In the fall of 2014, my county made national news because of students and teachers protesting the conservative majority on the Board of Education. The following summer, community members launched a recall effort. This story was published one month before the recall election, detailing the history of tension in Jefferson County and what the recall election could mean. Quotes and interviews from Board members included in this story became a major talking point preceding the recall election. Though I was not the main writer for this story, as an editor, I lead this article knowing how important it was to educate the people most closely related to the school about the long-standing dispute, to show that awareness of this conflict is integral to the development of education - such a monumental structure in most lives. 

It’s a hot Tuesday afternoon, and high school students fill the streets outside of their schools, chanting “Recall”.

 

It’s a Thursday night, at the boardroom down in Golden and teachers swarm in, wearing blue shirts that read: “Stand Up for All Students”.

 

It’s a cool Saturday morning, and students, teachers, and parents are filing through the neighborhoods to leave huge orange and blue door hangers on front porches.

 

Welcome to JeffCo.

 

Welcome to the Jefferson County School District, where a tug-of-war competition has surfaced between the teachers’ union and the school board majority, where over 1,000 teacher resignations have been submitted in the past two years, and where students are standing up, yelling for change.

 

There is turmoil now in JeffCo, and the first ripples date back two years.  

 

The school board majority, comprising of Julie Williams, John Newkirk, and Ken Witt took hold in the election of 2013.

 

After a long district-wide history of voting for teacher union-backed candidates and large increases in district spending, the election of the reformist “WNW” ticket put an end to this. The trio cited increase in school choice, fiscal accountability, transparency, and rewarding JeffCo employees as their top priorities.

 

“The three candidates were interested in reform and not sticking with the status quo,” Sheila Atwell, the director of JeffCo Students First, an organization that supported the majority’s 2013 election, said.

 

However, many in the JeffCo community feared that their campaigns, which were each funded by large, conservative political groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, would bring outside political agendas into the district.

 

“These people are not education reformers,” Wendy McCord, a district parent, said.

 

Concerned district members feared their premonitions were coming true when Cindy Stevenson, a nationally-recognized district superintendent for 12 years, announced that she would retire in June, leaving many to feel she was forcefully ousted by the majority.

 

But Board member Julie Williams highlighted that this was not the case.

 

“There has been an agenda since the day we were elected,” Williams said. “She didn’t want to work with the conservative Board because we are looking at moving the Board in a different direction than the way it was for the past 40 years. Change is hard.”

 

This resignation was quickly sped up in February 2014, when she announced in an emotional Saturday board meeting that her resignation would go into effect immediately.

 

“I can’t lead or manage,” Stevenson said at the meeting, “because I am not respected by this Board of Education.”

 

Board member Lesley Dahlkemper was quick to blame the majority for the hasty resignation.

 

“I want to be really clear, this is about the three board majority,” she said. “I want to ask the three member of the majority how this decision is good for 85,000 kids.”

 

The Board quickly set out to find a replacement by contracting an independent nationwide-search for the best candidate. However, once the results came in, the majority quickly discarded them, and named a sole-finalists for the position: Dan McMinimee, assistant superintendent for Colorado’s Douglas County School District.

 

But this decision was met with worry amongst the district, with many fearing the increase in salary that the majority offered McMinimee, as well as the possibility for him to bring  to Jeffco a reformist-minded agenda that was implemented in Douglas County.

 

Fast forward to August of 2014.

 

The annual teacher compensation negotiations between the district and the teachers’ union circled around the question of how teacher evaluations should affect the salary of a teacher

 

These discussions were interrupted, however, when an independent analysis of Jeffco’s teacher evaluation system found it not to be a “sufficiently valid and reliable basis on which to make salary determinations”.

 

However, these recommendations were rejected by the Board in a 3-2 vote, with the majority claiming they did not fulfill the district’s goals of having an effective teacher in every classroom.

 

Instead, during a final discussion of the recommendations, board president, Ken Witt, announced his own compensation proposal. This new plan, which became known as “pay-for-performance”, struck out the 2008 program of compensation based on specific steps in favor of pay increases for teachers rated “highly effective” and “effective”. It also proposed to raise the minimum district-wide salary from $33,616 to $38,000.

 

“To my mind, it’s disrespectful to give every teacher the same raise regardless of the job that they are doing,” Atwell said. “That’s what the old way of paying them was.”

 

But this new proposal worried Dahlkemper, Fellman, and teachers across the district who had agreed to sacrifice any raises since 2008 in light of the Great Recession.

 

Furthermore, teachers feared the sense of competition the program could create.

 

“The more teachers that are being highly effective, the smaller percentage raise that everybody gets,” McCord said. “The idea that they are trying to pit them against each other is really antithetical to the whole profession of education.”

 

The Board approved the plan in a 3-2 vote, which prompted the teachers’ union, Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA), to issue a vote of no confidence in Ken Witt.

 

This decision was accompanied by an ever-growing amount of teachers leaving the district. According to numbers reported by the district, since the majority took office in November 2013, over 700 teachers have submitted their resignation, with many moving to other districts with the promise of a higher salary.

 

“When you have over 700 teachers leave the school district, there is a problem,” John Ford, president of JCEA, said. “Through our exit interviews, through those teachers, we are finding those same common things over and over again: teachers are not feeling valued and they are not feeling respected.”

 

The board majority and their supporters, however, attributed the rise in teacher turnover to a nationwide trend.

 

“I think that across the nation, a lot of teachers have been leaving the field because they aren’t being given the flexibility to really teach,” Williams said. “And frankly, if a teacher doesn’t want to be in Jeffco, there are other teachers that do.”

 

Atwell is not concerned by the teachers that are leaving the district. “From the research that we have done, teachers that are rated ineffective - a lot of them have left,” she said. “I don’t know that I would be terribly worried if an ineffective teacher leaving the district.”

 

However, the issue of compensation and teacher turnover was quickly overshadowed a few weeks later when, in light of changes to the AP United States History curriculum, Williams proposed to form a curriculum committee to ensure materials do not “encourage or condone civil disorder”, which many saw as a form of censorship.

 

This proposal electrified the district and the nation, with students walking out of class and filling the sidewalks in protest.

 

“Julie Williams’ proposal to censor AP US History and then the comments that followed I think is where [the distrust] all really started to manifest itself,” Ford said.

 

It was this issue that gained national attention and birthed numerous student organizations, such as JeffCo Students for Change, which led a series of walk-outs protesting the proposal last year.

 

The interactions between these student-organizations and the majority brewed more dissatisfaction with the board.

 

During a board meeting on May 7, Witt called attention to a social media post mentioning burritos favorited by one of the student leaders of Jeffco Students for Change. McCord, along with many others, filed a formal complaint against Witt for bullying the student by accusing them of favoriting “racial epithets” towards Lisa Pinto, a Hispanic staff member for the district, and for violating a minor’s privacy by asking for the post, which revealed the student’s identity, to be displayed.

 

This incident pushed McCord to start a recall election. “That, for me, was the final straw,” she said.

 

From there, she partnered with two other parents to form Jeffco United for Action and filed a petition for recall in late-June of 2015.

 

“There’s been a lot of hard work leading up to this moment,” McCord said at a rally. “But the fight has just begun.”

 

The movement quickly grew. Only 17 days after the recall efforts were announced, more than 37,000 signatures were collected for each candidate, over twice what was needed.

 

“It’s not surprising,” Williams said, on the large amount of signatures. “We do have 15,000 employees in the district, and so if you just times that by two, that’s your 30,000 signatures.”

 

The collection of the required signatures is not the end of the process. In November, there will be a vote on the ballot on the recall of each individual Board majority member, the candidate to potentially replace that majority member, as well as the candidates for the regular elections of Dahlkemper’s and Fellman’s seats, as they will not be running for reelection.

 

Now, in a district where a large portion of voters do not have a direct connection to those involved in education, a mad dash grassroots race on both sides has emerged to sway uninformed voters.

 

“Our role really is educating the public in Jefferson County about what is going on, about the decisions that the Board is making and sometimes isn’t making,” McCord said.

 

Jeffco United for Action has printed yard signs printed with “Recall Witt, Newkirk, and Williams”, door hangers with information about the Board, and has published several articles about their grievances with the Board on their website.

 

Students across the district have also started protests to demand the recall.

 

These citizens argue that the Board has wasted taxpayer money in the compensation of McMinimee and a board attorney, caused over 1,000 educators to leave the district, attempted to censor US History classes, and violated Colorado open meeting laws.

 

With the potential replacement of all five board seats, a new slate of candidates has emerged, including Ron Mitchell running for Ken Witt’s seat, Brad Rupert for Williams’ seat, Susan Harmon for Newkirk’s seat, Ali Lasell for Fellman’s seat, and Amanda Stevens for Dahlkemper’s seat.

 

“I really don’t believe that party politics should enter the boardroom,” Rupert said. “Our priority should be providing an excellent education for every student.”

 

However, Atwell finds fault in the recall. “The recall petition really talked about things that were either flagrantly wrong or just didn’t rise to the level of a recall or the amount of discord and angst that it’s caused,” she said.

 

She points out that the effort does not cite that Superintendent McMinimee’s offered salary included potential bonuses and retirement whereas Stevenson’s didn’t.

 

Moreover, the board majority and their supporters fear that a 5-0 union-supported slate will disturb the staggered terms of the board members, and will not allow for diversity in the district.

 

As the district draws closer to Election Day, teachers found old wounds reopened with the approval of a new contract that gave teachers a 1% raise. However, JCEA reluctantly approved the contract, disappointed with it’s short expiration date in summer of 2016.

 

“I know of no other one-billion-dollar organization that negotiates for six months only to come out with a 10-month agreement in its employee association,” Dahlkemper said. “Denver Public schools just approved a 5.5% salary increase for its teachers. In Jeffco, we approved 1%.”

 

But Williams defends the approval. “As far as the 10 month contract, I think it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “It is prudent to be able to look at it next year and see where does it need tweaking.”

 

The slate, however, has used this new contract to their advantage in their campaigns.

 

“I think, if elected, we need to take a hard look at the current contract, whether the term of it is appropriate, whether the compensation package within it is appropriate,” Rupert said. “We are simply no longer competitive.”

 

This opinion is what has fueled the distrust between the Board majority and the teachers’ union and a surge of overall support for a new group of board members in the past few months.

 

“Teachers are not feeling valued. They are not feeling respected,” Ford said. “That’s why we are here: how do we save public education in Jefferson County?”

 

With so much on the line for the recall election, all sides are anxious to see which Jeffco will welcome them come election day.