This is like the bat signal that we play to bring Jimmy Segenberger out of the woodwork to talk about his latest work on the Denver Gazette column that he does twice a week. He's also filling in for Ross quite a bit this week, so you're gonna get some double doses like you are today. But when I read his column this morning about Jefferson County Public schools, I was like, oh, we must chat, so joining me again.
He's had a whopping a couple of hours off and now he's bag a one hour off and now he's back.
Hi, Jimmy, Hey Mandy, thanks for putting me back to work on KOA today.
You know what, We're gonna squeeze every single dime out of you today. We paid you for part of the day. We're gonna squeeze out as much of you as we can.
Don't think of this is.
iHeartMedia, Jimmy. Come on, we gotta make you earn it the call that you started today. Let me start with the headline for a moment. Okay, the headline is simply an erosion of trust in jeff Co's schools leadership.
Talk about barrying the lead.
I mean This is like the biggest understatement of a headline I've ever seen in my life, because if all the parents in Jefferson County Schools were really paying attention to what is going on with leadership or what passes for leadership at jeff Co schools, I think that they would collectively be horrified and mortified that they've let this go on long enough. But I'm gonna let you kind of give the thumbnail sketch of what you've got in today's column for the listeners who didn't read it yet.
So this really captures a story that goes back to over the holidays. You'll recall that the third in command for Jefferson County Schools case of Schools, David Wife, was it was revealed being investigated for child pornography and he was fired just after those revelations of an investigation came about, and two weeks later the district finally put out an email to families after only the media had gotten anything. Those of us in the media should not take precedence
over parents. I love when we get little scoops, but that's not what you're supposed to do. But that's what happened here, and there was a big discussion about what do we do and how do we approach the public facing side of this in terms of letting parents know what should the statement say, who should it be written by? And from? And lo and behold. These discussions happened over text message, not email, not something where they were like, let's shape this into a kind of email message to
parents that we want and having back and forth. It was multiple different text threads that were going on with sometimes pairs of school board members, with the superintendent Dorlund, with the chief of staff Lisa Ralou. However it was they were doing these text messages and Jeffco Kids first went and put in a couple of Open Records Act requests to obtain these text messages, and what they show is a doozy well, and.
Here's the part of it that I found the most interesting is that David Weiss was just all of a sudden fired from Jeffco Schools. We didn't know about the investigation, we didn't know what was going on. So he gets fired and it was after that two week period that we even began to understand. But he had to kill himself first, right, I mean, and that's a big part of the story. He goes back to Pennsylvania, he commits suicide, and then all of a sudden, people are like, what
the deuce is going on. At that point, the story had broken that he was being investigated for possession of child pornography.
You know, this is the parting in December around the nineteenth. But he had been fired and was under some kind of investigation or something was happening.
And when all that happened, when it came out that he was being invested for investigator retare pornography, my immediate response is the district has to immediately come forward and say exactly what they know. He is being investigated for possession of child sexual assault material. And if any parent suspects or wonders if their child had any contact, or or if there's something that students need to worry about, they must contact us immediately. That's how you should have
handled it. That's exactly what should have been done. But what you see in these text messages, as you lay out in this column, is a bunch of women worried about their feelings and looking bad and all of this stuff that has nothing to do with helping kids, helping families, and helping parents in Jeffco Schools.
And if you go back to the message to families, it was coldly bureaucratic. It even called this a personal legal matter. Yeah, didn't have anything in terms of sympathy for parents or expressions of concern, and which striking is
when you look at these text messages. The treasurer of the board, Danielle var And there's a lot to criticize her for in many different areas, but she makes it very clear in some of these text messages that included the president of the school board, Mary Parker and the superintendent Tracy Dorln that quote it's no longer okay to
be silent. She called this a crime of enormous proportion and one of the most heinous crimes against children, and chastised as the superintendent that we are not ahead of this and the board is in the dark of your thinking is unacceptable. We cannot try to protect wise or cover any of this up. Now, good for her, that's like just the basics of what you should be thinking about.
But what does the superintendent say at the end of that exchange Your name isn't on it, because she said Varda said, I'm not going to be a part of this statement, let's just have it be the president of the school board and the superintendent. So dore Lynd goes again, this is the superintendent of the schools. Your name isn't on it, so please let us be. We've all had a difficult and challenge and very sad day.
Oh being superintendent is hard. I mean, you know, I don't know if you know this, Jimmy, But I'm a woman, so I feel like I am in a good position.
Yeah, I am.
I've been one my whole life, well not my whole life.
What a woman is well, I have not heard a good answer of what is a woman. I don't know what the answer to that question is.
I am an adult, female human. So there we go. I am a woman, and this is one of my great frustrations with my gender. Right, this should have been very cut and dried. This should not have been a moment of discussion. They should have come up with a
statement that clearly said we're aware of this investigation. We want to let you know in case any of you have any concerns, so you can reach out if you are concerned that your child was either you know, around this individual too much, or that something might have happened, we need to let authorities know, and instead they made it about them.
They made it all about.
Their feelings and that they didn't want to be perceived poorly by some if word got out the thing about executive session really killed me explain that.
So I found this striking because you'll remember we are coming up this weekend on the two year anniversary of the shooting at East High School in Denver, and the day after, the Denver Public Schools Board of Education went behind closed doors and did an executive session about this, and it was illegal. There's certain requirements that you must
meet in order to have an executive session. So there was a legal case brought by media outlets, including the Denver Gazette, and they had to release the recording of this. So I think that was in the back of the mind of the district's attorney, Julie Tolison, who warned against an executive session when a couple of board members, including Varda, had gone ahead and said we should do an executive session on this. Can't we do that? And her argument.
Tolisen's argument wasn't about transparency, but because quote, if we had an improper executive session, the media could get a court order to access the recording, and she added that it would be a new crisis to an all added to an already horrible one. It's about the CYA moment as opposed to, oh, well we should be opening transparent of the public.
Well, it's basically, well, we can't hide this in executive session because they'll find out about it and then I'll just looking and worse, Which is true, right, if they'd gone into executive session, we found out much like what happened at DPS when the record was finally out, it was far worse than if they had just done it all in public in the first place. But there's a level of cowardice on display here that is unacceptable in my mind. But it's indicative of the priorities of the
Jefferson County School Board. They are not invested in making sure that student achievement is at the highest level. They're invested in protecting the people at the top who have an agenda. And I believe that the president of the school board genuinely thinks that every parent is an abuser and genuinely thinks that children must be protected from their parents. And I'm thinking of myself, if you believe that children were key here and that they need to be protected.
Don't you think they should be protected from the guy that you guys hired and made number three in the district, who was also being investigated for possessing childborn Well, do you think that would be a high a high thing.
You would. But then again, you'd think that when this comes anything involving students and teachers comes up, they would very seriously take issue with it. They wouldn't allow a student or participate in declaring a student homeless so that they could go live with their teacher, or take any sort of that they would have on it and report to the authorities, fire them, do something about it, as opposed to time and time again allowing these kinds of
breaches to happen. Because I've lost track of the number of cases now from a school social workers to teachers to chief for schools who, in Jeff COO's schools are alled to or have been found guilty of inappropriate relationships with students or other kinds of sex scandal.
One thing that people probably don't understand is that there are so many cases of this within schools overall. Children are very I don't want to say, very likely, that's the wrong phrasing. Children are. Well, let me just put it this way. Pedophiles are going to get jobs where the kids are, right just like bank robbers rab banks, because that's where the money is. Pedophiles are going to try and get jobs where the kids are, and that's
school districts. But to your point, Jenny, what do you think it is about Jeff Co or about Jeff co leadership that gives the impression to people who may want to prey on children that that's where they want to work.
Well, for one, I would say that they have this trusted adult policy and approach where they want teachers or other staff to name themselves to identify themselves as trusted adults. And what that means is you're not developing trust with the kid that I've written columns about this, or you're
not developing that trust relationship with kids. For example, I have teachers to this day that I look back fondly on that I could lean on for different things or would have very good working relationships as a student with a teacher. One comes to mind from high school or even in middle school, and that comes about naturally because you've gotten to know each other and be able to
feel confidence in that trust. But what Jeffco's trying to do is force students to identify trusted adults and institutionalize that concept as opposed to allowing it to develop as it should. And I think that provides a ripe opportunity for predators to sort of work their way in. And that's why we're seeing a lot of these cases happening more in Jeffco than even in other school district So, and.
It's my understanding that David Weiss was actually head of that the Trusted Adult program.
Is that accurate? Yeah, one of his responsibilities was for overseeing the implementation of trusted adults in schools. Yeah, that's just so gross.
You mentioned the Columbine situation where Columbine administrators, along with a now former teacher, falsified documents to the clar student homeless so she could move in with the teacher who was grooming her and having a sexual relationship with her. Apparently there's now going to be some kind of investigation, correct.
Yeah, the Jefferson County Sheriff's office and Sean Boyd, of course, Sean Boyd at CBS Colorado, the one who will tackle these TV News brought this out last night that the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office has opened an investigation into that case. And I think that's important in two respects. Not one obviously, because this case is worth looking into. What happened there is a grievous failure of justice and accountability, to put it mildly, But the second reason is it should put
jeff Co more on notice, perhaps than ever before. When you have malfeesis from the top of the school and other employees at the school engaged in these kinds of activities and circumventing parents in such a blatant way, the district needs to hear that message and see, yes, okay, there's actually something legally being done about this, even just
an investigation. It's not just a pr disaster. It could be something criminal and we have to prevent that from happening, because we're already having too much of that with our staff.
Now, Jimmy, let me ask you this. Have you spoken reached out to the board to get their thoughts on this, or or said look, I'm going to do a column on this. Is is anybody willing to go on the record with you on this stuff?
At all, are they willing to talk to anybody about it? Yeah, I have not seen one of the things that I've seen has been and the texts even show this. They directed the the board members to simply reach out to it with any requests that they get, just forward them on to the associate chief of Communications in the district. So there really is And you see, this can happen a lot in place like Denver Public Schools or others where there's an attempt to try and insulate board members
from these kinds of things. But then when I reach out to the district with questions, oftentimes Jeff COO doesn't even bother responding to me in any sort of what it was that there was a piece i'd written, the one that I wrote about that conservative teacher who didn't get hired in Jefferson County Schools. The district never responded. Even when Julie tolas in that same attorney Affward is on to this same exact person that they referred to in the media for the media in these text messages,
and I never heard a peep. I've sent other requests, we never hear a peep from the Jeff co media folks. So there is definitely an effort in jeff COO to try and avoid any sort of communication with folks in the media as much as possible when it's negative.
Well, it's unfortunate because the more they circle the wagons, the more I think it's going to make them easier to defeat in the next school board election, which has to happen. It just has to happen. Jeffco is positioning itself in a place that is not about educating kids. It's not about student achievement. They have carved out this space where they have decided that they are going to put the district between parents and their kids every opportunity
that they get. And it's gotten to the point now where it's like, if you're a jeff Co parent, do you really know what's going on at your daughters are your son's school? Do you really know what they're being taught or what clubs they're going to, or what teachers are talking to them about what issues, Because I wouldn't trust any of it if I were a Jeff Co parent,
and I, frank don't understand why. You know, Jeff co Kids first has been just doing yeomen's work, lifting and elevating all of this stuff, and Jefferson County parents should be grateful for all of the work that these all volunteers are doing, but when are they going to make a change, When are they going to say enough is enough? I want our district to focus on student achievement, not all this other crap. And I want them to get out of the way of my relationship with my kid.
Yeah, that's the real question, Mandy is in Denver public schools as another example, because I've covered Denver very closely for years, that's another instance where in twenty twenty three, after the East High School shooting that I mentioned before, you had a ground swell of parents who suddenly became recognized why how bad things were. They already weren't feeling comfortable, but they realized the gravity of it all and that the school board and leadership was just utterly failing. So
they got involved and they flipped. In that case, Unlike Jeffco where there are five school board members, in Denver, there are seven, and they flipped three of the seats, including the one that was previously held by our good buddy Hey Anderson. And they expected that there would be real change, and guess what, there has not. Been including a superintendent that also, like Tracy Dorelyn, has failed, failed, failed, and is not focused on academics, let alone school safety.
And so the problem with this is you really need to have a concrete effort to make sure that the average parent, the average voter who isn't a parent too, is aware of what's happening and why it's so bad and there needs to be a change. And then frankly, you need a majority and a majority that is committed to actually changing some of these core things, because if you don't have that, then you may get some expectations, and those expectations, even the minimal ones, won't get met.
As Denver shows am Ender.
That Jimmy Jimmy Seckenberger writes to twice weekly column in the Denver Gazette, I believe leave you're in for Ross on Thursday and Friday of this week.
Correct, actually tomorrow and Friday, Ryan.
Okay, tomorrow and Friday. You can hear Jimmy just before me as Ross continues to laze away in the Galapagos, riding tortoises and chasing dragons or whatever he's doing down there. Jimmy, I appreciate your time today, My friend, I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks tomorrow.
Excellent. I you know, I love that Jimmy now has a harmonica play in and out of the segments that he joins me on