In the small Colorado town of Woodland Park, nestled on Pikes Peak’s north slope, only 28.6 percent of students scored at grade level in math last year. Just 45.3 percent can read at grade level. So after taking over 18 months ago, the conservative school board immediately sought to recoup the learning loss.
But district leadership is now under siege — facing a deluge of integrated attacks from teachers unions resisting the board’s reform efforts. As the local union awaited a “crisis” designation and funding from the Colorado Education Association (CEA) — which recently condemned capitalism — other allied unions were coming to their aid.
Strangely, national legacy media are weighing in too. NBC News is setting up this school district as a poster child for “experiment(s) in conservative governance.” As reformers mount similar efforts to win and maintain school boards nationwide, they must watch the teachers union playbook unfolding in the Rocky Mountains.
National Attention on a Small Mountain Town?
Woodland Park is home to just 8,000 people, including 2,122 students. So why is a national news behemoth like NBC training its sights there? The answer may lie in reporter Tyler Kingkade’s coverage, replete with factual errors and mischaracterizations that portray the board as nontransparent and hasty in advancing its reforms.
Kingkade wrongly implies that in pursuing its school-choice program, the board rushed to approve the district’s first charter school, Merit Academy, under a vague agenda item in January 2022. However, it merely approved a memorandum of understanding for
