Colorado Springs Education Association

District 11 and Colorado Springs –

Where are we now? What’s soon to come…

We’re only a couple months into the 2025-2026 school year – it feels much longer.

In October, we’ve seen pages ripped out of our student’s Health textbooks. 

In October, our middle school students were supposed to be reading about Frederick Douglass after having read about John Calhoun’s defense of slavery, but it was crickets after a districtwide email was sent by Krystal Rasmussen the new Chief of Curriculum that began with the words, “we’re pulling Frederick Douglass…” Teachers were instructed to skip that unit. Who would have ever dreamed that Callhoun and pro-slavery arguments would prevail in 2025?

In October, Dr. Angel Givler-Viers, was placed on administrative leave—for merely talking about district policies on social media where she has more than 20,000 followers. She was walked out of her 5^th Grade classroom, told not to speak with her colleagues, parents and students. She was given no charge – they said they would try to find one. She’s now at home, instead of teaching her students. We have a school board and a new Chief of Curriculum that likes to talk about “liberty.” Censorship is not liberty.

In October, for the first time, in the more than a half -century that CSEA has existed, teachers went on strike. It was a one-day strike. A rare for Colorado “unfair labor practice strike”. Why, did we walk those picket lines? It wasn’t over wages. It was to protest the district’s policies and because teacher working conditions directly correlate to student learning conditions.

That was October.

Now for November.

On Tuesday, November 4, Election Day, Colorado Springs voters will have a chance to push back against the policies of Mom’s for Liberty and the other extremist groups that have captured the school board’s agenda. Three seats are up.

The following day, November 5, the school board is scheduled to take up banning books.

We don’t want to see our district become like nearby Woodland Park where the American Birthright curriculum has been adopted and where slavery is now referred to as “involuntary immigration.”

In October CSEA members stood up for our students and our profession when we went on strike. In November, take a stand at the ballot box.