In the March DAC meeting, a presentation was given showing the WPSD academic achievement. It took the district eight days to finally send it to me (the legal limit under CORA is three days for a single document); you can view it below.
Some of the highlights:
High School PSAT/SAT Achievement Gains
Achievement for 8th Grade Math & Reading (16% and 19% over state proficiency)
Growth for 5th Grade Math at Gateway Elementary (73% tile)
Graduation Rate for Student with Disabilities (95%)
The school board and interim superintendent Ken Witt chose not to apply for most grants for the upcoming school year. We’ve struggled a bit to really and truly quantify what this means for the district…how to translate grants into job positions and benefits for the students. Thanks to the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), we’ve learned quite a bit. There are some outstanding CORA requests for more information, but for now, here’s what we’ve learned.
here’s the ‘22-23 school year info. Note the ‘ESSER’ grants are what’s often referred to as Covid money…temporary federal grants that are going away this fall.
The real treasure trove of useful facts though, comes from an email exchange between Ken Witt and Laura Magnuson, the district mental health supervisor and a co-author of the mental health presentation given to the board on 12/21. Laura outlines how grants are being used, and later in the email summarizes a discussion she had with Witt on this topic of grants. Read this email for yourself, there is a LOT of information in there, only some of which I’ll be summarizing below.
The Substance Abuse Block Grant funded two social work positions and had additional funding for prevention. This grant was up for renewal; it would have been easy to renew this and maintain that funding.
The grant money she expected to be lost was about $1.2 million annually, funding fifteen jobs.
The School Health Professional Grant currently funds five school social workers (‘with significant additional program funding’).
Witt’s approach to mitigation acts of violence is to rely upon campus security, rather than fixing this problem at its source (mental health).
When asked how the schools would continue their work to prevent youth suicide, Witt replied that WPSD will prioritize academic success.
Sadly, Laura closed her email by stating her intent to not return to WPSD next year. Her email makes clear her dedication and caring for the students, and the community should be greatly concerned at not only her loss, but the reshaping of our district which has pushed her and others like her out.
Please read her email in its entirety for yourself. It’s our best insight to date on the use of grant money for social programs in the school district, and what we’ll be losing out on next year due to this board and interim superintendent.
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.
Ken Witt has amended the district’s contract with Merit, to shift some costs from Merit to the district. Section 8.1(I) used to read:
The District will provide charter liaison services by assigning these duties to an employee or retaining an independent contractor to act as the liaison between the District and the School. Such employee or independent contractor shall be mutually agreed upon by the District and the School. The costs of the liaison services shall be paid by the District’s authorized charter schools, including the School, as a purchased service from the District.
In February of 2023, Witt amended the contract to read:
The District will provide charter liaison services by assigning these duties to an employee or retaining an independent contractor to act as the liaison between the District and the School. Such employee or independent contractor shall be mutually agreed upon by the District and the School.
Note the change – previously, the cost for this liaison was to be paid by the charter schools. Now, the district will shoulder that cost. A relatively minor change but a quiet one that would have gone unnoticed if not for one of our unrelated CORA requests.
Ken Witt’s latest efforts to destroy the Woodland Park school district include firing two people last Friday (Logan in IT, and Morgan in payroll), and watching on the sidelines as the district is in violation of the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA). Specifically, on that last point, the district is not complying with the mandatory three day response period for single-document inquiries, or up to 10 days for others. They’re violating both. Much of the their delays have been due to the board choosing to have Brad Miller’s office review all CORA results for redactions. Miller drags his feet, results get delayed, and the board doesn’t care.
The district is even facing a new lawsuit alleging violation of CORA, refusing to turn over records from December.
Despite having a backlog of overdue CORA requests, Witt decided that the position of the person responsible for managing this process (Logan) was unnecessary, and eliminated that position. No word yet on who will be taking up this role…but the sort of transparency provided by laws such as CORA has never been a priority for this board.
Another fantastic turnout at the board meeting! It was a real marathon session too…the regular meeting lasted about five hours, before the board broke off to have an executive session to discuss the pending contract with Merit Academy. Those five hours sure were interesting though! For starts, attorney Brad Miller has recused himself from anything having to do with Merit, though the board is retaining him to deal with…well it’s not clear what he’ll be doing, a point board member Austin raised, as previous counsel is also retained. I suspect it’s because Miller is the one who wrote this contract for Merit so they might have questions. But there’s a new law firm brought on to deal with closing this deal with Merit (I didn’t note the name at the meeting but I’ll get it).
We don’t have video of the entire meeting, just the audio recording which can be listened to here. Below is a video of one of the more contentious agenda items, re-appoval (again) of the Merit MOU, and a brief discussion about CORA requests. You really should watch this video though…Chris Austin raise excellent points, and when he tried to get Illingworth to answer whether he’d seen a copy of the Merit contract draft, Illingworth got VERY defensive, and even started cross-examining Austin, totally unprofessional for a school board environment. His behavior really says a lot about him. He also lied about this website, saying we posted a copy of the Merit contract…I sure wish we had it! Fortunately the audience called him out on this lie.
One interesting point in the video above is around the ten minute mark, with Illingworth made it clear that approving the MOU meant approving Merit’s application to be a charter school. That application is a big deal, legally, and there was no mention of that in the board’s agenda (plus, charter school law requires public notice prior to application approval). So, this is the third time this board has violated the Sunshine Law on the exact same MOU (see section 2C of this link). There is a pending lawsuit to force the board to follow the law in this respect. The board is fabricating a process to convert a contract school (Merit) into a charter school, bypassing the normal charter school process. It’s unclear why they think they can do this, though keep in mind the attorney (Miller) who advised them that this was OK has since removed himself from anything having to do with this matter (reason unknown), so this whole thing is super sketchy right now. The board really needs to restart the process following established Colorado Charter School Law.
Surprisingly, there were not enough speakers signed up to fill the allotted one hour time slot! I spoke to several who told me they avoided signing up because they felt others had more important things to say…oh well, next time will be different I’m sure! The board discussed the possibility of adding follow-up meetings (town hall style) for additional public comment if needed in the future. It’d be great if there was a true question/answer format, but that’s all TBD. The speakers that did talk are worth listening to in the link above. Personal stories worth hearing, as well as a dry but informative five minutes of the various violations this board is making in how they’re conducting business.
Superintendent Neal revealed that he was not selected for the Anchorage position he was interview for, so he’ll be staying on with this district (we view this as a good thing). There was talk about raises for staff, though that really depends on statewide funding and total enrollment which hasn’t been announced yet. The administrative staff is going to look into options there so expect more on this in May’s board meeting, probably.
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.
