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Principles over popularity: Lessons from the Declaration of Independence for Douglas County Schools
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Local, Top Stories

Principles over popularity: Lessons from the Declaration of Independence for Douglas County Schools

By Laureen Boll | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Douglas County School District (DCSD) board members will be deciding later this year whether to resume formal collective bargaining with the Douglas County Federation (a local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers), and a primary deciding factor will be the results of a survey of teachers and staff.  This follows union pressure earlier in 2026 and comes after years of the federation advocating for a return to a contract model. The political composition of the DCSD school board has shifted back and forth over the decades, reflecting the community’s own evolving priorities. In 2012, a reform-minded board allowed the long-standing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) to expire, moving the district to operat...
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Drake Middle School removed “America, Reloading.” Then another poem fight started.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Local, Top Stories

Drake Middle School removed “America, Reloading.” Then another poem fight started.

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Drake Middle School parents were told last year that students could write spoken-word poems about politics or divisive issues if they personally chose those topics. This spring, one DMS student wrote a pro-life poem about abortion. School officials told the student she could turn the poem in for credit, but could not read it aloud in class. Parents had already spent more than a year warning DMS and Jeffco leaders about the school’s SLAM poetry unit before the story spread nationally. Parents objected to SLAM poetry unit in 2025 Parents began emailing DMS leadership in 2025 after students watched “America, Reloading” and “The Star Spanglish Banner” in class. One email sent to teacher Tanisha Lee and DMS principal Jill Kline des...
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Jeffco Parents Demand Answers After Hidden Safety Audit Flagged 153 Threats
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DENVER7, Approved, Local

Jeffco Parents Demand Answers After Hidden Safety Audit Flagged 153 Threats

By Maggie Bryan | Denver7 A safety audit completed a month before the Evergreen High School shooting flagged 153 threats in Jeffco schools, including a hit list with around 15 names. JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. — Jefferson County Public Schools parents are demanding answers after learning school district leaders received a third-party safety audit flagging 153 imminent threats — including a hit list with 15 names — a month before the shooting at Evergreen High School, but never released it to the public. The audit was conducted by student safety firm Gaggle, which was given access to the district's Google Workspace, including Google Drive and email accounts belonging to students, from February to April 2025. In the report, the company said it looked for questionable cont...
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Colorado Tax Data Raises Questions About Calls For Higher Taxes On Wealthy
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, State

Colorado Tax Data Raises Questions About Calls For Higher Taxes On Wealthy

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Colorado’s “rich” are already paying a lot (A LOT) Tax Day, both the day when tax returns are due and the day at which you have worked enough to pay your taxes (and start working for yourself) recently passed. Around that date I saw something online giving a breakdown of Federal tax receipts vs. income group and it got me thinking about Colorado’s tax receipts vs. income. After doing some digging I have some data to share, and, as the top line here suggests, the “rich” in Colorado are already paying quite a bit. Certainly a giant percent of state revenue compared to how many filers there are. As I’ll show below, if you look at the percentage of total tax receipts vs. the percentage of taxpayers ...
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Supreme Court Sides With Parents In California Gender Identity Secrecy Fight
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The Daily Signal, Approved, National

Supreme Court Sides With Parents In California Gender Identity Secrecy Fight

By Tyler O'Neil | The Daily Signal The Supreme Court Monday vindicated parental rights, upholding an injunction against California’s gender secrecy policy, which mandated that school staff hide a student’s claimed transgender identity from parents unless the student expressly consented to reveal it. “This is a watershed moment for parental rights in America,” Paul Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, said in a statement responding to the decision Monday. “The Supreme Court has told California and every state in the nation in no uncertain terms: you cannot secretly transition a child behind a parent’s back.” “The court’s landmark reaffirmation of substantive due process, its vindication of religious liberty, and its approval of class-wide re...
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From Campus To Classroom How CRT and DEI Mandates Reach K-12 Schools
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The Daily Signal, Approved, Commentary, National

From Campus To Classroom How CRT and DEI Mandates Reach K-12 Schools

By Reagan Dugan and Paul Runko | Commentary, The Daily Signal A recent report from Defending Education has found that more than half of collegiate social work programs appear to embed anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion standards into their core competencies, admissions requirements, and field work evaluations. This is not by accident. The sole accreditor of these schools, the Council on Social Work Education, requires adherence to these standards. This means, in practice, that left-wing ideologies—many of which promote discrimination on the basis of race—are de facto orthodoxy in most of the nation’s social work programs, just so the institution can remain accredited. This accreditation is required for graduates of these program...
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Teachers Union Criticized for Letting Radical Groups Shape Curriculum
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Washington Examiner, Approved, National

Teachers Union Criticized for Letting Radical Groups Shape Curriculum

By: Robert Schmad | Washington Examiner Teaching resources authored by Hamas sympathizers, praise for violent left-wing activists, and activities where students roleplay as “queer liberation” activists fighting against the “Religious Right” represent just a small sample of the material produced by the Zinn Education Project and its parent organization, Rethinking Schools. The nearly three-million-strong National Education Association has gone to great lengths to endorse and embed such materials in the public education system through a series of partnerships with the duo of left-wing organizations.  The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, has granted the Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools prime space and opportunities to present at its confere...
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Why is Denver trying to buy Western Slope school boards?
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, Local, Top Stories

Why is Denver trying to buy Western Slope school boards?

By Christy Anderson | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice In the Grand Junction area you may have seen flyers in your mailbox accusing our current school board members, Andrea Haitz, Angela Lema and “Willie” (Will) Jones of being “enemies” who “cannot be trusted.” These false attack ads come from Denver’s “Students Deserve Better” campaign. After digging into the financials, Students Deserve Better is also majorly funded by none other than the Colorado Education Association.  The teachers union has a long history that started in the 1970s of using money to influence local elections, but this year’s spending is unprecedented. The Colorado Education Association (CEA) is pouring tens of thousands of dollars into our local school board race to regain control and push their highly...
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Meta’s AI rules let bots flirt with kids and push false health tips
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Reuters, Approved, National

Meta’s AI rules let bots flirt with kids and push false health tips

By Jeff Horwitz | Reuters An internal Meta policy document, seen by Reuters, reveals the social-media giant’s rules for chatbots, which have permitted provocative behavior on topics including sex, race and celebrities. An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.” These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platf...
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