That’s when the crazy school board meetings started in this county that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 by at least a 30-point margin. In them, women and children sob, and men yell at board members who include a 110-pound grandma named Sue Patterson. Historic levels of interest — and animosity — in school board races have risen
across the state and nation.
“Woodland Park is a small town, so I do routinely run into friends and enemies everywhere I go, and I didn’t have enemies before I joined the school board,” said Dave Illingworth in a May interview with The Federalist after MSNBC and former
Vice reporter Antonia Hylton visited the mountain town.
Incoming Drone Fire
In her report on Woodland Park, Hylton called the district’s
original documents-focused civics curriculum created by the National Association of Scholars “dangerous” and featured a teacher describing it as fascist.
Much of Hylton’s work
involves delegitimizing conservative
participation in education and
promoting LGBT and
critical race extremism in schools.
District employees made secret recordings and leaked them to NBC, the outlet
reported, one of
multiple such incidents that prompted the board to prohibit employees from trashing the district’s elected leadership in public. Teachers unions are
suing to overturn the policy.
Hylton interviewed Matt Gawlowski on camera, who told his neighbors, “Don’t think that your district is safe.” State
records show Gawlowski has
donated $2,645 to candidates
opposing the board, and
a Julie Gawlowski claiming the same address
gave $1,000. They’re among the opposition candidates’ largest donors.
Hylton has even
linked parents opposing drag shows for children with “domestic extremism,” following the FBI
investigating parents as domestic terrorists for protesting school lockdowns, teaching kids explicit sexual information, and teaching kids to hate people for their skin color.
But in Woodland Park, the angry parents are different. They want the school board to
stop promoting racial unity, sexual privacy, parents’ rights, and patriotism.
“The teachers union wants to take us out because every other conservative board in America is going through this,” Patterson, who is not up for reelection this year, told The Federalist. “We’re not going to back down.”
In January 2022, the Woodland Park teachers union’s president told a new recruit the chapter is working with a regional union, the Pikes Peak Education Association, “for other methods of disruption” besides school board protests. PPEA is an affiliate of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country and a Democratic Party politics kingmaker.
A local news article
says that same union president, David Graf, “taught civil disobedience for eight years” in the town’s high school. Graf no longer works for the school district and the class has been canceled, but clearly some locals are practicing union tactics for how to take a town hostage until they get what they want.
“If they create layoffs, if they create students having poor educational record, or leaving the schools, that’s all worth it to them so long as they get to proclaim the message that this is what happens when you stand up to the union. If you part with the union, your school district will burn. That’s what they want,” Illingworth told The Federalist in a phone interview last week.
Finally, speaking of the far right and Louisiana, enjoy this rare look into what the other side really thinks of new Speaker Mike Johnson. The following clip a rant by long-time democrat political advisor James Carville, the “Ragin’ Cajun,” angrily warning other democrats about Mike Johnson’s terrifying sincerity and the threat posed by “nice” “Christian Nationalists.”
