If you missed the 4/12/2023 school board meeting, you can watch it here:
Highlights:
There was some interesting public comment (including a reference to the ‘rich and powerful teachers unions’, LOL), though only a handful of those who signed up actually got to speak, due to the board limiting public comment to 30 minutes total.
The board included an amendment to Merit Academy’s contract in the consent agenda. The public was not informed of the content of this amendment until the district sent an email out on 4/14 stating, “The board also approved the Merit contract amendment to eliminate charter school liaison charges.” This amendment was not discussed nor read in the 4/12 meeting.
The board announced a $1500 retention bonus for teachers, and approved a resolution declaring May 8-12 Teacher Appreciation Week. It’s nice to see them mirroring the declaration of the National PTA group.
Witt gave a few updates on the transition of sixth grade to elementary schools, though they still haven’t worked out all the details.
Interim Superintendent Witt talked briefly about the Academic Achievement report previously shown to the DAC. He didn’t show any slides in this meeting; if you want to view the report you can see it here.
The board hired Amy Ryan as CFO, and Bill Phalen was promoted to be the new Middle School principal for next year.
There were two professional photographers taking pictures at the meeting, and more than one reporter observed in the room.
In the board meeting on Wednesday, April 12th, Ken Witt will be providing an update on the changes to the middle school, moving sixth grade down to the elementary school buildings and reconfiguring the remaining space to give more to Merit Academy.
So, what should the parents be concerned about? The reality is, we don’t know the inner workings of these schools, we’re really in the dark here. We can shed some light on this situation, by looking at the words of someone who is (was…) one of the experts on the impact of this change – Tina Cassens, outgoing Chief Academic Officer. A recent CORA request revealed an email she sent to Witt detailing her concerns about restructuring the grade levels in each school. Read these, and keep them in mind when Witt gives his presentation Wednesday, see if they’re being addressed and how.
At the Elementary level:
Classes at the elementary are sitting at 30 – 45 students per grade level. Financially, staffing models would call for 1.5 teachers per grade level, which is not logistically possible. We have been watching this for years and discussing building primary (PK-2) and intermediate schools (3-5). The alternative will be multi-age classrooms across the board, i.e. a 1st/2nd grade combo, 3rd/4th grade combo, 5th/6th grade combo. Another alternative is hiring above staff formulas, which would greatly impact the district.
SPED center-based programs are currently sitting at capacity. Sending 6th graders back into the programs will send them over staffing allocations, requiring the hiring of additional part-time special education teachers, which are hard to find.
At the Middle School level:
Running a middle school with less than 300 students will essentially strip the enrichment opportunities. Under the current staffing model they would have less than 3 full time enrichment teachers. Finding part-time enrichment teachers is tough.
Most of the 6th grade teachers are not certified for elementary, thus the middle school would need to enact our reduction in force policy, which affects both middle and high school.
SPED center-based programs will run under capacity with 6th graders moved down.
Shifting Merit down in the building will result in displacing specially designed classrooms that serve our SPED center-based programs. This adds costs again to the District. One of these areas includes a specially designed bathroom/changing room and kitchen. I am not sure how these would be redesigned.
Shifting Merit down would also remove the family and consumer studies room, which then eliminates this program for the Middle School.
Redesigning the building for a 2nd year would result in additional expenses for the District. This includes redesigning the bells and announcement system which took over 9 months to reconfigure and adding/relocating separation doors which were extremely expensive.
Listen in Wednesday, her experience with this district is extensive and we should take these concerns seriously.
I guess one of the perks of being an interim superintendent is eating out frequently at taxpayer expense?
January started out slow. Witt didn’t have a district credit card, so submitted an expense report for the Pantry ($28.03) and Peak BBQ ($50.99).
For February, Witt enjoyed a couple meals at Mountainara ($51.07 and $71.68), Fortune Dragon ($34.31), and a whopping $121.44 at Ted’s Montana Grill (source). He went on to spend $29.39 at the Pantry, $44.64 at Rosie’s Diner (in Monument), $37.19 at Grandmother’s Kitchen, $64.05 at Wines of Colorado, $42.75 at Fusion Japan, $65.32 and $72.90 at Mountainara (gotta admit, I love that place too), and then $50.14 at the Pantry (curious, how many people joined him for that meal to push the bill so high, and how many of them were board members?). (source)
So, from 1/1-3/14/2023 (his credit card billing cycle ends at the middle of the month), Ken Witt has incurred $763.90 in expenses dining out.
Interested in running for school board? A friend in a neighboring community tipped me off to this…Andrew Wommack’s Truth and Liberty Coalition is hosting a Candidate Academy at Charis from 9:00-4:30 on Saturday, April 15th. It’s not open to just anyone though…you do need to fill out an application, which asks for things such as what church you attend, your pastor’s name and phone number, and an additional character reference. The training is being presented by the “National School Board Coalition”…an important-sounding group but one that, when you dig, isn’t really a coalition, it’s one guy, Ted Mische, a graduate of the Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR) (Mische previously led the ‘Colorado School Board Coalition’).
Some excerpts from the invitation, which you can read in its entirety below, are:
At Truth and Liberty, we want every school district in this state to teach only edifying and morally upright curriculum with an accurate and patriotic view of American history.
…
We are facing a crisis in our times as our nation seems to be abandoning biblical teaching, morality, and even common sense at a pace and depth that is alarming. Can you imagine the positive long-term impact that biblically minded Christians could have as members of 178 school boards in this state?
Our Interim Superintendent Ken Witt (also an LPR grad) hired Mische to do some consulting work for ERBOCES in early January (Witt works two jobs, if you recall, his interim superintendent position in Woodland Park and his executive director position at ERBOCES). This candidate academy appears unrelated to that work but there appear to be close ties between Wommack and the LPR grads (such as Bob Schafer, Curt Grina, Tim Farmer, Bryce Carlson, Ken Witt, Mick Bates, Dan Williams, Trevor Miller, Brad Miller, Ted Mische).
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 job posting for a new CFO position in the district has disappeared from the district website. It’s not clear if the position has been filled or removed (this would be a new position created in our district).
There’s a posted job opening for a Library Media Specialist at the high school. This was Sara Lee’s position before Witt eliminated that in January (temporarily, it seems).
In a complete 180 from public comments made to teachers in the schools in early March, the district announced it would participate in the statewide free lunch program funded by proposition FF, passed by voters last fall.
With Witt deciding to not apply for grants this year, the question is, what impact does that have? To help understand how the district uses grant money, check out this list obtained under CORA of all the grants the district has accepted for this current school year:
As for next school year, we’re still trying to get comprehensive data. For now, we do have this email from Witt seeking confirmation that the follow grants were written, so we presume he wants these:
Funding for enhanced after-school options for students
Funding for enhanced tutoring support
While not saying he will reject the follow ones, it sounds like that’s the plan, as he does ask for “the exact personnel that will be affected by the decision not to write” the ones below:
Funding for social workers in our elementary school buildings
Funding for the family school liaisons that assist families with connecting to outside resources
Funding for school-based therapy to assist families that are unable to access support outside of school
Funding for enhanced truancy tracking and support
Funding for student and staff wellness
He makes no mention of:
Funding for enhanced career and college support for students and families
On that one though, the career start program is continuing unchanged, so I suspect that grant had already been applied for with his knowledge, hence no mention of it.
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/
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 cancellationwas 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“Inthe best interests of 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.”
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.
