A former employee of a Colorado school district was banned from school board meetings because of his criticism of the conservative administration, a lawsuit filed Thursday by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union alleges.
Logan Ruths was fired from his informational technology specialist role at Woodland Park School District in March after he raised concerns that the administration had improperly withheld files and redacted information in response to open records requests, which Ruths processed as part of his job.
Ruths alleges in his lawsuit against the district and Ken Witt, its superintendent, that the district used a small remark Ruths made during a recent school board meeting as pretext to retaliate against him for speaking out against school board members and administrators, including in an NBC News article. He also testified in the Colorado Legislature about his experience in support of a bill to submit school boards to an ethics oversight commission.
The district did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since a group of conservatives took control two years ago of the school board in Woodland Park, a small mountain town outside Colorado Springs, the community has been embroiled in bitter discord over changes to the district.
The Woodland Park board hired Witt as a superintendent; he’d previously been booted off of another county’s school board after he pushed for courses that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board also adopted a right-wing group’s social studies standard, placed a gag order on school employees and approved the community’s first charter school without public notice. These decisions have received widespread criticism from locals in the Republican-leaning community and prompted dozens of school district employee resignations.
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Following his firing earlier this year, Ruths, a 26-year-old native of Woodland Park and a recent cancer survivor, has continued attending monthly school board meetings. He typically sits toward the front wearing a mask.
During the public comment portion of the June 14 meeting, a regular attendee said that the district should ask for FBI help to address a group of “extremists” who planned to support three school board candidates planning to challenge the conservatives who now control the five-member board. Those candidates, the man stated, according to video of the meeting, will “reintroduce gender confusion to young children” and an “anti-capitalist civics education.”
After the man finished speaking, Ruths called out from his seat, “Where else do you do comedy at? I’d like to come see one of your shows.”
David Rusterholtz, the school board president, quickly put the meeting in recess and said he was going to call the police if Ruths didn’t leave the room. Ruths declined, responding that he was a taxpayer and wanted to hear the budget presentation. The meeting went into recess for 10 minutes and resumed after Ruths had left.
The next day, Brad Miller, a lawyer hired by the conservative board, gave Ruths a letter notifying him that he was banned from stepping foot on school district property for one year, according to a copy filed in court records.
“On multiple occasions you have acted in a manner that was verbally aggressive and, sometimes, physically aggressive towards board members and staff members,” Miller wrote. “Most recently, your choice to verbally disrupt the Board meeting of June 14, 2023 was determined to be in serious violation of law.”
Ruths denies in his lawsuit that he has ever been physically or verbally aggressive toward board members. The civil complaint filed in court noted that Miller’s letter does not specify other dates that Ruths was allegedly disruptive, and that there have been similar incidents of meeting attendees making similar remarks who have not been kicked out or banned.
Miller and Rusterholtz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit asks the court to lift the ban so that Ruths can attend board meetings again.
“This experience has been a chilling illustration of the Woodland Park School Board’s abuse of power in trying to silence legitimate public dissent,” Ruths said in a statement. “As an alumnus of the Woodland Park School District, and a previous employee, I have the right to engage with and be heard by the district. Having that right taken away was particularly painful and harrowing.”
In addition to Ruths, other former district staff said they have faced retaliation by the Woodland Park school district this year.
In January, the district transferred teacher Sara Lee to an elementary school, even though she’d worked in a high school setting for 25 years, after students in one of her classes staged a protest against hiring Witt as superintendent. She resigned instead of adhering to the transfer.
And in March, the district fired campus monitor Mary Ward for allegedly encouraging protests against district decisions. Ward said she had only shared information about what was happening in the district on Facebook.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
