CASTLE ROCK — The Douglas County School Board is less than a week away from going beyond the two-month window in which it is required to select a seventh board member, and it appears no closer to reaching consensus on the issue.
That means it will be up to Meghann Silverthorn, as president of the board, to make the selection. The 60-day appointment period, which began with , ends Nov. 7.
The new board member likely would take the oath of office Nov. 15.
At a Tuesday study session, board member Anne-Marie Lemieux said she was concerned that the evening’s meeting wasn’t designated a special meeting that allows for public comment.
“I believe it is imperative that the public weigh in on this,” she said. “My concern is we cut off the voice of the people.”
Silverthorn said the public had plenty of opportunity to voice their views on the appointment at an Oct. 18 board meeting but chose not to. At that meeting, Silverthorn said she offered to hold a special meeting in the future on the topic but that none of her colleagues took her up on her offer.
“I did leave the meeting with a clear notion that no director wanted a special meeting,” she said.
Silverthorn made it clear Oct. 18 that she wanted Steve Peck, a health care executive at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, to fill the empty seat. She was joined in her preference for Peck by two colleagues, Jim Geddes and Judith Reynolds.
The board’s other three members — Lemieux, David Ray and Wendy Vogel — have objected to Peck’s appointment, saying he had stirred controversy in the community through his affiliation with the conservative Leadership Program of the Rockies. They put up the names of three other candidates for consideration.
At the Oct. 18 meeting, . The process laid bare just how divided the leaders of Colorado’s third-largest school district are, with half the board calling the other half ideologically rigid and uncompromising.
Ray, on his Facebook page, wrote on Saturday that he had entered the selection process for a new board director with an open mind, hoping that colleagues would settle on a second or third choice to reach consensus. Silverthorn, Geddes and Reynolds were unwilling to do that, he wrote.
“Apologetically, it has taken me a full year to come to the conclusion that our Board of Education is broken,” he wrote. “And while I subscribe to the notion that ‘you are either part of the solution, or you are part of the problem,’ today I am at a loss.”
