Police Reform: News Miner 88
Policing the police, homeschooling stats, Jeffco and Estes Park school boards, Prop. HH, and more.
Reminder: My new book, Getting Over Jesus: Finding Meaning and Morals without God, is now available!
Policing the Police: Complete Colorado published my new column, “Colorado has room for improvement on police accountability,” in which I cite reporting from COLab. I conclude, “[A] good start would be to stop cops from stealing people’s stuff under color of law, prosecute officers for violent crimes that they commit, and ensure that abusive cops never again work as police officers. We, the people of Colorado, deserve that much at least. And among the first to benefit will be the many decent police officers working tirelessly around the state to help keep people safe.” Read the entire piece.
Threats: Ken Buck reports he’s received death threats for voting “against Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as House Speaker.” As Kyle Clark notes, threats of violence from various “conservative” individuals and groups in Colorado by this point come as no surprise.
Homeschooling Stats: Sara Wilson writes, “In fall 2019, there were 7,880 full-time home-schooled students in the state, according to the Colorado Department of Education. In fall 2020, that number doubled to 15,773. It has dropped as more students return to traditional public school learning, but there were still 8,674 home-schooled students in fall 2022. . . .” But then a couple lines down she reports, “A census household survey from 2020 . . . found that the percentage of families in Colorado that home-school their children jumped from from 3.4% in the spring to 8.7% in the fall.” Apparently Wilson was not interested in the large disparity between the official numbers and the self-reported numbers. The Department of Education notes, “In fall 2000, there were 724,508 students in Colorado’s public schools” (do the math). If only someone had written a column explaining why the official homeschooling numbers reflect only a fraction of “homeschooling” families! Oh wait, I did. I pointed out, “Many people who think of themselves as ‘homeschooling’ actually are enrolled in private ‘umbrella’ (remote) schools or even in online public schools.” I also mention this in a more-recent column.
Jeffco School Board: The teachers’ union likes Erin Kenworthy and Michelle Applegate, so I probably wouldn’t like them. The two conservative/“reformer” candidates are Amara Hildebrand and Thomas Wicke, who recently appeared on Deborah Flora’s radio show. Flora was involved in the documentary Whose Children Are They, of which Heidi Beedle is quite critical. Both Hildebrand and Wicke replied to a Christian voter guide in which they said they agree that “teachers have the right to refer to a student according to the pronoun corresponding to the student’s biological sex at birth,” that “biological males should [not] be allowed to compete in girls’ sports,” and that “sex education should be age appropriate, emphasizing the abstinence-based model”—so much for parental choice! So our choices are between union stooges and religious fanatics—great. (There are two other candidates about whom I know little, Dawn Fritz and Joel Newton.)
Estes Park School Board Fight: The leftward Colorado Times Recorder is doing a bang-up job recently. Logan Davis’s latest is about the fight over school board in Estes Park. A group of parents there tried to open “an expansion campus of an existing charter school, Loveland Classical School” (LCS). The district turned them down, based partly on declining enrollment in the small district. LCS has clear ties to the religious right: “[A] local pastor, Bruce Finger[, . . .] a member of the board of Loveland Classical School, is also the pastor of Cornerstone Church of the Estes Valley—the location proposed to house LCS’s Estes expansion.” Partly in reaction to the rejection of the charter, conservatives are trying to take over the school board, Davis writes. Andrew Wommack’s religious-authoritarian organization (my term) “Truth & Liberty” has released survey results favorable to the conservative candidates. Here’s a detail that I found humorous: Estes Park, apparently with no sense of irony, has a “five-year plan” to improve academic performance.
Montezuma-Cortez School Board Race: James O’Rourke: A candidate for this school district posted, among other things, social media posts mocking the police murder of George Floyd. Ugh.
Preparation HH: Kyle Clark does a great job taking apart a deceptive TV ad promoting Prop. HH. See also a critical CBS 4 piece.
Mussels: Ugh: As 9News reports, Colorado Parks and Wildlife plans to empty the entire lake at Highline Lake State Park near Fruita, and kill all the fish in it, in an attempt to eradicate zebra mussels.
Masterpiece: The Colorado Supreme Court will “hear the case of a Christian baker who refused to make a cake celebrating a gender transition.” At this point the legal actions against the baker in question are just harassment.
Housing Occupancy: As of mid-September, CBS reports, the Fort Collins city council was looking at expanding occupancy rules that had limited “the number of unrelated individuals living in one household to three.”
YIMBY: KUNC: “Fort Collins has passed new land use code that increases building density and allows ADUs, or accessory dwelling units.” Good.
Golden Gate State Park: Here’s a photo of a recent hike there.