Hundreds of students in Douglas County, Colorado, staged a walkout this week, abandoning their classrooms in protest of the firing of the district’s superintendent, who was allegedly told by the school board’s new conservative majority late last month to resign or face removal.
Students filed out of classrooms chanting “equity for all,” “support our staff,” and “Justice for Corey” after the Douglas County School Board voted during a special meeting Friday night to fire Superintendent Corey Wise without cause and without public comment.
“Everything was very unethical, the way that it was treated,” Asella Straus, a junior at Highlands Ranch High School, told Colorado Public Radio. “He wasn’t given any fairness when it came to it. The majority board we could see clearly did not care about the students' voices, about community’s voices.”
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The 4-3 vote to oust the superintendent in Colorado’s third-largest school district—which serves roughly 64,000 students—was widely criticized by school board officials across the state, with accusations that the Douglas County board had violated the state’s open meeting laws.
Wise had supported policies for masks in schools which were scrapped when the board voted in December to do away with the district’s mask mandate even as the Omicron variant surged.
Kaylee Winegar, a newly elected conservative member of the school board, said Friday that Wise’s termination was “more about finding someone who better aligns.” “It’s just what we want with this district is different,” she explained.
In a Feb. 6 letter condemning Wise’s termination, more than a dozen Colorado school board directors wrote that they were “both shocked and disappointed by the unprecedented action” to terminate Wise—who had served in the district with “dignity and honor” for more than 25 years.
“Removing an effective superintendent like Corey Wise without cause, without opportunity for public engagement, and despite strong and vocal pushback from teachers, students, and staff is a failure of governance,” they declared.
Three of the board’s liberal members complained during a Zoom meeting last week, according to the Denver Post, that there had been no vote, meeting, or notice regarding plans to fire Wise with two years left in his contract.
The district closed Thursday as 1,000 teachers, district staffers and parents backed Wise and protested the board. A Change.org petition in support of Wise and demanding the recall of the board’s conservative majority had garnered 25,000 signatures by Tuesday afternoon.
The district’s deputy superintendents, Andy Abner and Danelle Hiatt, will jointly serve as acting superintendent, Board President Mike Peterson said.
Elizabeth Hanson, a board member who opposed Wise’s firing, offered an emotional defense of Wise after the vote.
“I need to be very clear that this decision was not about performance in any way and that this is politics in its ugliest and purest and most destructive form,” she said.“This is an attack on public education and I hope that it is something that will wake up our community, our state, and our country. There are very calculated efforts that are happening right now and only the people have the power to stop that.”
Hanson and two other liberal members of the board, David Ray and Susan Meek, accused the board leaders of violating Colorado’s open meeting laws when they allegedly gave him an “ultimatum” to either resign or be removed from a post that he has held since he was voted into the role last April.
“You all have the votes to do what you want to do. Have the integrity and the honesty to come together and make those decisions publicly, our public deserves that,” Meek said on Friday.
Peterson has dismissed any suggestion that he had violated the state’s open meeting laws.
“There was complete compliance with open meeting requirements and the Sunshine laws,” Peterson said on Friday. “When one director meets with another director whether its text, in person, by phone, or other means even if they're discussing school business that is not a violation.”
Under the state’s open-meeting laws, school board members are required to discuss public business or otherwise take formal action in meetings that are open to the public. They are barred from conducting public business in secret.
But Peterson insisted the meeting was to “allow the superintendent to consider how he wanted things to proceed before joint board action was decided or taken.”
“We stand by how we handled it,” he said.
Peterson declined to comment to The Daily Beast on Tuesday about what prompted the vote in addition to concerns about policy violations. A school district spokesperson, Paula Hans, also did not respond to a request for comment about any concerns raised about the manner of Wise’s firing on Tuesday.
Ray told The Daily Beast in an email that he had received a text from Board Vice President Christy Williams on Jan. 28 asking to “chat” and that she informed him that she and Peterson “had a meeting with Superintendent Wise to give him the ultimatum of either resigning or to be prepared to be replaced by the Board majority.”
Williams and two other newly-elected members of that conservative majority—Winegar and Becky Myers — did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment about the alleged private meeting concerning Wise’s firing.
Wise declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment last week about his imminent firing and couldn’t be reached for comment in the aftermath of the ouster on Tuesday. Ahead of the vote, he had pleaded with board members to “give us a chance, give me a chance, a real chance.”
The ouster comes as school boards have increasingly become key battlegrounds for culture war issues including how issues of race are taught in classrooms and questions of weighing parent rights when it comes to mask and COVID-19 vaccine requirements.
Douglas County's seven-member board was shaken up when the four new conservative members were installed in November, collectively tilting the board to the right and tossing control to conservatives for the first time since 2017.
The candidates also won the backing of the local and state GOP, as well as groups like the 1776 Project PAC, which opposes anti-racist education, NBC News reported.
“I do believe that the new board is going to no longer teach us about things like Black history and LGBTQ diversity, which I believe it's very important to keep in schools. We just want a fair, unbiased education without any politics,” an 8th grade student at Cresthill Middle School, Emily McMahan, told CPR.
Late last month, the board’s conservative majority voted to change an equity policy that Wise had supported from a year ago that called for more diverse hiring practices and efforts to evaluate the district’s curriculum.
The Gazette previously reported that Winegar, who said she drafted the proposal, claimed to have done so in response to “serious and genuine trepidations and worries” about the possibility of the policy leading to Critical Race Theory being taught in Douglas County classrooms.
According to Ray, a group of school administrators had pushed back on any changes, in a letter that was submitted to the board “was submitted without involvement or knowledge of Superintendent Wise.”
“I believe this had a triggering effect for the new board directors that the vast majority of our employees are not in alignment with their agenda,” he said.
