“The new Woodland Park School Board Policy KDDA no longer violates teachers’ First Amendment constitutional rights to free speech,” Nate Owen, president of the Woodland Park Education Association, said in a press release. “Not only does this restore the First Amendment rights of educators, but it ensures a clear path for educator voices now and into the future.”
— Read on gazette.com/content/tncms/live/
Tag Archives: KDDA
Woodland Park School District drops unconstitutional gag order, union says
The Woodland Park School District has removed and replaced a school board policy that the local teachers union called unconstitutional because it prohibited educators from speaking to the press or posting on social media about district decisions without consent, the Woodland Park Education Association announced this week.
The teachers union sued the district and its Board of Education in federal court over the summer, alleging employees’ First Amendment rights were violated by the policy. The decision to replace the policy with a new one, which the union says “protects the First Amendment rights of educators,” was made during federal court mediation, according to a news release.
— Read on www.denverpost.com/2023/11/02/woodland-park-teachers-union-lawsuit-agreement/
District revises policy KDDA in response to WPEA lawsuit
After being steered towards mediation by a judge overseeing the lawsuit between the WPEA and the WPSD (the judge said that portions of the policy “do have problems”, policy KDDA has been revised, and you can read the full document here. This revised policy no longer takes away teachers’ right to talk to the press about district decisions (read more about the previous policy here). It’s sad it took a lawsuit to get the district to respect their First Amendment rights to free speech, but at least in the end, those rights were preserved.
Woodland Park teachers speak out against school board
Teachers and community members (and I believe four press cameras) crowded the Ute Pass Cultural Center this evening to protest the actions taken by the Woodland Park School Board and the Superintendent, Ken Witt. 81 staff members signed a letter of protest, which you can read here (page 1, page 2).
KKTV’s article can be read here, along with video of most of the speaking.
The Colorado Sun wrote a very long article about this, read it here
CPR also wrote a great article about this story, read it here
What the teachers did by speaking out appears to be in direct violation of district policy KDDA, and is similar to what Mary Ward was fired for earlier this year. The district is currently involved in a lawsuit brought against them by the WPEA regarding, among other things, that policy. Staff I spoke to expressed uncertainty and even fear about how Ken Witt and the school board will respond to them speaking out like this.
Full video:
The next board meeting (and last scheduled one before the election) is Wednesday, October 11th, 6:00PM.
School board and Ken Witt move to restrict free speech in Woodland Park
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.