Today is Nov. 27, 2023, and here’s what you need to know:

Three new board members supported by a pro-charter school group that hopes to alter the direction of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education, which has been marred by personality conflicts, will be sworn in on Tuesday.

The local teachers’ union – credited with flipping the board in 2019 that shifted the balance of power from the reformists to a traditional model – supports each serving board member, including the two incumbents who were not re-elected.

John Youngquist, a former East High School principal, will raise his hand on Tuesday along with Marlene De La Rosa and Kimberlee Sia.

On Sept. 29 the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of filing suit against the state of Colorado, alleging it violated the Americans with Disabilities Act in hundreds of cases like that of Louise Apodaca.

“Thousands of Coloradans with physical disabilities are unnecessarily segregated or at risk of being segregated in nursing facilities due to the State’s failure to make community services available to them” the federal lawsuit alleged.

Citing the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Olmstead v. L.C., the lawsuit said that if disabled people languish in an institutional setting when a less restrictive option is available, it is discrimination.

“People with disabilities wanted to live in the community,” the lawsuit said, “but were stuck in Colorado nursing facilities because State policies and practices make it hard for them to move back to their home.”

A federal judge this month partially dismissed the wrongful termination claims the Florissant Fire Protection District’s former chief lodged against the special district, citing procedural deficiencies.

Erik Holt, who was the chief until June 22, alleged the Teller County district’s directors terminated him because he cooperated with an investigation into their allegedly illegal conduct and because he provided testimony about potential discrimination.

The district held an election for its board of directors on May 2, and five non-incumbent candidates won a majority of the vote. Allegedly, the non-incumbents and their poll watchers violated state law against electioneering at polling places. In response to a request from law enforcement, Holt turned over security camera footage from the fire station, where in-person voting took place.

Colorado’s Judicial Department this month offered two days of training to its more than 350 judges statewide on how to file personal financial disclosure reports, as well as asked the attorney general whether senior judges must also file the public documents just weeks after The Denver Gazette stories disclosed dozens had not.

The training and stern reminder of an annual Jan. 10 deadline for filing comes three months after a Denver Gazette review found that one in six judges – even more when senior judges were added – had not filed the required disclosures last year.

It is a misdemeanor for a judge to knowingly not file the disclosure. The Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline immediately launched its own inquiry into the newspaper’s findings.

In his latest column, Eric Sondermann ponders rethinking. Here’s an excerpt:  

It was a dinner out about 18 months ago with our friends, Heather Lamm and Alex Ooms, along with Heather’s mom, Colorado’s former first lady. After settling in and ordering drinks, Alex, out of nowhere, posed perhaps the best question I had heard in a long while.

He asked, simply and directly, as to what issues the rest of us had rethought and changed our minds upon over the years.

What an inspired conversation starter. In this age of intensely-held views and give-no-quarter surety, it was an invitation to talk about those issues on which we had been wrong or where our thinking now was markedly different from our thinking back then.

Our disabled political system discourages such reflection and reevaluation in favor of an unrelenting cocksureness. Passion, dogmatism and predictable, unwavering loyalty garner cable appearances and Twitter followings in the millions. The audience for nuance and reexamination is infinitely smaller.