Elementary-school teachers in the Montezuma-Cortez Re-1 School District have been left scrambling to fill in some lessons after the school board dropped a controversial curriculum from its K-5 materials.
The teachers were already hustling to deal with errors cropping up in the materials before the curriculum was dropped.
Following a deluge of negative publicity, the school board voted 4-3 at a heated special meeting Tuesday to reject the use of the Bluebonnet Learning Curriculum in English Language Arts classes.
Board president Joshua Shumway said at the beginning of the meeting that it had not been called because of “public influence” but because of events that took place at the board’s meeting on July 21.
Shumway said that on July 21 the board had an informational item on its agenda that included a curriculum to be voted on. He said he asked Ramirez to move it to an action item, but that didn’t happen, which was why the board was having the special meeting Aug. 11.
The decision to use Bluebonnet, a controversial curriculum based in Texas and infused with religious messages, triggered a furor of criticism.
After articles came out recently in several statewide news outlets including Westword and Chalkbeat, Superintendent Eddie Ramirez sent out an “open letter to parents, community members, and elementary staff” on Aug. 8. Noting that “Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 has experienced historically low student performance and achievement,” Ramirez wrote that the district had adopted the model based on the Houston Independent School District’s approach in order to improve student outcomes.
“We cannot continue doing the same things and expect different results,” he wrote.
In the letter, Ramirez said the district would “edit the curriculum materials. . . so that biblical instruction or religious teaching is not part of our elementary academic instruction.”
At the special meeting, Re-1 board members grilled administrators about when and how the change was made from the curriculum that was originally adopted in May. That was when the board approved adopting the highly structured Houston NES (New Education System) model.
Ramirez had written Shumway a letter on July 18 in which Ramirez said the board approved adopting the Houston NES (New Education System) model in May, but the Houston Independent School District had then shifted to using the Bluebonnet curriculum, so Re-1 had to use that curriculum in order to implement the NES model.
“This item is intended to be informational,” Ramirez wrote.
Board VP Laura DeWitt said the curriculum approved in May included materials from a number of different suppliers.
“So this is not essentially the same as what we approved in May because there is a different curriculum that it is based on,” DeWitt said. She asked whether Bluebonnet had been reviewed by the Colorado Department of Education as an approved curriculum.
Schmitt said he didn’t think it had. “There has not been an alignment study done by the district that compares the Bluebonnet curriculum to the Colorado academic standards, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He also said Colorado is a “local control” state where districts can choose their curricula.
DeWitt, who has a daughter in the district, said she had viewed one of the instructional slides that her daughter would be seeing in class as part of a story. It showed a map on which the city of Houston was labeled as being near the Florida panhandle.
“The images seemed to be largely AI-generated,” DeWitt said of the slides, adding, “I have a hard time believing that the only curriculum that is going to help our students is one that is full of errors that we are asking our teachers to go in and catch the day before.”
Re-1 board member Lara Maria Blair commented on reporting by the Texas Tribune that the Texas Education Agency will be spending $8.4 million correcting more than 4,000 errors in Bluebonnet learning materials.
According to the Tribune, four other publishers reported a total of 16 corrections in their materials.
“I don’t think we’re at the point where we should be using this curriculum that was just recently fact-checked,” Blair said.
Social-media posts have been highly critical of Bluebonnet.
“We’re using it right now,” wrote one teacher on social media. “It’s terrible. Everyday I find more mistakes.”
Ramirez, Re-1 Executive Director of Academic Services Justin Schmitt, and Shumway did not respond to requests for comment from KSJD.
Board member Mike Lynch said the Bluebonnet material should be all right to use because Texas had spent millions of dollars correcting the mistakes, but DeWitt said the slide with the geographical error about Houston had been shown in her daughter’s class the day before.
Board member Justine Bayles said she thought the board had lost sight of the students and the teachers. “We need to figure this out at our level so that our teachers and our students can move on,” she said, adding, “I’m concerned about what’s happening in the classroom tomorrow.”
Bayles said the teachers and administrators could go through the Bluebonnet slides and decide which to use and which to reject.
“This is a hard vote for all of us,” DeWitt said when the question was called on the motion to adopt the Bluebonnet curriculum. She, Shumway, Blair, and Barbara Mate voted to reject it, while Lynch, Bayles, and Justin Hall voted to approve it
