Hundreds protest history class review in Colorado
GOLDEN, Colo. – A suburban Denver school board approved a plan Thursday to review the curriculum in some U.S. history classes, with some changes from the original proposal that sought to promote patriotism and downplay civil disobedience.
Hundreds of students, teachers and parents who have been protesting the proposal for weeks filled the evening school board meeting and watched live video on a screen set up outside.
Some in the audience yelled “resign” and “recall” as the board voted 3-2 to approve a review committee that will include students, parents and administrators.
The board voted over the objections of the panel’s two-member minority, who wanted more time to study the compromise proposal offered by the district’s superintendent.
Students across a majority of the 17 high schools in Colorado’s second-largest school district have left classes in droves over the past few weeks.
The protests began more than a week ago, after the Jefferson County school board proposed creating a committee to review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
The committee’s membership was expanded to include representation by students, parents and administrators, but the history proposal was still on the table.
The changes didn’t appear to satisfy the hundreds of students who have been leaving class to protest in waves. The history class was the first of the AP classes to be reviewed. Students plan more protests.
Board member Julie Williams originally proposed that the committee review materials for classes. She and other backers have said students are being used as pawns by teachers, who are upset about the plan to base raises on an evaluation system and have been calling in sick, forcing school to be canceled some days.
Williams is one of the board’s majority of three new conservative members who were backed by Republicans last year in the officially nonpartisan elections, campaigning on their opposition to a proposed $1 billion tax increase for schools that failed by a wide margin on the ballot.
Minority member Lesley Dahlkemper, a Democrat who was elected to the board in 2011, said the resolution went too far. She noted the movement in other places where state and local education officials have debated opting out of AP U.S. history over complaints that the new courses are un-American. The Texas state board of education, for example, has ordered teachers not to teach AP history.