The Colorado Springs School District 11 (D11) Board of Education voted Wednesday to allow the master agreement with the Colorado Springs Education Association (CSEA) to expire. After nearly an hour and a half of public comment from pro- and anti-union speakers, the board voted 6-1 to end the contract, the only master agreement in El Paso County, which has been in place for over 50 years.
“We are not this scary powerful political Lobby that D11 momentum is trying to portray,” said Mitchell High School teacher Marsha West. “We have a passion for students, for learning and for teaching. We are the boots on the ground, and more than anything we want each and every one of our students to learn, grow and succeed. That is why we became teachers. Our union used to have a great partnership with the board and the district. We all used to work together for what was best for students and it felt like we were on the same team. For 56 years we had an agreement where everyone came to the table in the spirit of collaboration and trust. That should mean something to us all.”
In recent years the D11 board has been dominated by a conservative majority. Following the 2023 election, five of the six sitting board members are part of a conservative slate that has been supported by prominent Colorado Republicans, activists and consultants who consider teachers unions their opposition.
“My primary issue with the master agreement is the governing authority doctrine, which mandates that the district share decision-making authority with the unions,” said Joel Sorensen, an employee of longtime GOP political consultant Daniel Cole. “That prevents, among a number of things, the district’s ability to innovate, its ability to pay harder-to-fill positions at higher rates. There’s a number of things. Fundamentally, the school district shouldn’t share governing authority with a special interest group, and I believe that directly impacts academics because I think this board is doing a tremendous job of making necessary reforms and improving academics. I think we’ve seen that in the numbers over the last few years, but I think that this is holding them back.”
In 2023, dark money group Springs Opportunity Fund spent $144,532 supporting D11 incumbents Parth Melpakam and Jason Jorgenson, as well as candidates Thomas Carey and Jill Haffley, with direct mail efforts and digital advertising. Following conservative victories in 2023, D11’s board spent $118,000 in March on retaining additional legal counsel and communications support for upcoming interest-based bargaining (IBB) sessions with the CSEA. D11’s board authorized $100,000 to retain West Group and conservative attorney Suzanne Taheri to represent the district during the IBB process, and an additional $18,000 to West Group for communication support during the negotiations.
“I do think that their representation has done a good job,” said Sorensen. “The representation that they hired last year in the negotiating, I think they did well. Certainly, if this is the conclusion, I believe they’ve been led well.”
Jorgenson shared a litany of anti-union grievances. “There are many widely shared concerns about unions,” he said. “First, their political activity and their use of their dues to advance partisan causes can be distasteful to some. They can injure some members’ interests while advancing the interests of others, like Director Haffley mentioned. When employees may need help, CSEA can prevent them from getting the help they need from other preferred sources other than the CSEA as the exclusive bargaining agent of D11. That’s just not equitable. The union is not governed by any obligation to provide quality service as we are, duly elected officials to the Board of Education, and so the exclusive representation of the CSEA with the district, because it’s always how it’s been, has to be discussed. Not only can unions hold the employees hostage, but also students and their parents. School choice, which is antithetical to the teachers unions across the country, has been attacked time and time again, and they want your child to be forced to attend a school under the Union’s Master agreement, even if that school is underperforming. Additionally, not all of teachers CSEA dues stay local as we’ve heard. Portions are sent to the state-level union, the CEA [Colorado Education Association], and another portion of the dues goes to the NEA, the National Education Association. I even learned that last week we had an NEA representative here to help with the CSEA’s display outside last week. These two organizations do not care about our D11 teachers or students like this board, and future boards, will. Instead, these two parent organizations have voted and approved pushing [critical race theory] and the 1619 Project and defeating Colorado bills that expand educational choice and parental rights. Just last year CEA passed a resolution condemning capitalism.”
One example of negative district/union interactions Jorgenson shared came directly from the playbook of conservative anti-union activists. “A few years back we bargained to have the CSEA handle their own members’ dues, opting to not have our taxpayer-funded HR talent to handle the dues deductions, sending dollars to a third-party, private organization,” he said. “In good faith we came to the conclusion that the practice would stop and CSEA would either handle their own dues or at least pay our D11 team to take care of that for them. Not two months later – I remember – a grievance came from the CSEA stating that it’s been common practice and it should remain the same way. At that time the superintendent succumbed to that grievance and just said, ‘Okay, we’ll go back to the way it’s always been.’ I wonder when you tell me, ‘Why don’t you go to the negotiating table and fix this? Why don’t you bring a different master agreement?’ The answer is it would never be good enough, and it hasn’t been good enough because there’s only two issues that you can bring, and they usually get swatted down, or in this case we bring one to the table it gets approved and then they come back and grieve it. It’s hard for them to be accepting of anything other than what they currently have, and they won a master agreement with a multi-year contract with little accountability.”
Ted Mische, who serves as the public/private partnership liaison for Woodland Park Superintendent Ken Witt’s ERBOCES, and is the trainer for the Truth and Liberty Coalition’s “Candidate Academy,” explained to an audience in 2023 that exact tactic during a discussion on union-busting. “What we can do if we’re elected and we have a majority is we stop doing that,” said Mische. “The teachers actually write the check and every single month they will leave. They will leave the teachers union when they see how much money they have to pay in.”
D11’s board has also followed a number of Mische’s other suggestions, such as replacing the superintendent, communications team and legal counsel. “Do they want what you want?” asked Mische. “If they don’t, then you need to replace them. Either you need to retrain them, get them thinking the way you’re thinking, or you need to replace them.”
Board member Julie Ott was the lone dissenting vote. “I am disappointed and dismayed with the motion, and it will come as no surprise to probably anyone who pays attention to our board and politics,” said Ott. “I believe that this motion and the ending of the master agreement, for starters, is a distraction from our focus on students and I don’t think we will gain anything sufficient by ending the master agreement. With this motion I believe the board’s not taking the opportunity to discuss concerns with the Union, with our employees, that we might find significant and want to change. We’re not renegotiating the entire agreement … when I talk to employees currently, I would say fear is already part of our culture, fear that if someone speaks up they can lose their job. A contract would assuage that fear, and some employees – I’m sticking to the facts again – believe they can’t even write a letter to the board.”
Ott also pushed back on claims that teachers unions are inherently far-left organizations. “I want to note as far as politics, we’re all nonpartisan representatives, in theory, and that said, I know the union has supported Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated candidates,” she said. “When people go throwing the union under the bus for only supporting the far-left, well, my Republican former fellow board members are going to be really surprised to hear that suddenly they’ve been categorized as such and probably deny such affiliations.”
