Tag Archives: meetings

WPSD board meetings

Woodland Park School board operating in the shadows

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.

Proposed change to policy GP-5

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.

3/8/2023 School Board Meeting Recap

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.

https://youtube.com/live/Dw6bDmxT6yE?feature=shares

2/8/2023 School Board Meeting

The public comments in the 2/8 meeting were really inspiring and worth watching…you can view this segment below. Lots of new voices at this meeting and some great speeches, word really is spreading.

In the meeting itself, Witt proposed a change to GP-5, to change from:

Board must represent the interests of the citizens of the entire school District

To:

Board must represent the educational interests of the students and their families as first priority, as well as the citizens of the entire school District

This change is expected to come into play with any decisions regarding social issues with students (LGBTQ+, etc) – we expect less tolerance for anything like that (especially after Illingworth’s questions in the 1/25 meeting!). We have CORA requests open to learn more about what discussions may be going on behind the scenes. This was a FIRST READING of this policy, so has not yet been enacted. Be sure to email board members if you have concerns about this (see the district contact info page).

The board also voted to modify the district calendar for next year…I expect they’ll publish that soon.

Here’s the entire meeting:

Illingworth interviews board candidates about “Between the World and Me”

On Wednesday, the board interviewed three candidates for the vacant board seat. The video here is David Illingworth’s question, which he thinks is connected to the book “Between the World and Me” but really seems unrelated (I don’t think he actually read that book). This is the book that was removed (banned) from a high school class recently (read more about that here).

The board selected Mick Bates, the second person to be interviewed.

1/11/2023 Board Meeting recap

After the shitshow that was the 12/21/22 board meeting, this one proved only slightly calmer (link to agenda). Though the police were called to this one when one audience member spoke up and refused to leave. Tensions were high leading up to this…not only was it going to be Witt’s first appearance as the new interim superintended, but he was going to presenting some unknown policy changes (first reading, not a vote). Also, the board was going to take action on a “Social Studies Academic Standard Resolution” to be read by board director Sue Patterson. What resolution, you say? We didn’t know, that’s all the info we had and there had been no discussion leading up to this.

So, prior to the meeting, we reached out to Patterson and Rusterholtz, asking if they could share any information about that resolution. They didn’t reply, but the board secretary did, sending us the name of the standard and a link to it – it’s the American Birthright standard. We turned to Google to educate us further…and wow, did we find a lot! But we’ll write up something different about that. Needless to say, people kinda freaked out that this might be adopted in our district, and attendance at the meeting was high.

– Some great speeches in the public comments! Listen to this, it’s actually pretty short as the board cut the allotted time to 3 minutes per speaker.

– Some minor policy changes proposed, including one making it sound like the agenda wouldn’t have to be written by the superintendent and/or board president (we’ll need to read the exact words on this one).

– Some BIG policy changes proposed by Witt around charter school process. Not sure why they care when they didn’t follow district process with Merit Academy? But what they are proposing now would allow charter schools to apply at any time of year (previously just fall) as long as the superintendent was OK with it. I expect we’ll get a new charter school before the end of the school year.

– As expected, the board voted to adopt the American Birthright standard, which does not align with Colorado standards and was rejected by the Colorado Board of Education last fall. But more on that in the coming days!

Here’s the video:

Board posts final Merit contract and schedules vote

In a giant ‘fuck you’ to the taxpayers of this district awaiting a chance to voice their opinions on the Merit Academy contract in tonight’s special board meeting created for that purpose, the school board has gone ahead and posted a FINAL version of the Merit contract to the district website and scheduled a meeting for tomorrow at 6:00 (agenda) to vote to approve it (they also posted an approval resolution which they’ll be voting on). They have no intention of listening to public feedback nor making any changes to their contract based upon that feedback. This is all a circus show (maybe ‘shitshow’ would be a better description).

It’s worth showing up at tonight’s school board meeting, 6:00 (agenda) in the auditorium, and let the board know what you think about this corrupt, unethical process.

Both meetings will be livestreamed and the link for that is in the agendas.

Report from 4/13 School Board Meeting

4/13 school board meeting

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.