Dougco School Board President's Secret Recording: Sex's Creep Into Classrooms and More

The biggest surprise at the Douglas County Board of Education meeting on the night of March 29 was how few surprises there were.

The goal of the meeting was to approve the contract for controversial former Douglas County School District interim superintendent Erin Kane to take the position on a permanent basis following the February 4 firing of Corey Wise, her predecessor. And despite the absence of boardmember David Ray, who boycotted the session (see his statement below), that's exactly what happened. Those present approved a salary for Kane of $250,000 annually through June 2025, with board president Mike Peterson running the proceedings smoothly and professionally, without any eyebrow-raising remarks.

But that wasn't the case last week, as demonstrated by an audio recording of a private event at which Peterson was the special guest.

Peterson has been at the center of a maelstrom over Wise's dismissal, which was preceded by a staff sickout and student demonstrations and prompted both a lawsuit alleging violations of Colorado Open Meetings Law (COML) and the subsequent granting of a preliminary injunction that prohibited determining policy through multiple one-on-one meetings outside public view. But during an appearance before the Lincoln Club of Colorado on March 23, the day after the four-person conservative bloc of Peterson, Becky Myers, Christy Williams and Kaylee Winegar pushed through Kane's hiring, Peterson said that his only regret about canning Wise was that it didn't happen sooner.

In addition, Peterson explained that he'd supported Kane over Danny Winsor, the only other finalist for the superintendent position, because he thought she was better equipped to squash "activism"; claimed that the uproar over the Wise matter was part of a grand conspiracy by the Douglas County Federation, a union that advocates on behalf of teachers but doesn't have a collective bargaining agreement with the district; maintained that the method by which the board's conservative majority engineered Wise's ouster might have run afoul of open meetings laws in several other states but was perfectly legal in Colorado; and raised a warning about sexual material "creeping" into classrooms.

The recording was obtained by the DougCo Collective, which a spokesperson describes as "a newly formed local nonprofit 501(c)4 focused on educating the community on public education issues that impact the district. DougCo Collective believes in quality, inclusive and equitable public education. We are a collective of members of the Douglas County, Colorado, community. We are pro-public education parents, teachers and staff, students and community members who care about the success of our school district."

The spokesman emphasizes, "We believe the Board of Education has every right to make personnel changes — and the new majority most certainly could have done so by following established policies and procedures. But by choosing to fire Wise outside the process and by circumventing COML and any discussions with the three veteran BoE directors [Elizabeth Hanson, Susan Meek and David Ray], they created much of the distrust and chaos that has become the new normal in the DCSD community."

The March luncheon of the Lincoln Club of Colorado, which has been "promoting Republican principles since 1918," was billed as "Taking Back Our Schools: The State of Education in Douglas County." According to the DougCo Collective, "The event was closed to the media, and attendees were asked to identify themselves if they were with the media or campaigns and asked to leave. One attendee who was in neither category attended and recorded Peterson’s speech."

The DougCo Collective says that it's concerned about a number of assertions Peterson made during that speech — among them "that students are being indoctrinated by teachers, who he claims are bringing supplemental materials about sex into the classroom. He said it was 'creeping into the district.'"

Kane "is going to put academics first over having activism in the classroom," Peterson contended. "We've been stomping out those fires as a board, but that's not my job as a boardmember. ... And Danny Winsor, the other person in the finals, is an honorable man, and a fair man — a very well-respected man. He would have been excellent for our district as well. My doubts were around his ability to fight the battle with activism in our schools."

Peterson told the group that the teachers' union's plan to undermine the efforts of the board's majority has three main pillars. The first involves calling him and his three cohorts, all of whom were elected in November 2021, "horrible people...crank up that narrative and make this as noisy as possible with their media allies." The second entails a recall effort that supposedly started before the quartet had formally taken office. And the third allegedly centers on the "two Cs — collective bargaining and curriculum."

In Peterson's words, "You're gonna see the collective bargaining come in, that self-licking ice cream cone. Where the teachers' union funnels money into candidates to get elected to the school board, then they negotiate with the candidates that they funded for more union dues, and on and on it goes...that's where they come in. You get the revision of history, you get the social agendas, and every minute where they spend time on these other activists items is a minute your child was not in there learning the core of literacy, of writing, of math, of science, of those skills that will enable them to be a constructive member of society however they choose."

The new boardmembers had been in office for a few months when they disappeared Wise. "If I could rewind, do it all over again, I probably would have done a superintendent thing right away instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt," Peterson said. "But we did — we gave the superintendent the benefit of the doubt."

Peterson, Myers, Williams and Winegar are now facing a lawsuit for how they conducted their business. "What is being alleged is that myself and the other three members broke Colorado laws. Did we break open meeting laws? Yes, we did...in Hawaii, Ohio, Nevada, California, which is where the judge cited out of state law, which has similar provisions to Colorado," he told the group. "Do I think we broke Colorado meeting laws? No, I do not."

Still, he continued, "Would I go back from a political aspect of how that whole thing was weaponized back to narrative and noise, and do it differently in hindsight from a political aspect? Absolutely. I would have been smarter. We’re new boardmembers."

Westword has reached out to Peterson and the Douglas County School District for comment about the contents of the recording. Listen to it below.
Here's the statement David Ray issued on the morning of March 28 to explain why he wouldn't be taking part in the meeting last night: "Given that [the] meeting is scheduled for the sole purpose of approving the superintendent’s contract, I will not be in attendance. Speaking as one director, I believe this meeting is the culmination of a series of unethical and unacceptable practices. These include the wrongful termination of the former superintendent, a deeply flawed selection process, and decisions/discussions that were made outside of the public eye. I look forward to a day when the Board can refocus its work on learning, the well-being of ALL students, and supporting our employees who make this possible."