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I was sitting in my congressional office before heading to the House floor for votes when my phone lit up. Charlie Kirk – right-wing activist and podcaster – has been shot in the neck at a rally on a college campus in Utah. The growing political violence we’ve seen recently has been gut-wrenching and terrifying. I’m not only scared for the safety of friends and colleagues but fearful for the future of our country.

Then my phone lit up again. I received additional horrifying news: there was, at that very moment, an active shooter at Evergreen High School.

I was stunned sitting on the couch thinking about the parents receiving word that there was an active shooter and that they were warned not to go to the school for their safety. The helplessness and not knowing if they’d ever see their kids again. My heart breaks for the students who continue to fight for their lives in the hospital, the parents who are at their bedsides not knowing if they will ever come home, and for the kids and educators who will carry the trauma of this day forever.

Just like every parent reading the headline, I felt the shock and terror and thought: what if that was my kid? What if that was his school? I’m outraged that this is the result of failed policy and inaction.

‘Radicalized’ Evergreen High School shooter appeared to hold antisemitic, violent views in online accounts

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I grew up here. I attended high school in Jefferson County, not too far from Columbine. I still remember the shock I felt as a junior in high school when the unimaginable happened. Back then, it shocked the nation. But now it’s become all too common. Mass shootings have become an ugly stain on our state. My heart breaks that Evergreen now joins the long line of Colorado communities forever changed by a mass shooting.

While Colorado has a history of making national headlines for gun violence, we’re certainly not unique. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children in this country. Not cars. Not cancer. But gun violence. It’s worth repeating – guns are the number one killer of our kids. And the most outrageous part about all of this is that it’s completely preventable. How many lives do we need to lose before we are willing to say enough?

Just weeks ago, we saw kids in Minnesota killed at school. And earlier this summer, lawmakers murdered outside their homes. Now a conservative activist. Now once again, high school students in Evergreen. Who’s going to be next? It feels like we’ve reached a breaking point. This is untenable.

We are living through a dark moment in our country’s history – one that will be remembered for whether we confronted the radicalization and violence tearing at our communities or allowed it to break us apart. As a society, we are being forced to answer a fundamental question: is this who we want to be as a country? This is a policy choice. Not a political one.

We have to ask ourselves – do we want to live in a country where our kids are being gunned down in their classrooms? Where your life hangs in the balance at a grocery store, a movie theater, or a political rally?

This is the moment to decide. Overwhelmingly, we want a world where our kids can come home safe from school. Where their lives aren’t at risk because of what they believe. But we need leaders who have the courage to stand up and decide that we are no longer going to standby while one more life is taken too soon.

We’re all still reeling from the events of this week. But our community is resilient. The world feels heavy right now but we can’t give up hope. My kids and our kids depend on it.

If you are struggling and need support, please call 988 to be connected to someone who cares. Also know that my team and I are here to support you and our community every step of the way as we recover from this tragedy.

Together, we can build the future our children deserve.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was first elected to represent the 7th Congressional District in Colorado in 2022.

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Part of my job as a Grand Canyon educator is picking up stuff a hiker drops or leaves behind next to a trail. Some of the things I’ve found this summer lead me to wonder what the John Muir they were thinking.

A fast-food burger, in the original wrapper. I suppose they left it for the timid woodland creatures, except if fast food isn’t good for us, why would critters want it?

Someone’s last remains. When a hiker pointed out a shiny object off the trail, I clambered over rocks to find a sealed urn of cremains, which is illegal to leave in a national park. Local tribes have also asked that visitors avoid doing this for religious considerations.

I reported finding the urn to park rangers, and for the next month was identified as “the lady who found the body.”

A can of corned beef. We found this on day three of a seven-day backpack. Those who abandoned it surely thought, “Oh, whoever finds this shall fall upon it with glee!”  Except we had enough food, thanks. Rather than carry a three-pound can of beef, though, we ate it, and yes, it was vile.

Balloons. I risked life and limb one day clambering down a scree slope after what I thought was an abandoned backpack only to find deflated balloons. It is a lovely thought to release balloons to honor a friend. But creatures can get tangled in the strings or eat them to serious ill effect.

Mascara wand. I understand that many women cannot bear to be without their makeup, but on the trail? For one thing, you are all sweaty and dirty, or at least, I am. In the same vein, I have come across discarded bottles of cologne. Perhaps the owners finally realized that no perfume can cover up the smell of a long hike.

Glow sticks. Tied to the trees. Not only are they plastic, they’re toxic to any animal who chews on them.

Double boiler filled with rice.  It might make sense to find this in a campsite, but four miles up the trail?

Underwear. I do know about these situations. Someone has an unavoidable emergency and no TP so they use whatever is at, um, hand.

Plastic tooth floss picks. Oral hygiene is important. However, most people do not leave their toothbrush behind, so why leave the silly things that only weigh one-tenth of an ounce?

A five-pack of beer. I assume they drank one and left the rest for later, then did not find tepid beer palatable. But stashing items along the trail is problematic. We never know if you are really going to pick it up later, or if you just got tired of hauling it around. So best keep it with you.

Laminated photographs. These are often left as a memorial. Does your loved one really want you to honor them by littering public lands with their portrait?

One shoe. How does one hike out with one shoe? Although I did once meet a hiker wearing a single shoe and sock, one for each foot.  Another time, we found a jacket, then a shirt, then a pair of pants, then socks. I guess they kept the shoes.

A hemostat used to compress a blood vessel. Was someone prepping for emergency surgery?

An empty backpack. How did they get their gear out?

A full backpack, including, among other things, a queen-sized bed sheet, a beach towel, canned food, and two hardback books. Rumor has it that the hapless hiker yelled, “I can’t do this!”, grabbed a bottle of Gatorade, and threw the pack off the trail. At this point, the hiker was five miles from the trailhead.

The first rule of “leave no trace” is to plan ahead. Perhaps one should sit down with one’s supplies and ask: Do I really want to lug these books, this frying pan, that good bottle of wine?

If yes, more power to you, and keep on lugging! Just make sure you take it all back out with you.

Marjorie ‘Slim’ Woodruff is a contributor to Writers on The Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a Grand Canyon educator.

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Over the past couple of days, I’ve had conversations and reviewed numerous letters from individuals within the City and County of Denver, all of whom are committed to ensuring the continuation of Scott Gilmore’s work.

My great-great-uncle once said:

“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.” — Chief Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota, known as Mahpíya Lúta).

There is a significant divide between what is being promised and the reality of keeping that promise. We know that you cannot replace Scott Gilmore in the City of Denver, no matter how hard you try. Stop fooling yourself and listen. We know what is best for us. Listen to us.

The individuals who made the decision to include Scott Gilmore, who worked for years in the city’s Parks Department, in last week’s layoffs never consulted with our community. These “officials” never do. We are the forgotten people, the invisible people who are thrown away because of money. Who in the Denver City administration was ever adopted in a Sacred Hunka ceremony?

The action is going to hurt 100,000 American Indians living on the Front Range directly.

Who amongst the Denver administrators knows our creation story of the Buffalo? Who amongst you is going to the sweat lodge and pray with us as we make plans about Buffalo restoration? Who has ever been in a Pipe Ceremony? Who knows how to handle that pipe? What is its significance?

It is doubtful that any of your staff will get invited to a Yuwipi Ceremony. These are things that cannot be learned from a book; they can only be realized through participation. You can’t just expect to participate because you want to. You must be invited. It takes many years to develop the respect of our people. And even longer to develop the trust. It takes even longer to become a part of our Sacred Circle of Life.

We have a different way of seeing the world and everything around us. This is our homeland. This is where our ancestors died protecting a way of life. We have never forgotten our ways despite the torture and brutal actions to convert us to your ways.

We had our civil ways of interacting with other people. Among the Cheyenne, we had a sacred council of peace, called the Council of 44. The members were peace chiefs. We did not seek out war against people coming to our homelands. We sought peace until such a time that our destiny and continued existence were in jeopardy. Then and only then did we retaliate to protect our families and a way of life.

The people who came here ignored all those good ways and forced their concept of civilization on us. All my life, I have said that I hope that I never succumb to becoming civilized. Now more than ever, when I look across America and see what is happening on the national level, I see the devolution of your civility. That kind of future is bleak and uncomfortable at best. That is not what we want.

Who amongst you knows the leadership structure of the Denver Indian community? Who speaks for our Denver community? Do you know perhaps even one person? Do you have any connections with the leaders or community members in our area? Our community is small, and when someone like Scott comes along, we are comforted and start growing confidence that perhaps the city administration will look back at the iniquitous history that left us landless in our own homeland.

Our ways strongly condemn breaking promises. It emphasizes the importance of keeping one’s word, highlighting the negative consequences of dishonesty and the value of trustworthiness. We use “careful consideration” before making a promise and stress the need to fulfill it.

The city has put us in a difficult position because we know that you will never be able to fulfill your promises. It took Scott most of his entire career to gain the confidence and trust needed for us to trust and respect him. He earned it, and he knows the secrets needed to make and sustain good relationships with our diverse community.

My people think differently from you. We always have and always will. That is the innate nature of our people. Our values are vastly different than yours. The first law of our people is respect, something that is sorely lacking in the ways of the people around us.

The second way of our people is about relationships. We try to treat everyone as relatives. This is hard to do because it is a foreign concept for others. We end our prayers by saying mitaku oyasin …. all my relatives.

We tell our children to listen and only speak when spoken to. We have similar expectations in all our relationships. Listen! That is difficult for many people who make critical decisions for the people. We are a small community with no degrees of separation; we all know each other. We are asking you to bring Scott Gilmore back. It is a straightforward request to fulfill.

You have seen many letters from many of our people. And only a few responses promise things that we know can’t be kept.

We are watching and organizing our future action. Please don’t try that famous historic tactic of divide and conquer. It would only exacerbate this situation.

We want to negotiate with you and find a meaningful compromise that works for our people. We want you to listen, we want you to hear our concerns, because we are tired of looking back and seeing the genocide of the past. We want a rightful place in creating a meaningful future for our people in our homeland.

Richard B. Williams is a Lakota Elder who has lived in Denver for 54 years. 

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Are the Denver School Board elections transparent and democratic?

Not really.

Sadly, the Denver School board campaigns are far less democratic than any other Denver elections with two “dark money” groups providing more than 70% of the funding. We are talking more than $1 million from these two groups in 2023, and expect the number to be even higher this fall.

There is no other Denver or even Colorado election with so much soft or “dark” money pouring into an election. Not only is the funding coming from just two 501(c)(4) organizations — the teacher union (Denver Classroom Teacher Associations Action) and a charter school advocacy organization (Denver Families Action) — but neither group is transparent about the sources of their funding or their expectations for candidates.

Denver Families Action doesn’t even list their sources of funding on their website in spite of spending more than $950,000 in 2023. Another dark money group — Better Leaders Stronger Schools — spent more than $1 million.

Instead of school board candidates having to focus on making their case to voters and raising money from Denver supporters, school board candidates must first convince one of these organizations to back them. School board candidates know that without either of the outside group’s support, they have little or no chance of winning. One hundred percent of the 24 candidates that have won a Denver School Board seat since 2011 had the support of one of the two groups.

To be fair, the independent expenditure committees funded by DCTA or Denver Families Action are not allowed by law to coordinate with the candidates, but the reality is that they don’t need to coordinate to provide strong support as we have seen in the last several rounds of elections.

Independent expenditure committees organize for the candidates, pay for flyers, social media and even TV ads.  And if they say something unreasonable, the candidate can honestly say they know nothing about what DCTA or Denver Families Action did on their behalf.

The most comparable election to school board are the Denver City Council elections. In those races, there are independent expenditures that include developers, unions and other special interests. But in none of these elections was the IE funding greater than the candidate’s campaign spending.

And in most of the city council races, the IE funding was less than 25% which meant that the city council campaigns were managed by the candidates with far less influence from outside “dark” groups as compared to the school board elections.

Why are the city council races less influenced by IE’s?

There is a public match that encourages candidates to raise their own funding. The match is publicly disclosed and allows them to run a campaign without having to be dependent on IE’s. City council candidates have more control over their campaigns and this incentivizes them to directly connect to voters. A 2023 report on the impact of the city’s public matching fund showed that there was far more participation in terms of voter support for candidates and more candidates.

So what can be done to enable school board candidates to act independently and allow voters to know it is unlikely that a candidate has been influenced or bought by a special interest group?

Here are three practical suggestions:

• Provide a public campaign match for qualified school board candidates. Return the responsibility for election campaigns to candidates so they do not have to depend on Independent Expenditure Committees.

• Expand the number of regional school board members from five to eleven to follow Denver City Council regions so that school board members can better represent their communities. The current school board regions make it hard for candidates to truly represent the needs of their community because of the size and diversity of the current school board regions.

• Pay school board members commensurate with other city offices like Los Angeles. This will make it possible for far more qualified candidates to run for school board seats. The school board is responsible for managing a budget nearly half the size of the city budget and educating 90,000 students. It’s a responsibility as great as any city council seat.

Denver’s schools are in crisis with chronic absenteeism, declining enrollment, segregation, and too few low-income students thriving academically. Too many teachers cannot afford to live in Denver and public education funding is threatened at the state and federal levels. The district needs thoughtful committed board leaders.

Oddly, as two people that have mostly disagreed on school board candidates and policy, we find ourselves strongly agreeing that without changes to how we elect Denver School Board members, it is unlikely that our beloved Denver schools can live up to their promise.

Now is the time to curb the outside growing influence of DCTA and Denver Families Action, stop the election arms race and return our school board races to the voters. We need to bring democracy back to public education in Denver.

Van Schoales is a former public school teacher, Denver school principal and education improvement (sometimes reform) advocate. Scott Baldermann is a former Denver School Board member, and parent of two DPS students.

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She fled. It was the middle of the night. Her boyfriend had hit her hard enough to blacken her eye. Fearful of going to the police because she was in the country illegally, she went to her workplace instead. Though closed for business, the security guard was on duty, she reasoned, would protect her from another blow. Though my friend, a manager at the company, encouraged the young woman to go to the police, she feared they would tip off federal immigration enforcement. The crime went unreported.

This is the kind of situation that Colorado laws are designed to prevent. By limiting communication between state and local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), victims of crime, regardless of legal status, can feel safe approaching local police to report crimes and receive protection. These laws do not stop federal agents from enforcing federal immigration laws, they ensure that our police officers have the trust of the public as they enforce state and local laws.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration is trying to bully Colorado into repealing these laws with threats and litigation. These efforts, if successful, would cripple our state’s autonomy under the Constitution to govern law and order.

The Department of Justice’s most recent intimidation tactic, a letter sent last month to Colorado and the city of Denver and other jurisdictions around the country, demanded that the state and city repeal their so-called “sanctuary” laws or face criminal charges. The so-called sanctuary laws–so-called because “sanctuary” is nowhere defined in law—refer to legislation passed by the Colorado General Assembly over the past six years limiting communication and cooperation between state and local law enforcement and ICE.

For example, Colorado laws state that local law enforcement cannot arrest someone based on whether he or she is here illegally or share immigration status information with federal authorities unless a judge has issued a warrant in a federal criminal investigation.

Additionally, police cannot hold individuals in jail past their release time so they can be picked up by ICE. However, local authorities can still respond to ICE requests to provide information on when inmates will be released so ICE agents can be on hand.

The threat to prosecute so-called sanctuary jurisdictions comes after the administration’s failed attempts to starve and sue them into submission. The courts quashed the administration’s efforts to withhold funding from noncompliant jurisdictions as a violation of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment and other provisions.

The Tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Policing, a government responsibility nowhere delegated to the federal government, is clearly a state and local prerogative.

For similar reasons, the Trump administration’s suit against the state of Colorado and city of Denver, lodged in May, is also unlikely to succeed. A federal judge dismissed a similar suit against Illinois, Chicago and Cook County reasoning that the Tenth Amendment protects these jurisdictions’ “decision to not participate in enforcing civil immigration law.”

Given past precedents, the Supreme Court will uphold these lower court rulings and back states and localities against the Trump Administration. Back in 1997, when the Clinton administration and Congress tried to commandeer local law enforcement into enforcing the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the Supreme Court ruled in Printz v United States that thanks to the Tenth Amendment, the federal government cannot “command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

The application to this situation couldn’t be clearer. The Trump administration’s efforts to coerce states and localities by carrot or cudgel to repeal duly enacted laws will come to naught, an expensive taxpayer-funded naught, but naught nonetheless.

In the meantime, state and municipal elected officials are to be commended for not backing down.

Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

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