By Paula Noonan.

Both the last straw and the straw that broke the camel’s back dropped onto Jefferson County Schools on the night of September 18 at the Jefferson County Schools Board Meeting. The next morning 50 Jefferson County teachers, unable to carry any straws anymore, called in sick or took personal leave. Parents, teachers, citizens turned to twitter to share the new history content.

The Board’s “curriculum committee” resolution and its pay for performance structure pushed these teachers over the edge; when day broke on Friday, two high schools, Standley Lake in Arvada and Conifer High School in the foothills closed for lack of enough substitutes. Students upset by the Jeffco school board’s resolutions protested along the heavily traveled Wadsworth Blvd near several Jeffco high schools on Friday and at the Jeffco Administration building on Monday, meeting, finally, with new Jeffco Superintendent Dan McMinimee. More students left their high schools on Tuesday and Wednesday to the slogan “don’t make our history our mystery!”

Nine months of unrelenting conflict between teachers and the conservative majority of the Jeffco board, Ken Witt, president, Julie Williams, first vice president, and John Newkirk, secretary, have passed.

A shortened list of many disagreements includes: Board rejection of full day kindergarten for all Jeffco students; $3 million of a budget just recovering from the recession put into “equalizing” funding for charter schools; nixed agreements made between the previous board and teachers in salary negotiations; nixed findings of a contract mediator related to salary increases for all employees.

Now the conservative majority board members, particularly Julie Williams, a sister-in-law to a candidate for Colorado State Senator and aunt to a candidate for the Colorado State House and to another nephew who’s a lobbyist for the most radical pro-gun organization in the state, wants to take on the district’s curricula, especially its American History curriculum. Elementary sex education is next. Altogether too many straws.

Williams wants to make sure that Jeffco’s education content promotes “citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” She also wants to make sure that curricula will be rejected if they encourage or condone “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.” She’s surprised that students and teachers object to “balance and respect for scholarship.”

What teacher can resist testing Williams’ “respect for individual rights” notion but through a little civil disobedience? Jeffco students at Standley Lake, Pomona, and Arvada West High Schools from Williams’ home district stood up for the teachers in protest picketing. That act of legal petition was dismissed by Board President Ken Witt as an act of dragging kids into the teachers’ issues.

Williams, along with others in her extended political family, apparently doesn’t get that American history, like all of history, has some good parts and bad parts, in the simplest terms. The Declaration of Independence and US constitution are good parts. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and James Monroe as slave owners make up some bad parts.

During the school board election in 2013, the three conservative school board candidates stated directly that they were not like “the Douglas County School Board.” Dougco board has led the conservative rebellion against teacher unions in Colorado, turning its compensation system into a “market-driven” program.

The Dougco board, unchecked by moderate or liberal members, will start a voucher program as soon as its voucher initiative gets through the legal process. Dougco is also 65% GOP to 35% Dem. Jefferson County is distinctly purple, with more people registered independent than with either party. Jeffco also has 33% of minority kids to Dougco’s 12%.

The Jeffco conservatives were elected when moderate to liberal candidates in 2013 supported Amendment 66, a constitutional amendment to change the state’s school finance act. The initiative went down a little more than 60%-40%, a huge number. The union-supported candidates went down right with it.

So now, as with Dougco, Jeffco has a board that wants to change its compensation system to a market-based formula and implement curriculum oversight to ensure kids learn history the Rush Limbaugh and Koch Brothers way.

Conservatives who are serious about conveying the huge and complicated threads of the founding, growth, and politics of the United States surely do not want propaganda to substitute for an honest history curriculum.

Surely they don’t want to ignore the VietNam War, 1950’s McCarthyism, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the robber barons, slavery, the Trail of Tears, or the American colonies’ witch hunts. These events and facts are as much a part of our history as our constitutional documents, our inventions, our science, our optimism, our victory in World War 2, and the glory of our public education system.

Paula Noonan served on the Jefferson County school board until 2013. She blogs here, at No Parccing Zone.