading, and vote, on this policy change in the 3/8/23 meeting (as stated in the agenda). Instead, David Illingworth offered forth a different proposal for GP-5:
Board members must represent the interests of the citizens of the entire school District, while always recognizing that the district exists solely to educate children and that parents retain a fundamental constitutional right to direct their children’s education.
Anyone reading the posted agenda would have expected a second reading of the policy change proposed by Witt in the last meeting. The fact that no board members appeared surprised (there was zero discussion on it when prompted by President Rusterholtz) by this change of plans does further suggest more discussion is happening outside of the public eye.
This policy change furthers the stated focus of the board to be academics only. The board is intent on cutting all Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs and denying any grants (and thus calling into question continuance of any programs/classes funded by those grants). It remains to be seen how the board will view art, music, and athletic programs.
Here’s a video clip of just the public comment from the 3/8/23 school board meeting in Woodland Park:
If you missed Nate’s public comment during executive session, it’s at the end of the video above, or you can watch just that one speech in the clip below:
The Woodland Park school board, and interim superintendent Ken Witt, have made several moves to clamp down on the speech of teachers and other staff in the district.
First was last December…the board blamed Sara Lee, a teacher at the High School, for the student-led protests. After placing her on administrative leave for about a month, they finally just cut her position at the highs school and moved her to Gateway Elementary (but then had to hire someone to do the position she was cut from…).
In January, the board adopted the American Birthright Standards. The Colorado Sun reached out to social studies teachers to learn more about this; one Middle School teacher asked district administration if it’d be OK if he talked to the Sun about this and Witt used policy KDDA to prevent him from doing so. Later, Witt used the newly adopted American Birthright standards to ban a book from a high school elective class.
What does policy KDDA say? Or rather, what did it say in January (it later changed…)? Here’s the January copy:
Also in January, the board reduced the public comment section in regular board meetings from 60 minutes, to 30 minutes.
Next up was the news about moving sixth grade to the elementary schools. After the middle school teachers protested this by staging a sick day protest, following by a massive public protest the following morning, Witt took charge. First, he fired a Middle School staff member, again citing policy KDDA and seeming to point blame at her for the sick day protest:
Next, Witt sent an email to Middle School staff warning of further retaliation if staff were to do something like this again:
Finally, we received word that policy KDDA had been updated…or rather, expanded, to silence teachers from saying just about anything about the district. Here’s the latest copy (we’re not sure if the 2/28/23 revision date is accurate or was back-dated; no announcement of this policy change was made):
So if a teacher has a kid in the district…they can’t talk to the press about their own kid even.
Is this legal? There are, naturally, differing opinions on this topic. If you read about the Supreme Court’s decision in Pickering v. Board of Education, though it really makes this seem like an unconstitutional move on the part of the board and Witt. The Brechner Center studies this issue more in this link. It’ll be interesting to see if our board ends up in the courts over all this.
Once again, strong public turnout led to an overflow room being opened up. When will the school board recognize they need to have this meetings in the auditorium instead?
Public speaking this time had a strong religious showing, with much prayer. We are making an impact, and Charis (presumably) is worried.
For GP-5, the board proposed a DIFFERENT change to GP-5 than what they read the first time. So, this is a first reading of the new edit. Previously, minor changes to the first sentence. Now, Illingworth proposes it to read, “board members must represent the interests of the citizens of the entire school district while always recognizing that the district exists solely to educate children and that parents retain a fundamental constitutional right to direct their children’s education.” Setting things up to further eliminate any sort of Social Emotional Learning programs from our district.
GP-9 change – would allow for the vote to happen in the same meeting as the second reading of a proposed policy change. This was a first reading of that change, not a vote.
Redistricting – will not affect the boundaries for what school each student attends. For the April meeting, two redrawing district maps will be presented. Three priorities: roughly equal population in each district. two, well consolidated district boundaries that reflect current geographic clusters. Three, preservation of current director resident districts. Brad Miller will be creating the maps (per Rusterholtz).
Next board meeting is March 22nd! It’s a ‘work session’, so no public comment period.
Video link is below. After they go to executive session, the camera keeps rolling, skip ahead to 1:36 for some additional public comment.
Thursday morning, around 80-100 parents, students, and concerned citizens showed their support for staff at the Middle School by lining the sidewalk as teachers arrived for a scheduled meeting with interim superintendent Ken Witt. This comes a day after nearly two dozen middle school staff members called in sick in protest of Witt’s decision to move the sixth grade classes back to the district elementary schools. This was NOT a decision the board had discussed with the public, though surveys in November did ask this question…with the answer (on page 5) clearly showing the public did NOT support the idea of splitting sixth grade off from the middle school like this. This was not a decision made in collaboration with staff at any of the schools, and elementary school staff has expressed uncertainty about how to fit the extra kids in place. There are also unanswered questions about less opportunity for sixth graders with this move, especially band and forensics.
Wednesday, in response to the staff’s sick day, Witt sent this following email threatening action if this were done again:
The teachers appreciated this show of public supported, though ultimately the day ended on a sour note as Witt fired one middle school staff member for alleged interactions with media, as explained (without much detail) in this letter below:
So, what’s next? Well, when the middle school was partitioned last spring, a feasibility study showed Merit being given a bit more than half the space when viewing student capacity…theoretical capacity of 471 students, vs. the Middle School’s theoretical capacity of 432 students. With 331 students enrolled this year, Merit did not seem to need more space. The middle school, at 391 students, was full but not quite capacity. So how does this change make sense? Especially since it will leave the Middle School at around 270 students (based on current 6-7th grade enrollment).
This screenshot shows the division of the school between Merit (top) and the Middle School (bottom):
Witt said this change was being made to provide more space for Merit…and looking at this map, it’s not clear what will change to accomplish that, easily. What we actually expect to happen next is 7-8 grades to be moved to the high school, and the entire Middle School building to be given to Merit.
And therein lies one of the biggest complaints about this school board…they are not up front about their plans. They are not telling the whole story here, there are blanks yet to be filled in, as their story about moving sixth grade to the elementary school buildings just doesn’t add up on its own.
