The Denver School Board is supposed to be bought and paid for by Dark Money, so public education advocates rejoiced when they elected one person to the seven-member Board.

Jeannie Kaplan, a former member of the board and now a tireless activist, tells the story here. She says it was EXTRAORDINARY!

“Dr. Carrie Olson, 33 year DPS teacher, soundly defeated incumbent, “reformer,” Mike Johnson., and she did so with $33,747 in her campaign war chest and a completely volunteer “staff.” The dollars and vote totals cited in this post can be found here and here. As of the last campaign finance report Mr. Johnson had raised $101,336 on his own and was the beneficiary of $42,777 from Democrats for Education Reform( DFER) dark money and $6320 Stand for Children dark money. His 11,193 votes cost his campaign $13.44 each; Carrie’s 11,121 votes cost her $2.73 per vote. He spent almost 5 times as much per vote as she. Extraordinary.”

Jeannie’s underfunded (almost unfounded) Group is called ODOS (Our Denver Our Schools). In one race, it supported a dynamic high school graduate named Tay Anderson. The union, however, decided to support a candidate who is from TFA and works for the TFA leadership training program, which grooms TFA Teachers to get involved in political roles. The latter candidate swamped poor Tay, and now TFA has two seats on the Denver board.

As you can see, Denver is a hotbed of political intrigue and big money.

But ODOS is celebrating because it elected one member to the board.

Given the odds, that was quite an accomplishment.