This article was originally published in March of 2022 but is worth bringing up again as it’s a reminder of what this district has been going through for the past year or so. Things have only gotten worse since this was published.
Tag Archives: David Illingworth
New charter school coming to Woodland Park?
Mike Miles, the founder of the Third Future network of charter schools in Texas and Colorado, appears to be considering opening another charter school, this one in Woodland Park. On Saturday 1/15, Illingworth and Witt gave him tours of several district buildings – Columbine Elementary, Gateway Elementary, and the Middle School (well, what’s left of it after it was carved up for Merit Academy). Board President Rusterholtz was unaware of this and no announcement was made, and it was only through keen observation by community members that we were even made aware of it.
His two local schools are Coperni 2 and Coperni 3, both in Colorado Springs. Witt helped bring Coperni 2 to that district through his work at ERBOCES (though back then it was called Colorado Digital BOCES).
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.