Attempts failed at hosting a Woodland Park School District RE-2 forum featuring all board candidates together, leading to two separate events Monday evening for one of the region’s most contentious races.

Two slates of candidates – the incumbents and their challengers – offered dramatically divergent visions for the district’s future. Three of five seats are up for election this November, meaning the results will effectively determine which vision will manifest by way of a majority.

The current board was thrust into the national spotlight after a series of controversial decisions last school year. The board adopted a new social studies curriculum that does not meet state standards, limited employees’ ability to discuss district or school decisions and refused $1.2 million in grants to retain its social and behavioral health workers.

Incumbent candidates David Illingworth III, Mick Bates and Cassie Kimbrell joined a forum at Columbine Elementary School. Their challengers Keegan Barkley, Seth Bryant and Mike Knott, who are running in a united attempt to oust the incumbents, attended a separate event at the Ute Pass Cultural Center.

Emails and social media posts indicated each group was distrustful of the moderator and/or venue of opposing forums, The Pikes Peak Courier reported, meaning there will likely be no face-to-face public meeting between the two groups prior to election.

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Incumbents

Before a smaller but supportive gathering at Columbine Elementary School, current board members Bates, Kimbrell and Illingworth focused on parental rights, school choice and the progress made over the past two years.

Kimbrell and Bates are facing their first-ever election this fall since they were appointed to their positions after previous board members vacated their seats.

“There are two questions that I always try to keep in mind when determining how I’m going to approach an issue,” Illingworth said. “The first question is: Who do the schools exist for? The answer is the children. The second question is: Who do the children belong to? And the answer is their parents.”

When asked whether they support student choice in course selection and access to mental health independent of parental oversight, the candidates were equally firm.

“I will never support anything that cuts the parents out of the equation in terms of their roles in our schools,” Illingworth said.

Bates pointed out that the district is in line with state requirements on mental health care.

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All three pointed to the success of the district’s charter school, Merit Academy, which Illingworth said had grown 30-40% year-over-year.

On the topic of recruitment and retention of top teachers, they pointed to raises of 8.5% and 5% over the past two years, the former being the largest increase in district history. They cautioned that more work needs to be done.

“Woodland Park School District has been lacking in appropriate teacher wages for the last 20 years,” Bates said. “We can’t fix that overnight.”

In a recentnews conference held by Woodland Park current and former educators, the claim was made that the American Birthright Standards used by the district is not an accredited standard recognized by certain collegiate organizations, like the NCAA.

In a strongly worded response issued Monday afternoon, the district called that assertion “patently false.”

The candidates were unanimous in defense of the standard, which asserts that pedagogies that claim to promote diversity or social justice actively inhibit student learning.

“I think those concepts tear at the very fabric of our human fellowship and our American society,” Illingworth said. “If you’re trying to teach a child that he’s either a member of the oppressor class or he is one of the oppressed, you are teaching him to look at his fellow students and look at his teacher, look at his friends based on the color of their skin. You are telling him to racially discriminate.”

Challengers

Barkley, Bryant and Knott each have at least one child enrolled in Woodland Park schools, a point they emphasized at the Ute Pass Cultural Center’s forum as giving them skin in the game. The candidates shared a cohesive stance on district priorities and on walking back major changes brought by the current board last year.

They want to eliminate the so-called gag order preventing employees from speaking about the district to press or on social media without superintendent approval and to throw out the American Birthright social studies curriculum, which they say puts students at a disadvantage and does not foster critical thinking skills.

The candidates also want to reinvest in mental health resources after district leadership in March chose not to reapply for grant funding that supported 15 district positions.

Parents had always had the right to opt out of those services, Knott said, describing the decision as an affront to parental rights for those who sought to utilize them.

The funding’s implications are numerous, candidates said. LGBTQ+ students are perhaps losing a much-needed lifeline, Knott said, and school safety tragedies that could be prevented by mental health professionals trained to spot warning signs might now come to pass, according to Barkley.

“It is absolutely unrealistic and seriously unfair to the teacher and to all of those students to remove those extra support systems and expect a teacher to be able to succeed in teaching their whole class,” Barkley said.

Though commending the current board’s decision to increase teacher pay, the candidates said salary is not the only factor when choosing a workplace. Culture and community are also important, which they say current leadership has neglected, pointing to last week’s gathering of 81 current and former teachers and staff who decried the district’s alleged hostile environment.

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The candidates said they can remedy this by including teacher and parent voices in decision making and bolstering the lines of communication. They traced much of the past year’s strife to a lack of transparency from the current board in pursuit of national political talking points and agendas as the community’s needs suffered.

Any big decision should be discussed in a public forum rather than behind closed doors so stakeholders have a seat at the table, Bryant said.

“No more leadership by surprise,” Bryant said. “If we’re considering changing something, let’s talk about how we’re considering changing it and invite stakeholders in to be part of that process that helps us make the decision.”

Knott said he wants to revert a recent change in the district accountability committee’s appointment process, which now allows board members to choose their own accountability representatives, amounting to an “echo chamber.” He said this responsibility was once the principals’.

“We’ve seen what they have done in just two years, and we know what their plan is, and I really think that the future of our traditional public schools is on the line,” Barkley said. “It’s not just a choice between candidates. It’s a choice between having a voice in what the future of Woodland Park looks like and letting somebody dictate to you what those choices are.”