April 07, 2015 09:21 AM UTC

Something Stinks On The State Board of Education

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• by: Colorado Pols

Several local organizations including Planned Parenthood and One Colorado, the state’s major LGBT advocacy group, sent out action alerts to their members yesterday warning about an upcoming vote by the Colorado Board of Education that could do major harm to a program known as the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. From Planned Parenthood’s alert yesterday afternoon:

Every two years, Colorado middle and high schoolers take an important, anonymous, voluntary survey that provides our state with vital information about their health and well-being. The Healthy Kids Colorado Survey (HKCS) determines the prevalence of health-risk behaviors and trends related to this behavior, including: physical activity & nutrition, school & family, injury & violence, mental health, alcohol & drug use, and sexual health. And the data is used for creating important policies and programs to better serve Colorado’s youth.

This year access to that survey is being obstructed. Our opposition is trying to change the survey by creating a difficult process for youth. This process could significantly decrease Colorado youth’s access to the survey, and lower response rates by up to 30%.

Meanwhile, the current process already has several opportunities for parents and students to opt out of the survey. Changing this process will only reduce the data that helps the state allocate resources, and most damagingly, could result in negative impacts for our vulnerable youth.

Conservatives on the state board of education, led by GOP lobbyist and appointed board member Steve “Prince of Darkness” Durham (actually his nickname under the Gold Dome, we didn’t make it up) of Colorado Springs, want to substantially reduce student participation in the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey. This anonymous survey asks a range of questions about behavior and lifestyle that Durham claims could be “self-incriminating,” and therefore wants parents to affirmatively opt in students to the survey instead of the current opt-out system. That seemingly small change would have the effect of greatly reducing response to what advocates say is crucial to understanding and providing the right services for at-risk students of all kinds. With their bills dying in the split state legislature, supporters of the “Anti-Vaxxer Bill of Rights” legislation and other similar proposals are now looking to this vote on the state board of education for a victory.

What we’ve heard about the dynamics of the current board suggests that this vote is very much in doubt, with at least one member of the conservative majority not on board with hobbling the HKCS. Attention appears to be focused on the would-be “safe” Democratic representative on the board for Denver, Val Flores–and there’s a problem. Since winning the CD-1 seat on the state board of education last November, Flores has apparently manifested as a tool of Durham and the far-right wing of the board: voting repeatedly following Durham’s explicit lead, and severely straining her relationship with her former supporters. In the case of the Healthy Kids Survey, the “opposition” consists almost completely of manufactured controversy from the same Tim Neville conspiracy theory types that backed the attacks in the legislature this year against immunizations. To say that these actors do not have the best interests of a diverse urban population like Denver at heart is a considerable understatement.

So why the hell is Denver’s voice on the state board of education wavering? We haven’t heard a good answer for this, but we’re told that a vote to gut the Healthy Kids Survey could be the last straw for Flores politically. She may be voting like a Colorado Springs Republican, but that’s not who she answers to at the ballot box.

Stay tuned, we’ll update this story after the vote tomorrow.