A Colorado school district was forced to cancel classes after teachers called out sick to protest the new conservative school board

Authored by insider.com and submitted by JanitorKarl
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A Colorado school district was forced to cancel classes on Thursday after teachers called out sick.

The teachers are protesting the new conservative school board, a union spokesperson told Insider.

The district said absences had "impacted our ability to provide a safe and supervised learning environment for students."

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A Colorado school district was forced to cancel classes on Thursday after teachers called out sick to protest decisions made by the district's conservative-majority school board.

The Douglas County School District said on its website that a "large number" of staff submitted absences for Thursday and all classes across the district's schools were canceled.

"We have reached the point where the number of absences has impacted our ability to provide a safe and supervised learning environment for students," the alert said.

A spokesperson for Douglas County Federation — a local affiliate union of the American Federation of Teachers — confirmed to Insider that Thursday's protests are a culmination of concerns about the school board from district employees, community members, and parents.

In November, four seats on Douglas County's school board were up for grabs in an election, and a quartet of conservative candidates raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their competition.

The four individuals — Mike Peterson, Becky Meyers, Christy Williams, and Kaylee Winegar — all now sit on the seven-person board.

The Douglas County Federation spokesperson told Insider that one particular grievance the union had with the new school board members was the decision made by the conservative-majority in late January to weaken the district's educational equity policy.

The spokesperson also said that two new conservative school board members tried to fire the district's superintendent Corey Wise, and they along with the two other new conservative members decided they would give Wise an ultimatum to either resign or be fired.

The school board also struck down a COVID-19 mask mandate late last year, the spokesperson said.

Along with the protest from teachers, there is also a planned rally against the conservative-majority school boar on Thursday afternoon at the district's headquarters in Castle Rock, just south of Denver.

Douglas County's school board did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Fundraising for Douglas County's 2021 elections shattered contributions made during the district's 2017 elections.

In last year's elections, the quartet was supported by the conservative 1776 Project PAC, a national group that launched in May that says it's actively trying to stop critical race theory from being taught in classrooms.

All the Colorado school board candidates backed by the PAC swept their races in local elections in November.

The election in Douglas County came at the heels of a heated school board meeting that saw parents lash out against the board over COVID-19 safety policies and the supposed teaching of critical race theory.

It's a microcosm of a general trend, where school boards and districts have become battlegrounds for culture war topics.

surfingNerd on February 3rd, 2022 at 21:46 UTC »

Wasn't there a harry potter movie about this?

The_Lonely_Satirist on February 3rd, 2022 at 21:11 UTC »

In November, four seats on Douglas County's school board were up for grabs in an election, and a quartet of conservative candidates raised hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their competition.

One particular grievance the union had with the new school board members was the decision made by the conservative-majority in late January to weaken the district's educational equity policy.

Adopted in March 2021, the district’s Educational Equity policy was put in place to identify and address inequities within the district, look at practices that could be considered biased, racist or discriminatory, and foster an “inclusive culture to ensure all students, staff, and community members feel safe and valued,”

Two new conservative school board members tried to fire the district's superintendent Corey Wise

In last year's elections, the quartet was supported by the conservative 1776 Project PAC, a national group that launched in May that says it's actively trying to stop critical race theory from being taught in classrooms.

All the Colorado school board candidates backed by the PAC swept their races in local elections in November.

Mind you, and as someone who drives past this area from time to time, this is just past Colorado Springs, an evangelical/conservative haven, some might even call it the "mecca" for evangelical Christians. It's no wonder that this region is a breeding ground for right wing culture war inspired fanaticism.

What irks me most about these zealots is their flat-out ignorance and hypocrisy. You better believe that these are the very same conservatives crying, moaning and regurgitating bombastic narratives of "oppression", "censorship", "cancel culture", "tyranny", "racism", and "liberal indoctrination". Embracing the fearmongering propaganda and misinformation that plagues their favorite echochambers, the fringe right-wing broadcasts, the online communities and cliques and the provincial town halls that they patronize, that they indiscriminately trust and depend on to validate their homogenized, partisan and regressive ideology, their one dimensional and narrow minded political and socio-cultural worldview.

They rely on a strawman, "the radical left", to sustain their victimhood, their righteous indignation, their contempt, hostility and vitriol. They cling to their delusions of oppression, and in doing so seek to become the oppressors themselves.

In the end, they become everything they accuse this villain of being, and they use their own propaganda to rationalize their authority. They determine themselves the judge, jury, and executioner, justifying their rigid, dictatorial impulses through the deranged notion that they're the victims in all of this, that justice had to be taken into their own hands.

They become the heralds of curricula, they declare dominion over the education system, over what should or shouldn't be taught, seen, or heard in school, they determine which knowledge to suppress, what literature to ban or blacklist, what history to gloss over and whitewash, they've resolved that authority exclusively belongs to them, the victims. For all of their crying around this country devolving into some "Orwellian" state, they've been the ones to ironically fall into the role of "thought police".

Both racism and Critical Race Theory turn into these ambiguous terms that conveniently change to fit any description, perception, or illustration of oppression and discrimination against white people. They determine themselves the victims of racism, and that racism only exists if it's solely them who cower at its sharp end. They transform CRT into an umbrella term, a label used to categorize any teaching, perspective or history, any literature or book that highlights racism, slavery, discrimination, ostracization, racial injustice, violence or cruelty against black people as an effort to burden white people with guilt, as an effort to indoctrinate their children. While once again, it's them who have ironically of course, forced themselves into the role of the uncompromising dictator and withholder of knowledge and information.

But it doesnt stop there. The disinformation campaign, the fearmongering. the vilification, the culture war, the endeavor persists and metastasizes, the hysteria spreads and before long this movement is shifting its objectives over to more and more topics, literature, books, novels, authors, artists, teachers, administrators, politicians and people, broadening the scope of its generalizations and its propaganda, indoctrinating more and more people along the way.

It's also not long before legislators are pandering, posturing and passing laws to cater to this movement and ideology. Not only do they seek to ban, cancel, and censor whatever passes as CRT and Racism, but they too get to decide what falls under the umbrella of CRT and racism on a legislative level. They pass the ambiguous legislation targeting CRT and racism while affording themselves the privilege to classify whatever conveniently fits their description of CRT and racism. All the while garnering political points and acclaim from their mindless base of voters, galvanizing a future for themselves in partisan, repressive politics.

In the end it all becomes painfully apparent, the oppressed are the oppressors, the victims are the villains, the freethinkers are the fanatics, the principled are the prejudiced.