Neither side in the Jefferson County school board controversy will ever be a candidate for political sainthood, but I’m particularly angry with the pro-recall faction. They’ve forced me, as a voter in the middle, into a premature electoral dilemma: allow an incumbent majority that is more conservative than I am to finish their term, or consent to setting the district on a path that could jeopardize the future of the charter school that has served my daughter and many other Jeffco kids so well.
The pro-recall faction is tactically downplaying its antipathy towards choice and charters, because showing it would be bad politics. Rather than proactively find avenues for dialogue and reconciliation, the faction’s leaders have chosen a different strategy: cover up the antipathy, and divert voters’ attention to other questions.
Reconciliation with the charter school community could have been an opportunity for the faction to prove it values dialogue and openness. But that hasn’t happened, perhaps because reconciliation with charters is anathema to too many of the faction’s number.
Why the faction’s hardliners needlessly insist on casting charters as an enemy is odd, considering how diverse Jeffco charter schools really are. I served on the governing board of my daughter’s charter school for three years. When I listen to someone from the faction explain why they’re against charters, it’s almost like they’re describing schools run by space aliens on another planet. It certainly doesn’t describe the school I served. But that hardly matters, apparently. When it comes to charter schools, hard-core opponents are as impervious to facts as any climate-change denier I’ve encountered. So, to be clear:
• The school was not part of a conglomerate. Having one campus in Golden and one in Wheat Ridge hardly comes close to that.
• We never sent profits out of state, because we didn’t have profits. As a non-profit, the only entity outside of Colorado we reported to was the Internal Revenue Service.
• We didn’t pick and choose who got in. Openings were filled through a blind lottery to which all Jeffco families had equal access.
• We were not ideologically right-wing. If anything, our community’s culture leaned liberal.
Like other Jeffco charters, our school was locally grown, locally governed, and answerable to the Jeffco board academically and financially. Still, the anti-charter hardliners in the pro-recall faction want to throw what we accomplished under the bus.
When Barbara Jordan gave the keynote speech at the 1992 convention nominating Bill Clinton for president, she exhorted her fellow Democrats to remember that change alone was not enough: “Change — from what, to what?” For her, change had little virtue unless it led towards justice and fairness for all. But angry factions don’t think that far ahead. That’s what is so scary about the Jeffco recall effort and the limited choices voters will have on the ballot. While I voted against the current majority in the regular election, I’m not convinced that removing them mid-term and handing power to this faction would leave Jeffco as a whole better off.
David Hurlbut lives in Golden and served on the Compass Montessori Charter School’s board of directors from 2009 to 2012.
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