A Denver school board member’s job with the state’s largest teachers union raises questions about potential conflicts of interest that could open the door for legal action against Colorado’s largest K-12 system, ethics and education experts say.
staffers first raised concerns about board Vice President Monica Hunter’s employment with the earlier this year. They’ve been renewed more recently by the board’s president amid ongoing disagreements among the school district’s leadership.
Experts said Hunter’s job as the union’s director of human and civil rights is not a conflict of interest by itself. Rather, they said, actions she takes in her roles as both an elected school board member and an employee of the teachers union can present ethical dilemmas given that DPS and the CEA can have competing interests.
“Itap incredibly concerning if the people writing the checks work for the people who receive the checks,” said Jonathan E. Collins, professor of political science and education at . “This places a major constraint on accountability.”
Both Hunter and the CEA have defended her dual roles, arguing that the school board member does not directly or indirectly benefit from agreements DPS strikes with local unions.
“I have never been advised to recuse myself from a specific board vote or matter because of my employment with the Colorado Education Association,” Hunter said. “Voters knew where I worked, and so did the district, when I was elected. Now, nearly a year after my election, as I have continued to hold the district accountable, these baseless claims continue to arise.”
Hunter was elected last year and her term on the board expires in 2029. As a DPS school board member, she is paid by the district and can earn as much as $33,000 per year for her board duties.
Ethics and education experts said Hunter should recuse herself from votes involving the district’s unions, including the . The local union is an affiliate of the CEA, which represents about 40,000 educators statewide.
“It doesn’t mean that anything she votes on is guaranteed to be compromised by her position with the teachers union,” Collins said. But, he added, teachers are major constituents for a school district, and the union is “a special interest group that is charged with pursuing compensation for teachers.”
A majority of DPS’s billion-dollar budget goes toward paying employee salaries. While district staffers negotiate contracts with DPS unions, including the DCTA, the school board ultimately approves the agreements that determine teacher salaries and benefits.
Colorado K-12 districts are largely left to govern themselves when it comes to ethical and conflict-of-interest concerns. Neither the nor the state’s has the ability to intervene, which leaves the responsibility to school boards themselves.
The most severe punishment an elected school board can take against members is to censure — or rebuke — them for their behavior. A school board does not have the ability to remove a member from office.
But education experts said the lack of outside enforcement over ethical concerns leaves Colorado school districts vulnerable to lawsuits or other legal action when there is a potential conflict of interest involving a board member.
Hunter sits in on the board’s executive sessions — which are closed to the public — and information from those meetings may not be shared with others, including the union, said Derek W. Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.
Problems could also arise, he said, if a company bidding with DPS loses out on a contract and there are concerns about a director’s conflict of interest.
“Itap just bizarre they don’t have anything in place” to address conflicts, Collins said. “…Without any local or state agency there with teeth that can enforce ethics violations, what you’re really in position for is for there to be some other violation to occur through the conflict of interest that then triggers some sort of lawsuit or legal action.”
A situation similar to Hunter’s recently placed the ’s contract with its teachers union in legal jeopardy because a school board member who voted for the $105 million deal serves on the board of directors of the California Teachers Association, the reported.
The Oakland board voted 5-0 to approve the contract, but if the director who works with the teachers union is found to have violated California’s conflict-of-interest laws, a court could overturn and void the contract, the newspaper reported.
“Itap a scandal waiting to happen,” Collins said of the situation at DPS.
Ethical concerns raised by DPS leadership
Emails obtained by The Denver Post highlight DPS leaders’ concerns about Hunter’s employment with the CEA and actions she has taken in her role as a school board member — complaints echoed by board President Xóchitl Gaytán earlier this month as part of the allegations of policy violations that she and Superintendent Alex Marrero have made against Hunter and a second director, Donald “D.J.” Torres, in recent weeks.
Gaytán and Marrero have also accused Hunter of making antisemitic comments about a colleague, and the board voted Sept. 17 to launch a third-party investigation into that specific allegation.
The dispute between DPS and the CEA regarding Hunter’s employment played out behind the scenes ahead of that Sept. 17 board meeting, during which directors were initially expected to discuss the conflict-of-interest concerns. But directors opted to postpone any discussion about Gaytán’s other accusations.
Director Marlene De La Rosa said she wants the board to discuss the conflict-of-interest allegations against Hunter so that the elected body can better understand what potential legal liabilities DPS faces when certain votes take place.
“Anything that is possibly a legal liability on the district should be discussed and brought to the public,” she said.
Board member John Youngquist advocated for the outside investigation into the allegation of antisemitism, but sought to have the board drop any further discussion of Gaytán’s additional accusations, including Hunter’s alleged conflict of interest.
“Unless there is other information — which there doesn’t seem to be — the furthering of the conversation and the accusation just seems more harassing than anything,” Youngquist said. “…I don’t see any viable potential for Monica to experience financial gain by participating in those decisions.”
Earlier this month, DPS General Counsel Aaron Thompson sent a letter to the CEA, saying that district leaders were concerned Hunter’s actions on the school board could run afoul of state ethics laws given she is on the union’s payroll.
Thompson highlighted a letter Hunter and two other board members sent Marrero earlier this year that advised the superintendent to voluntarily recognize the districtap professional and technical employees’ and office managers’ right to unionize and begin bargaining for a contract.
“Vice President Hunter, therefore, used her governmental position to advocate an official labor-relations outcome sought by an organization operating within the organizational structure of her employer,” Thompson wrote.
Hunter also did not recuse herself from at least two board votes this year involving employee pay and other benefits, despite working for the CEA.
She voted to approve a contract for DPS’s facility managers last month and to keep as a health insurance provider for employees for at least one more year. The Kaiser vote, in February, placed Hunter and other members who voted in favor at odds with Marrero’s recommendation to drop the insurer because of its costs.
“If an actual conflict is ever clearly identified by DPS general counsel and confirmed by independent counsel, I will follow the law and recuse myself from that specific matter,” Hunter said. “…What I will not accept is the use of vague and unsupported conflict allegations as a blanket demand that I abstain from voting on collective bargaining agreements, employee benefits or matters involving workers’ rights.”
DPS spokesman Bill Good said district leaders don’t believe any contracts with unions or vendors voted on by Hunter would be invalidated over potential ethical violations because those decisions, including the Kaiser deal and the facility managers’ contract, received support from the board’s majority.
However, he said, the district would be concerned should Hunter be the deciding vote in matters where her employment with the CEA could pose a conflict of interest.
“The districtap objective is compliance with Colorado’s conflict-of-interest laws and the board’s governance policies,” Good said in a statement. “DPS is not seeking to prohibit Vice President Hunter from serving on the board, visiting schools in her official capacity, or performing her lawful employment responsibilities with CEA. The districtap concern is ensuring that those responsibilities remain separate when they intersect.”
Still, the Kaiser decision is an example of when Hunter should probably have recused herself from a vote, said Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously served as executive director of the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission.
“Every vote she takes is going to have to be scrutinized separately,” said Feldman, who is now chair of the . “…It sounds like she’s not being careful enough to keep those two jobs separate.”
Hunter calls allegations ‘retaliation’
In a July 30 letter to Gaytán, Marrero expressed concern about Hunter holding office hours with district employees as part of her job with the CEA. Hunter, he alleged, has repeatedly demanded the district launch investigations into staff based on information she learned from her visits to schools as a union official.
“That conflict becomes particularly significant when she uses access obtained as a board member to receive or advance employee complaints that overlap with her union responsibilities,” he wrote. “This conflict was presented to her by general counsel. After this, she exhibited adverse treatment towards general counsel and lobbied other board member(s) against him and asked me to fire him.”
Hunter denied the allegation that she sought Thompson’s termination and called the accusations made by Gaytán and district leaders “retaliation.”
Marrero’s letter, Hunter noted, was sent three days after the board and superintendent met behind closed doors to discuss his contract and performance.
“The timing of these attacks is another desperate, retaliatory and baseless attempt to silence the only Black member of this board,” she said. “It is sad that people endorsed by the union are now fully engaging in union-busting tactics.
“The allegations that I demanded Aaron Thompson to be fired are false, and repeating them does not make them true,” Hunter added.
Union officials have called DPS’s conflict-of-interest concerns “overbroad and speculative.”
While Hunter is paid by the union, the CEA’s membership dues are set by the state’s average teacher salary and not those earned by members of local unions such as at the DCTA, Kris Gomez, general counsel and interim executive director for the union, wrote in a letter to DPS earlier this month.
Hunter’s compensation, specifically, is set by the CEA’s union contract with staff, Gomez wrote.
“The board does not raise a legitimate or credible claim of conflict of interest that arises from Ms. Hunter’s employment with CEA and does not have legitimate grounds to call for her to recuse herself from voting on matters of public concern in the performance of her board duties,” Gomez said.
But education experts said itap not just votes that Hunter needs to be mindful of in her dual roles. It’s also possible she could receive information or documents that she wouldn’t otherwise have access to while working for the union and vice versa, they said.
“There’s all kinds of subtle ways that that conflict of interest can manifest,” Collins said. “…It may not be impacting her pay, but the decisions are impacting her (union) colleagues.”
