WOODLAND PARK — More than 80 Woodland Park teachers and staff have signed a letter calling on the community to urge its conservative school board to restore social studies standards that fall in line with state standards, reinvest in mental health resources for students and “prioritize our children’s futures over politics.”
The group of Woodland Park School District RE-2 educators and employees released the letter late Thursday afternoon, then held a news conference at the Ute Pass Cultural Center in Woodland Park to amplify their concerns after a 2021 conservative takeover of the school board led to what they describe as a “culture of fear and silence.”
“At this time the stakes have become too high and the risk to our schools too great to remain silent any longer,” said Woodland Park educator Lindsay Orellana as she opened the news conference following a standing ovation from a crowd of at least 100 attendees. “We will no longer allow fear to speak louder in this community than love.”
Their criticisms fall about a month before elections, when local voters will elect board members in three of the five seats. Six candidates are running, according to information posted on the district’s website.
“We feel that in the face of the current administration’s attack on our students’ learning environments, we can no longer stay silent,” they write in their one-and-a-half page letter. “We must utilize our Constitutional rights to speak out against what we feel is incompetent leadership actively harming our students and community.”
The district of approximately 2,100 students has attracted national attention over the past year, with controversial board decisions escalating tension and dividing the community, which is located in Teller County about a half hour northwest of Colorado Springs.
Those decisions, which many teachers and parents say were made without their input, started with the board adopting the American Birthright standard for social studies in January even after the Colorado State Board of Education rejected those standards, Colorado Public Radio reported.
Those standards, which have also been criticized by the National Council for the Social Studies, were developed by a national conservative coalition, the Civics Alliance. On its website, the coalition states that it aims to “preserve civics education that teaches students to take pride in what they share as Americans,” which includes “the joyful accomplishments of their common national culture.” The curriculum is also being considered for adoption in Garfield County, according to the Glenwood Post Independent. The board is set to vote on whether to use the social studies curriculum Oct. 25.
In Woodland Park, the district and board, which underwent a conservative takeover in 2021, have been the target of multiple lawsuits in the past year and saw nearly 40% of its teachers and staff leave at the end of the last school year with many saying district and board leaders were suppressing their First Amendment rights.
Among the latest lawsuits, in August the Colorado Education Association and the local teachers union filed a federal lawsuit against the district and board, which they argue have violated the First Amendment rights of educators, largely because of a policy in which teachers must seek permission from the superintendent before speaking to the media, Colorado Public Radio reported.
One more blow hit Woodland Park schools, teachers and parents say, when district leadership in March opted not to renew $1.2 million in grant funding that had helped provide mental health services to students and had supported 15 mental health positions. The Woodland Park school board president has said the move was necessary to cut down on government bureaucracy in schools.
“We strongly believe that mental health is integral to academic success and that students must be treated as the developing young minds that they are,” the letter said, calling the decision shortsighted and dangerous. “Cutting funding for mental health support in our schools when students are facing a variety of challenges and changes both at home and in school was entirely the wrong decision to make.”
Anna Hand, an eighth grade English teacher at Woodland Park Middle School, is among the teachers who signed the letter, even while fearing that could mean jeopardizing her job with the district, where she has worked for 15 years.
“Now I cannot stay silent any longer, and we cannot stay silent any longer because where we are heading will not serve our students,” Hand told The Colorado Sun on Wednesday. “And we want to prepare them for the futures that they choose, so to do the right thing, we have to speak up.”
“I don’t recognize my school anymore”
Teaching has long been part of Hand’s identity, a passion that pulls her back to the classroom every day — one that drowns out fleeting thoughts she’s had of leaving Woodland Park schools like so many of her colleagues, some with 20 years of experience, already have.
She shares concerns with other district educators that students, more than anyone else, are feeling the effects of the mass of teachers who exited the district.
“It is our students who are suffering the most because of that loss,” the letter states. “Our students have lost decades of institutional knowledge.”
Hand said she constantly worries about her students, including whether they’ll be prepared to develop skills on their own after learning social studies using the American Birthright Standards, which she said are neither rigorous nor accepted by the state.
“They don’t live up to that bar, which will put our students behind,” Hand said. “It will leave out too much, too many skills.”
She is equally concerned about students’ well-being, particularly after the district stripped schools of mental health resources, services and staff. She’s seen kids who were excelling last year as bright students in class and active participants in extracurricular activities, now “struggling to just make it through the day” following the “abrupt removal” of mental health support.
And teachers, Hand added, are simply scared.
“With the culture of fear that’s created with our educators, it’s affecting what we can do in the classroom,” she said. “People are afraid to choose books. People are afraid to say the wrong thing. And instead of feeling supported and able to do our jobs to a very high level, we are spending a lot of time second-guessing or worried about the decisions that are made without our involvement.”
Parents like Laura Gordon and Dana Kramer have felt similarly ignored by the new board as it has made decisions reshaping the district.
Both mothers said the only time parents have been consulted is through a survey conducted in November by a pair of interim superintendents, who have since resigned. That survey asked parents questions about how they wanted the district to approach new district leadership. Most parents and teachers said they wanted the district to keep its two interim superintendents in place and then hire a permanent superintendent “who would continue with the district’s long-term strategic plan, not create a new plan and not expedite immediate change,” Kramer said in a text message to The Sun.
The board, which selected Ken Witt as an interim superintendent in December and made his leadership position permanent in May, clearly did not listen to parents, Gordon and Kramer say. Witt is a former JeffCo school board member who was recalled in 2015 along with two fellow board members after pressing for controversial changes to the history curriculum.
“It feels like they’re trying to undermine our public school option and make it worse so that they can replace it with what they want for us,” Gordon said, noting that board and district leaders have indicated they are inviting more charter schools into Woodland Park.
Gordon, who has three children in Woodland Park schools, was particularly troubled by the recent loss of critical mental health services for her own children, one of whom lost a classmate in a murder-suicide while in kindergarten last year.
“She knew at home she had me to help and comfort her, but at school when she would remember and miss him, who would be there for her?” said Gordon, who was relieved at the time to learn that a crisis response team would be in school.
Gordon is considering leaving Woodland Park, despite her family’s original plans to stay until all four of their kids are grown. “It won’t be the same community,” Gordon said. “What they’re doing with our schools is going to bring in a different slate of people and I moved here for the people that are already here, not for the extreme conservatives.”
Kramer, who has five children enrolled in Woodland Park schools, has contemplated sending her kids to a neighboring district.
Staying has been hard, she said.
“I’ve seen friends become enemies over this,” Kramer told The Colorado Sun in a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s really sad and heartbreaking to see people accusing either side of things that are not true and friendships being lost. The divisiveness that has been caused because of this board has ripped our close-knit community apart.”
She has tried to shield her kids from the rancor in the district and community, but they’re still feeling the void of educators who have left. At Gateway Elementary School, where four of her kids go to school, only two classroom teachers from last year returned, Kramer said.
Her 8-year-old daughter cried to her, saying, “I don’t recognize my school anymore.”
Kramer simply wants the board to listen to teachers and families and prioritize a focus on students.
“The way this board operates has confirmed my convictions that I do not want to be pigeonholed into voting along party lines for every issue,” she said in a text to The Colorado Sun. “School boards are designed to be nonpartisan, and that’s how it should stay. Every child needs a voice and an advocate, despite their parent’s political leaning.”
In search of “a middle ground”
Woodland Park School Board President David Rusterholtz said the division tearing apart the district and community started before the conservative board was elected, which then “brought it to the surface.”
In a phone interview Thursday morning with The Colorado Sun, Rusterholtz defended the board’s decision to implement the American Birthright standards into Woodland Park classrooms.
Despite those standards being rejected by the Colorado State Board of Education, he said he believes that the district’s curriculum, including its social studies program, “absolutely will exceed the state’s minimum requirements, far exceed (them),” with district teachers and administrators ensuring that will happen.
The standards, Rusterholtz said, also ensure that educators aren’t teaching students about what he calls “contemporary social programming,” or “special treatment for certain groups of people that make sexual choices, that make political choices as far as racism goes.”
“They need to be treated with the exact same special rights that everyone else is treated with,” Rusterholtz said. “Everyone in our nation is special because we recognize the rights that God has given us, and it is the responsibility of elected people, elected servants first and foremost to protect those rights. So if we give someone rights above and beyond or exclude other people from our rights, then I think that that is a violation of what elected servants are called to do.”
In addressing concerns about the district not renewing grant funding that supported students’ mental health, Rusterholtz said that government funding is no longer necessary. He wants to cut out government bureaucracy, he said, pledging that the district will bring back mental health services “as necessary,” including to respond to any tragedies that affect Woodland Park schools.
“Personally, we are in the business of education and meeting our kids’ needs first and foremost,” he said. “The number one thing that a school does is to educate our kids in a safe environment with qualified great teachers, and that’s what we have.”
He also acknowledged that the board has limited educators’ First Amendment rights in interfering with their ability to talk to media and post on social media, noting that he mistakenly thought teachers were limited in talking to media because of a contractual agreement with the school district.
“I’ve come to find out that what we did should have not been done to the extent that it was,” Rusterholtz said, declining to comment further on the gag order, citing pending litigation.
He maintains that his first responsibility is to work for all parents and reflect their “virtues, values and goals.”
“I don’t just represent the people who are like-minded or who voted for me,” he said. “I represent all of those people, and so I want to hear from them. And if there is a middle ground that we can find, I certainly will.”