Colorado Springs – Douglas Bruce is known as a frugal man, not a giver of gifts.
But when he tried last spring to give pocket- size copies of the U.S. Constitution to high-school seniors, two Colorado Springs-area districts said “no, thanks.”
Lewis-Palmer District 38 and Fountain-Fort Carson District 8 did not accept Bruce’s booklets because they said it would set a precedent for districts receiving products from the outside.
Bruce, author of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights and an El Paso County commissioner, gave more than 5,500 copies in May to seniors in more than a dozen other school districts and the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. The copies were paid for by Bruce’s nonprofit, Active Citizens Together. Next spring, Bruce said he plans to pass out 10,000 copies of the Constitution to seniors throughout southern Colorado.
“Anybody that is going to be a citizen and a voter, I’m happy to have this,” Bruce said. “I believe that they are not getting in government schools proper education in limits on government. Government has a conflict of interest; they don’t want people to know how to limit the government.”
Robin Adair, a spokeswoman for Lewis-Palmer, said Bruce offered to hand out copies of the Constitution to “each of our graduating class.”
“The administration, the school board and the principal talked about it and reached a consensus where we didn’t want to set a precedent where anybody could come hand out stuff to our graduates. We didn’t want to turn graduation into that,” Adair said.
“It’s not because we have anything against the Constitution. In fact, it’s a lovely document. But if they let him hand out something that he thought was innocuous then, of course, we can’t say no to anyone else,” Adair said.
Bruce said he made it clear that copies of the Constitution were to be given to seniors, but “I said nothing about giving them at graduation or interfering with the ceremony or my being there. That was a contrived excuse by Lewis-Palmer School District.”
The city’s largest district looked at the documents before it let schools hand them out.
“He brought us a copy. We looked at them, there was no propaganda, it was just the Constitution, the declaration, some quotes, and we couldn’t find any reason that we should not accept them, so we did,” said Elaine Naleski, spokeswoman for Colorado Springs School District 11. “He brought them late in the year and we already had started graduations, so we let the schools decide how they wanted to distribute them.”
Bruce said he received an e-mail from Fountain-Fort Carson’s then-superintendent Dwight Jones that the district didn’t want the gift. Bruce said Jones, now the state’s education commissioner, did not provide a reason.
Bruce said he contacted the district’s school-board president and was again told that the district would not accept the booklets.
Fountain-Fort Carson did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
