2 weeks Ago
Only one thing is certain in the State Board of Education race for Congressional District 2: The winner won’t be a Republican. That’s because, after a heated primary, Kathy Gebhardt sits as the only candidate on the ballot — with no Republican opponent in sight. A win isn’t guaranteed, though, since a write-in candidate for the Libertarian Party is challenging Gebhardt in November.
Four new members will be elected to the state’s board following Election Day, Nov. 5. The board consists of eight members representing Colorado’s congressional districts and one at-large member.
Members serve six-year terms on the board, which currently has a six-member Democratic Party majority, and are not paid. The board’s job is to oversee regulations and policies that govern public education and libraries, appoint Colorado’s education commissioner and department personnel, approve the department’s budget and set teaching standards, among other responsibilities. Congressional District 2, currently represented by Angelika Schroeder (D-Boulder), will see candidate Kathy Gebhardt (D-Boulder) and write-in candidate Ethan Augreen (L-Longmont) vie for the vote of roughly 718,000 residents around the northwestern suburbs of Denver, including Boulder and Fort Collins, as well as mountainous counties including Grand, Routt, Summit and Eagle.
The district has 493,895 active voters , 50% of which are unaffiliated. The number of Democrat voters is greater than Republicans, who represent roughly 33% and 16% of voters respectively. The district could be considered a “swing district” for electing State Board of Education members since voters have chosen a mix of both Republicans and Democrats for the past 70 years .
Kathy Gebhardt Kathy Gebhardt comes from a family of teachers. Born and raised in Colorado, Gebhardt grew up attending public schools in Boulder, which all five of her children have since also attended. Despite having a grandfather, mother and two daughters who have all worked as public school teachers, Gebhardt herself is an education attorney focused on promoting “equal and adequate funding” for all schools in Colorado.
One of her achievements as a litigator was bringing a lawsuit against the state over how school facilities are funded. The case was settled in 2000 and resulted in the BEST (Building Excellent Schools Today) Grant Program in 2008. “It took the effort of parents stepping forward.
It took the effort of legislators stepping up and wanting to try to solve this,” she said. Gebhardt teaches education law at two Colorado law schools and the University of Colorado. She has served on several education boards as either a board member or president, including the Boulder Valley Board of Education, the Colorado Association of School Boards, Great Education Colorado and the National Association of School Boards, where she currently serves as chair of the Action Committee .
Although Gebhardt doesn’t have an opponent on the ballot, her win during the Democratic Party primary election drew national attention for its unprecedented funding numbers. Marisol Rodriguez, Gebhardt’s opponent in the primary, received over $1 million in funding from supporters of charter schools and independent expenditure committees, for which contributing organizations do not have to disclose their donors. Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students, created by Colorado League of Charter Schools, spent over $900,000 million on Rodriguez’s campaign according to campaign finance reports filed with the Colorado Secretary of State.
As a result of the funding received by Gebhardt’s opponent, she saw her own funding committee reach over $800,000 in donations. “I think it was the amount of money that was coming in — that was the dark money against me,” she said. “When you look at the dark money in other races, it was fractions of that, and I think people were offended by that.
” Although being the only candidate on the ballot greatly increases her chances of winning, Gerbhardt is still active in her campaigning. “Until the votes are cast on Nov. 5, I don’t take anything for granted,” she said.
“I do show up at events still because I feel like I should so people can get to know me and ask me questions. I want people to understand what my positions are.” Gebhardt is endorsed by the Colorado Education Association, Boulder progressives, Colorado Working Families, and over 60 elected officials.
Ethan Augreen (L-Longmont) Augreen is a write-in candidate for Colorado’s Libertarian Party, which centers around the principles of individual liberty, personal responsibility and limited government interference. Augreen announced he would be suspending his campaign toward the end of August in solidarity with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
, who suspended his presidential campaign in August and endorsed former President Donald Trump. Augreen has not withdrawn from the race, however, and said people who don’t want to support “the establishment lockdown Democrat” should still vote for him. “The truth is I have effectively suspended my campaign, in the sense of not actively campaigning, since it’s impossible to win as a write-in candidate,” Augreen wrote in an email, adding that he wanted to focus on building Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
The movement promises to work with “President Donald Trump to transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine” by cleaning up agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“I have limited time and energy and resources, and I thought it was more important to focus on the presidential race because there’s really no chance to win as a write-in candidate,” he said. In solidarity with #RFKJr , I am suspending my campaign for CO Board of Education. I will remain a write-in option in CD2 but the race is unwinnable as a write-in.
With 68 days until Election Day, it's time to focus on mobilizing the #Kennedy4Trump vote to defeat #KamalaHarris ! pic.twitter.com/7idDyAE6gx Since suspending his campaign, Augreen has been increasingly active on his X account, mainly posting pro-Trump content from conservative commentators like Alex Jones, Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson.
Augreen ran to be the Mayor of Longmont in 2023 and lost. After switching gears and campaigning for the district’s state senate race, he decided to instead go for a seat on the Board of Education. He said he wanted to run against Gebhardt specifically because he disagreed with her support of mask mandates in Boulder schools during the pandemic.
“For libertarians, we like to run head-to-head against the other party — whether it’s Democrats, Republicans — so that there’s not the distraction of a three-way race,” he said. “And so when I heard about the Board of Education race that there was no Republican in that race, I thought that was a great opportunity to raise issues of educational freedom, even though it ended up being too late for me to get on the ballot.” Before suspending his campaign, Augreen was also involved as a grassroots state lead with People For Kennedy .
Augreen holds a graduate teaching degree in elementary and secondary education and previously taught as a substitute teacher in New Mexico, though he was not able to transfer his teaching license to Colorado. He then earned a master’s degree in environmental leadership from Naropa University in Boulder and worked there as a graduate teaching assistant. Student achievement and success Gebhardt said she’s seen renewed emphasis across the state for career technical education both in and outside of K-12 education, which she said was a productive opportunity for students who feel traditional universities are not for them.
“When students get out of high school, they actually have the training and the skills that they need to go on if they don’t want to go to college,” she said during the Sept. 21 Club 20 debate . She referenced “the Colorado paradox” as an existing challenge in the state, which refers to Colorado’s history of outsourcing talent from other states and the difficulty faced by the state’s youth to find jobs after graduation.
In order to increase graduation and post-secondary attainment traits, Gebhardt proposed addressing the state’s chronic absenteeism issue, which has become much worse after the pandemic . She complimented the “boots-on-the-ground strategies” she’s seen many districts implement, like knocking on doors and one-on-one talks with families about their students’ attendance. Augreen pointed to the Democratic Party’s control of public schools as the reason why enrollment has been declining in some Colorado school districts.
He said schools’ management of the COVID-19 pandemic caused parents to lose trust in the public school system. “Ideally, people will decide that they don’t like the authoritarianism that has been taking place in public schools, in particular in Colorado, with the lockdowns and the mandates and just the promotion of a political and social agenda that so many parents don’t resonate with,” he said. “(Parents) saw bureaucrats following along with these nonsensical public health guidelines, for example, that children have to wear masks,” Augreen continued, arguing that some of these guidelines have impeded student success.
In terms of curriculum, Augreen said he would support creating opportunities for students to develop job or trade skills, especially if they choose not to attend a university. “Many kids want to go into the workforce, and, in my experience in high school, there wasn’t really a lot of focus on job skills,” he said. Teacher shortages and funding Gebhardt identified a shortage of qualified teachers and insufficient compensation for educators as two of the biggest challenges faced by her district.
She praised existing programs encouraging high school students to study education, such as Colorado’s Educator Recruitment and Retention Program , and alternative licensure programs. When it comes to shortages in special education, however, Gebhardt said the state still has work to do. “We need to lift up the needs of special serving needs because I think in Colorado that is one of the most underserved populations that we have,” Gebhardt added.
Gebhardt said that paying a living wage to teachers involved two things: increasing their pay and finding solutions for the cost of housing in many of the districts. “The state board may not have a direct hand in that, but we ..
. can work collaboratively to make sure that we help address those issues so that teachers can afford to live in the communities in which they teach,” she said. Gebhardt was the plaintiff attorney in the Lobato vs.
Colorado School Financing lawsuit , which challenged the constitutionality of Colorado’s school finance system but was lost by a 4-2 vote. If elected into office, Gebhardt said she would address TABOR as a potential solution to funding shortages since even future mill levy overrides wouldn’t bring in enough money. “I find it a little challenging that we’re refunding the kinds of dollars that we are at the same time as school districts are having to cut budgets,” she said.
Augreen’s proposal for increasing teacher salaries involves reducing the size of administrative staff both at the local and federal levels. “I think that if you could transfer the salaries of the administrators toward teachers, that would be the ideal outcome,” he said. Augreen added that he supports former President Trump’s plan to abolish the Department of Education in order to decrease regulation at the federal level and release more power to local departments.
In terms of a solution to the state’s teacher shortage, he suggested that districts “train more teachers” by making education programs accessible online in order that students in rural districts could have the same training opportunities as urban ones. School choice and Amendment 80 Augreen said the heart of his mission is to promote educational freedom, especially on the topic of school choice and parental freedoms. “Our mission is to dismantle the one-size-fits-all approach and bring innovation, accountability, and personalized learning to the forefront of Colorado’s education system,” his campaign site states.
Augreen has openly supported school voucher programs for alternative education options like homeschooling, and said the competition could incentivize public schools to return to the “core of education.” “Parents don’t want to send their children to school to be indoctrinated. They want the kids to be educated,” Augreen said.
“It’s a reason why they’re taking their kids out of public schools.” Gebhardt follows the stance of the Colorado Democratic Party in disagreeing with Amendment 80, saying she is “150% opposed” to the way it would impact parental rights . Gebhardt added that although she supports charter schools, she still has some ongoing concerns because they support a lower percentage of special needs and bilingual students than public schools.
While on the Boulder Valley School District school board, Gebhardt voted against Ascent charter school organizers’ request to apply to the state Charter School Institute in 2019 because they weren’t willing to adopt the district’s anti-discrimination policy as it related to transgender and LGBT+ students. Some parents complained that this went against their right to school choice. “We felt really strongly that that was an important part of the charter schools — they had to be open and affirming and welcoming as our schools are to all students.
And Ascent was not willing to do that,” Gebhardt said. “That was a concern of mine, and I was not quiet about it.” Gerbhardt leads Augreen in funding Gebhardt has received an impressive $83,500 in monetary and almost $2,000 in non-monetary contributions from 380 unique donors since announcing she was running for the Board of Education.
She has spent nearly all of it at around $84,800 in expenditures. The majority of Gerbhardt’s contributions came from individuals in the community giving small donations anywhere from $5 to $200. The largest contributions came from the Public Education Committee ($6,200), the Boulder Valley Education Association ($6,200) and Saint Vrain Valley Education Association ($3,100).
Some notable donors include Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young, Brett Family Foundation President and former Boulder Valley School Board President Linda Shoemaker, and State Board of Education members Karla Esser, Rhonda Solis, Kathy Plomer and Vice-Chair Lisa Escárcega. Augreen does not have a candidate committee accepting contributions. He has reported $66 in candidate expenditures as of the filing period ending on Oct.
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