Colorado’s “first public Christian school” isn't a mistake. It's a test case.
Behind the scenes, a conservative legal group and district leaders crafted a challenge to church-state separation
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I recently wrote about how a “public elementary school” near Pueblo, Colorado that was pushing a Christian curriculum on children. If they were indeed marketing themselves as a public school—and receiving taxpayer funding as a result—it would mark a new strategy for conservative Christians who believe the government should actively fund the spread of their religion.
It turns out this wasn’t accidental. It’s very much part of a larger plan.
A quick recap: This whole saga involves Riverstone Academy, a new school for kids in grades K-5. There are currently 30 students enrolled. The school’s website touts how they use Master Books Social Studies and Berean Builders Science—both of which are faith-based companies that usually cater to Christian homeschoolers.
How could this have happened?
It’s not like the local public school board knew much about it. Like many school districts in Colorado, District 49 outsources certain services, like special education, to a “Board of Cooperative Educational Services.” (BOCES help fill in certain gaps for public school districts in an indirect manner.)
It was the head of Education reEnvisioned BOCE, Ken Witt, who first referred to Riverstone Academy as “Colorado’s first public Christian school” during a school board meeting in October. When Chalkbeat Colorado, a news outlet focused on education, looked into this arrangement, they found that there was no reference to the Christian nature of the school in the initial paperwork.
When the Colorado Department of Education found out about this unusual arrangement, they sent a letter to the head of D49 (Superintendent Peter Hilts) and the head of Education reEnvisioned BOCES (Witt), asking both of them to explain what the hell was going on here. They were eager to get answers quickly since the schools would soon receive a lot of money based on student enrollment.
Both D49 and Education reEnvisioned BOCES said they planned to submit the Christian school’s enrollment numbers, and it would be up to the state to decide what to do about it. Witt in particular said his company would not “discriminate against Riverstone Academy due to their religious affiliation.”
That’s where we left off. Would the state do something about this apparently illegal arrangement? Would there be a lawsuit to prevent Riverstone Academy from receiving taxpayer dollars?
More importantly, was this the next evolution of a plan that began in Oklahoma, where conservatives tried to launch a publicly funded Catholic charter school, only to have the State Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional?
We now have some answers to that question thanks to reporter Ann Schimke of Chalkbeat Colorado.
This whole arrangement apparently began in June, when Brad Miller, a lawyer for Pueblo County School District 70 (which is adjacent to District 49 and shares some of its resources), asked that school board if it’d be okay to open a new school within D70’s boundaries even though it would be part of D49. (Why there? It’s unclear. Maybe there was a vacant building they could use.) He was asking because he also represented that new school.
He also told the D70 board why he wanted to do this:
Miller wrote that the cooperative would then work with Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based group involved in high-profile conservative legal causes, to test “the legalities around the issue of whether a public school may provide religious education.”
On June 24, the school board signed off on Riverstone Academy, allowing it to operate within the southern Colorado district’s boundaries for five years. In August, the school, which describes itself as offering “a Christian foundation” and Christian curriculum, opened quietly in an industrial zone in Pueblo County with about 30 elementary students.
Miller explained in that June email that Alliance Defending Freedom had hosted him when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about whether a Catholic charter school could open in Oklahoma.
“The case resulted in a 4-4 tie and so the question did not get answered,” Miller wrote. “ADF asked me if I could find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado.”
Who needs a smoking gun when you have truth bombs like that? A right-wing legal group asked Miller to launch a Christian school funded by taxpayer dollars specifically so that it would become the subject of a legal battle.
The email suggests none of this was an accident or the result of ignorance. This was a deliberate attempt to shove religion into a public school system. The conservatives involved in this case know damn well how this will play out: Either the Colorado Department of Education will refuse to give the district the money it says it deserves because they won’t count the students at the religious school, in which case ADF will file a lawsuit over it… or the CDoE will give the district money, at which point a church/state separation group might sue.
Either way, this is heading to court. That has always been part of the plan. The 30 children at Riverstone Academy are nothing more than pawns in a right-wing culture war battle. This is all a calculated effort by ideological actors to pry open the wall between church and state by using schoolchildren as leverage. They won’t stop appealing this case until they can get it in front of their allies on the Supreme Court.
The quiet approval process, the omission of religious references from the paperwork, the involvement of a national legal organization eager for a test case—none of that is an accident. It is the blueprint. And in that blueprint, transparency and constitutional boundaries are treated as obstacles to be bypassed. Having failed in their numerous attempts to get Christianity promoted in schools—by hiring chaplains or forcing Ten Commandments posters on the walls—they want to litigate their way to precedent.
Maybe the most damning thing about this story is what it says about everyone’s priorities. Children are being treated as subjects in a political experiment. The school’s religious mission is being hidden from those running the very system they expect will bankroll it.
Riverstone Academy isn’t just violating church-state separation; it’s gambling with children’s education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.
If they’re allowed to get away with this once, quietly, with 30 students in an industrial park, you can bet they’ll replicate this elsewhere. This needs to be stopped immediately before what’s happening in Colorado gets out of hand and leads to more “public religious” schools.
Fewer than half of all Americans now claim any kind of religious affiliation, but never the less right wing Christians continue to put their religion forward as the solution to all the world's problems. They do this in spite of the fact history does not begin to support their claims. Their obsession with indoctrinating children speaks directly to just how weak their belief system is. It is NEVER the job of our secular government to backstop Christianity or any other religion.
More Dominionist Creep/Wak-a-Mole. They want these cases before SCOTUS so bad they can taste it. Theocracy is just one of their goals. Teaching kids not to ask difficult questions and how to short-circuit critical thinking skills is an even bigger goal.