Douglas County, Colorado, will have a crucial election this fall between its current board majority and challengers. Some say it is the most important school board race in the nation.
Douglas County is the most affluent school district in the state. Yet wealthy Coloradans have showered money on pro-privatization school board members and candidates. On the other side is a pro-public education slate.
The rightwing majority consists of four members on a board of seven. The majority created a voucher program. Its anti-teachers policies have led to a high rate of exodus by experienced teachers.
The Douglas County voucher program is currently under appeal in federal courts.
Two slates are competing in the race for school board.
The differences between them are stark if you read this perceptive article. One is tied to corporate reform/Republican circles, the other is actually pro-public school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Douglas County Schools are a HUGE MESS because of charters and now the voucher issues. Would someone help knock some sense into Douglas County residents?
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Thank you for shining light on our CO school district. I’m a mom, and local resident, with kids in our public schools. We had amazing schools and outstanding teachers in this district, as our student and school performances (in the past) showed. Over the last 7 years, outside interests and forces (which most residents and/or parents haven’t really understood), have been decimating our schools, and causing the loss of our best teachers. I never realized that high functioning, successful public school districts in wealthy suburban areas were such attractive targets for private “for-profit” national education corporations. I’m realizing that our local tax dollars, collected for “public” purposes, are the focus of BIG corporate cash-grabs. Vouchers and charters are strangling our once thriving schools. Please help us shed light on this destructive trend, and help us stand up to it, as a community. Our own elected school board members (the “reformers”) have been selling out our district, and hiring their own friends and colleagues, spending obscene amounts of money, with little accountability, or transparency. I wish we could personally sue each one of them for negligence, collusion, and damages to the community, and our kids.
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I walked one of my precincts today.
Out of fifty people I only talked with
One who was pro-charter, we had a good conversation.
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