Douglas County Schools "Modern Trench Warfare"

For decades, Douglas County has been the target of national radical libertarian ideology and culture.  

The cultural Great Divide is being lived in the halls of the Douglas County School District, pitting radical ideologues with national agendas and billionaires financial backing, against those who believe politics have no place in DCSD.  

These timeless articles dive into the foundations of  the DCSD reality...

"It's a Political Prize " The Denver Post by  Jessica Seaman. February 16, 2022

The District has faced partisan school board elections for decades .  

Local school boards have become more partisan recently amid national debates about COVID-19 and how teachers ought to teach about racism but in Douglas County School District, tense, high-profile battles between educators, administrators and parents have a longer history.

The district — which recently saw two protests involving hundreds of teachers and students, allegations of violating state open meeting laws, and the firing of its superintendent all in a span of eight days — faced highly divisive clashes since reformers first took control in 2009.

Douglas County School District was on the “leading edge of the school board elections becoming pretty politicized,” said Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver.

"Culture War Reader - Douglas County School District "- JSNE's inhouse  compilation of published articles, opinions and news reports ...2009 thru 2023.

"The Koch Network Says It Wants to Remake Public Education. That Means  Destroying It, Says the Author of a New Book on the Billionaire Brothers."  Washington Post by Valerie Strauss.  Oct 16, 2019.  

The Koch network is the influential assemblage of groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and more than 600 wealthy individuals who share his pro-business, anti-regulation view of economics and positions on social policy, such as climate change denial.

The focus on K-12 education follows long involvement by the Koch brothers in higher education. As leaders of a conservative movement that believes U.S. higher education is controlled by liberals who indoctrinate young people, they spent as much as an estimated $100 million on programs at hundreds of colleges and universities that support their views.

Astroturfing - Koch Invented the Concept of Fake Front Organizations of "Concerned Citizens"   Wikipedia, Jan 1, 2025.

Use of one or more front groups is one astroturfing technique. These groups typically present themselves as serving the public interest, while actually working on behalf of a corporate or political sponsor. Front groups may resist public policies and advocates that may be damaging to the sponsor's interests by emphasizing minority viewpoints, instilling doubt and publishing counterclaims by corporate-sponsored experts. 

Billionaire backed astroturfs are plentiful in Douglas County in  2025. Examples - Foundation  Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR),  Moms for Liberty (M4L), Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN), Gays Against Groomers (GAG)

 Douglas County Superintendent Honored at Colorado Parent Advocacy Network Launch Event.  Douglas County News Press, by McKenna Harford.  November 14, 2022

 Douglas County School District’s superintendent was honored as part of the launch event for the new organization, Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, which opposes diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in schools. The group promotes parents’ rights and school choice.

 Around 250 people attended the event, including Douglas County school board members Mike Peterson, Christy Williams and Becky Meyers.   The event also featured a panel with Deborah Flora, Erec Smith with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, and Cain Young, founder of Task Force Freedom. The panelists lambasted critical race theory, teachers’ unions and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, while encouraging parents to get involved. 

Several questions the panel addressed focused on giving advice to parents who may be concerned about curriculum in their child’s classroom. In response to a question about why schools are assuming the role of parents, Flora blamed it on the spread of Marxism and the belief that children belong to the state.

"How the Far-Right Uses Educational Takeover to Impose Its Agenda."  LitHub, September 2024 by Jason Stanley. 

 In recent years, for example, the United States has seen a wave of right-wing political interference in education focused on banning certain concepts, authors, and books from schools’ libraries and curricula. The unstated goal of these bans is to erase the perspectives and histories of marginalized groups, including most prominently the history of Black Americans, whose ancestors were enslaved and brutally subjugated in this country.

These bans target especially concepts and theories used to explain how that subjugation operated, how it has changed over time and persisted to this day, and how it might be challenged—concepts such as structural racism, intersectionality, and critical race theory (CRT). The concept of structural racism, for instance, is targeted because it explains racial subjugation not in terms of individual bigotry, but as a result of underlying systems and practices—whether in housing, schooling, banking, policing, or the criminal legal system. It explains, for example, that the racial wealth gap in America (which is so extreme that Black Americans possess just over 15 percent of white Americans’ wealth) is a product of racist policies such as discriminatory lending and redlining. The concept of intersectionality, introduced by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, reveals the particularly acute harms inflicted on groups that are at the intersection of multiple oppressions.