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Directors Peterson, Williams, Winegar and Myers continue to bypass board governance and show their allegiances to their supporters rather than the ENTIRE DCSD community. Just before 3:00 p.m. yesterday, the Kids First supporters received an email announcing that President Peterson would be holding a Special Board Meeting on Wednesday evening to discuss the Superintendent vacancy and the future direction of DCSD.
The email came from Steven Peck* and asked them to attend the special meeting to send a clear message that “We support this board and we are not going away.” The email also requested Kids First supporters to provide supportive public comments and send emails to the board directors. Curiously, the agenda for this meeting was not yet public, showing clear allegiances and backroom conversations with their supporters.
In a show of transparency to the entire DCSD community, Directors Ray and Meek shared the contents of the email from BOE Secretary Myers with the discussion topics for the special meeting on their BoE Facebook pages last night. The agenda was made public on the District website a little after 10:00 this morning.
As these unilateral antics persist, is it possible to find a path to restorative healing? This majority board keeps claiming it wants to bring the DCSD community together, yet it continues to keep widening the divide; they demonize teachers and community members for standing up for public education by claiming those who participated in the rally earlier this month didn’t care about our students, they ran on keeping politics out of the boardroom and classroom, yet they continue to push an agenda from the far-right at the expense of public education. Majority board members do not allow and, at times, ignore input from anyone other than those who fall in line with the agenda they are tasked with implementing. And whose agenda is it?
The playbook being executed by Peterson, Williams, Winegar and Myers appears to be straight from the Reform Board’s efforts during their tenure, 2009-2017, and it is becoming almost irrefutable that the current DCSD board majority is not ‘Kids First,” but “Reformers 2.0.”
This hostile takeover of our school district is eerily similar to the destruction implemented by the Reform Board, yet Peterson, Williams, Winegar and Myers deny any connections to them. The email authored by Peck confirms that link, and the board majority’s resistance to talk to any mainstream media, and instead speak only to their supporters through the echo chambers of far-right media outlets.
Finding common ground within the DCSD community may still be possible, but the actions of these four illustrate a lack of interest in taking that path. Including members of the minority board in decision making and agenda setting would be an authentic first step; inviting one of them to serve in an officer position could make a real difference in starting the healing process. And to address the lack of input from perhaps the most important voices in our district, our teachers, these board majority directors could start the conversation to ensure they have a seat at the table as this new board majority takes DCSD in a new direction.
*Who is Steven Peck?
Peck is a former DCSD Reform Board member and Leadership Program of the Rockies alumnus. He was appointed to replace former director Doug Benevento, (also a Reform Board) who resigned in 2016. With Benevento’s departure, the board was split 3-3 between Reformers and pro-public education directors. As the president, Meghann Silverthorn (also a Reformer) cast the deciding vote for Peck. The appointment wasn’t without controversy, and like recent antics by the current BoE majority, minority directors were left out of the loop; Directors David Ray and Wendy Vogl were quoted in the Denver Post as not being made aware of Peck’s swearing in ceremony until after the fact.