Colorado school district dumps Bible-heavy curriculum borrowed from Texas after 3 days

Montezuma-Cortez officials abandoned the "Bluebonnet" curriculum over the religious material, apparent AI errors, and lessons irrelevant to students in Colorado

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In 2024, Texas Republicans passed a Bible-heavy reading and language arts curriculum for public schools—essentially creating their own in-house textbooks. Because of the added incentive of literally paying schools by-the-student for using the new “Bluebonnet Learning" curriculum, it wasn’t surprising that roughly a quarter of school districts—more than 300 of them—took the state up on its offer. Cheaper than buying their own textbooks, after all.

It was later discovered that the Bluebonnet curriculum had literally thousands of mistakes that needed to be corrected. But even beyond that, Bluebonnet was criticized for treating some Bible stories as literally true, ignoring other religious traditions, and treating public school lessons as if they were a part of a church’s Sunday School curriculum.

(Image via Adobe Spark)

But what happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas, and one Colorado school district just found that out the hard way.

The Montezuma-Cortez School District serves about 2,200 students overall in the southwestern corner of the state, and they’ve been struggling academically. That’s why school board members decided to adopt a model for reform that appears to have worked in Houston, Texas.

Houston Superintendent Mike Miles, a former Colorado charter school founder, created the school improvement model Montezuma-Cortez is using. Called “New Education System,” it emphasizes explicit teacher-led instruction, keeping students engaged, and training for teachers and principals. With the help of consultants, Montezuma-Cortez will use the reform strategy at its three elementary schools starting this fall.

There’s nothing unusual about a district trying to copy what worked somewhere else, but this particular decision came with a poison pill of sorts. When the board approved the reforms, they also said yes to the reading curriculum being used in the Houston school district… which happens to be Bluebonnet.

To put that bluntly, this Colorado school district inadvertently adopted a Bible-based curriculum from Texas in order to help kids. This came as a surprise to at least one board member, reporter Ann Schimke of Chalkbeat Colorado explained:

Board member Mike Lynch said by email Tuesday [August 4] that the district is following Houston’s lead on curriculum because of that district’s “rapid and phenomenal turnaround history.”

“I want that outcome for my district,” he said.

…

Lynch said he doesn’t know if Bluebonnet is evidence-based or how well it matches Colorado standards.

…

Lynch also said he didn’t have enough information to form an opinion about Bluebonnet’s Biblically infused lessons.

Once it became public knowledge that the Colorado district was adopting this Bible-centric curriculum, there was enough backlash that the district addressed it directly via a letter to parents, staffers, and community members on August 8.

Yes, they had adopted this curriculum, Superintendent Eddie Ramirez said, but he assured everyone that the Bible nonsense would not be included in their lessons.

I also want to directly address questions that have arisen regarding references to biblical or religious content within some of the curriculum resources.

Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 will edit the curriculum materials used in our schools so that biblical instruction or religious teaching is not part of our elementary academic instruction.

Our schools will not use the curriculum as a vehicle for religious instruction. Any content that is inconsistent with the district's educational purpose, Colorado Academic Standards, or our expectations for a public-school instructional program will be reviewed and, where appropriate, removed or modified.

That’s fantastic news. But even those assurances weren’t enough, because when schools finally opened in the district last week, teachers quickly realized their Bluebonnet lessons were essentially crap. It wasn’t just the Bible garbage. There was AI slop and way too much material about Texas. It led to other board members speaking up:

Board Vice President Laura DeWitt, who has a fifth grade daughter, said at Tuesday’s board meeting that she looked at some of the Bluebonnet materials on the first day of school and found what she described as “robot errors” — mistakes probably generated by AI.

…

A story about a Japanese man who visited Houston to plant rice in 1904 includes a map that shows Houston next to the Florida panhandle, instead of in Texas.

DeWitt showed a printout of the erroneous map at the meeting, drawing a chuckle from one person and a “wow” from someone else.

…

Board member Barbara Mate said when she visited classrooms on the first couple days of school, she saw reading lessons centered on Texas.

“I viewed a lot of stuff about Texas and Houston and San Antonio and migrant workers, and Texas and Texas,” she said. “I just wondered why we’re not representing our current demographic.”

This was just embarrassing and everyone knew it.

That’s why the school board voted 4-3 last week to reject the Bluebonnet curriculum in full.

Even after the superintendent’s promise to purge the Bible nonsense from the lessons, what remained was so useless that board members couldn’t defend it. They also didn’t know if Bluebonnet met Colorado’s academic standards because they never had time to verify all that. It’s why they decided it was easier to get rid of the curriculum three days into the school year than force teachers to try to make it work and adjust along the way.

The upside is that the Bluebonnet curriculum is no longer in use.

The downside is that teachers now have to scramble to figure out what lessons to teach students… though, hopefully, most can revert to lesson plans they used in the past, at least until a better curriculum is adopted.

In some ways, these are the perils that come with a rural, smaller school district doing whatever it can to improve test scores and reading abilities. But it’s also a reminder that no one should be trying to imitate Texas right now when it comes to public education given that conservative Christians are in charge of academics there. They can’t be trusted to prioritize the needs of students when there’s an opportunity to inject their religion into the material.

How many other school districts are going to make the same mistake?

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