So it is with great dismay that I've been following the MAGA takeover (styled after the tactics of DeSantis' forces, now underway in the Florida public school take-overs) -- of the Woodland Park school board. [The nearby town of Manitou Springs remains a safe, sane place for kids to go to the public schools -- if they wish to learn real history. So, most parents are transferring their kids to that district, come this Fall.]
Even so, I would ask you to follow, and publicize, this blog -- and the article linked and quoted below, respectively. This is what MAGA forces have in mind, in smaller, sleepy towns -- like Woodland Park, Colorado -- that were caught largely unaware, due in no small part to the holding of illegitimate, in-secret school board meetings. [Those violated local law, by the way -- but litigation and appeals are ongoing -- and take years.] Here is a bit:
. . .Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building. . . .
[Woodland Park parents] discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in. . . Jefferson County [down the front range, about an hour's drive -- and abutting Denver, the capital], supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union.
After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy. . . . [He would later take the helm in Woodland Park, after a school board meeting held in secret, but captured on security videos, in December 2022.]
Laura Magnuson, the district’s mental health supervisor, had a call with Witt to press him on reapplying for grants for mental health professionals. She had emailed him to warn that due dates were coming up, and a couple had already passed. If the district did not reapply, it would lose $1.2 million in annual funds that covered the salaries of 15 positions, such as counselors, social workers and career and college readiness specialists.
The following week, after she couldn’t convince Witt to reapply for the grants, she sent him her resignation.
“I feel most worried that this new vision will leave our most vulnerable students and families behind,” Magnuson, who declined an interview request, wrote in an email to Witt. . . .
That private meeting — which was captured by a surveillance camera — became a flash point. Any time three or more members of a school board gather and discuss the district, the meeting must be open to the public under Colorado law. People in the community began clamoring for the district to release the footage.
Witt declined. The district argued in response to one mother’s lawsuit that the conversation “was of a personal nature,” and that it would be a security risk to disclose where the surveillance camera was placed.
Teller County District Court Judge Scott Sells disagreed and said he found it “troubling, the lack of transparency by the school board and the school district.” Sells ordered the video to be released, but the district appealed and the case is still pending. . . .
This is not the way America works. We change policies, if that is to occur. . . in PUBLIC meetings, after notice to, and comment by, concerned parents. The ideology is troubling enough, but because they know the agenda is divisive, they implement it in secret. Deplorable.
But let us close this on a better (Julie Taymar infused) note -- or a set of decidedly more hopeful notes, in fact:
नमस्ते
No comments:
Post a Comment