How Voters Can Reform JEFFCO Schools
Many parents and community members are frustrated with Jefferson County (Jeffco) schools and the Jeffco school board. Among issues reported in media are “up to 61” boys on girl’s teams (despite Jeffco denials, I’ve seen recent reports on Facebook of girls cut from Jeffco’s Dakota Ridge High volleyball teams while boys make the team—Jeffco sent lawyers to meet with the team to justify boys on the team while barring parents from those meetings. Further, see https://www.foxnews.com/media/colorado-school-parents-sound-alarm-after-daughters-were-cut-from-volleyball-team-while-trans-athlete-plays), boys sharing hotel beds with young girls on school trips (a lawsuit was filed), lawsuits against the Federal government chasing the 4% of Jeffco budget the Feds threatened to withhold over Title IX, expending over 2 million on repairs for each of several schools subsequently closed and sold for about the cost of the already-completed repairs, valuing usable schools for sale as vacant lots, excluding parents from decisions, focusing on social issues over reading, writing, and arithmetic, and other policies that detract from education. We need better results from the Jeffco schools budget of about 1.32 billion yearly.
Local Colorado school boards have much autonomy and supposedly report to the voters. In practice many local district school boards are union controlled. This results from low-turnout, odd-year, board elections (Jeffco’s last election was 2025), heavy union and leftist-group financing of leftist candidates, political teachers who suggest board votes to students and parents, measly funding of conservative board candidates, ballot division between conservative candidates, etc. This pattern has sometimes been broken by organizing communities to get high voter turnout and educate voters.
This year, we have an opportunity to “flip” the State Board of Education (SBOE) and the State Department of Education (DOE) that the SBOE controls. Flipping the SBOE will affect policies and state rules passed to the Jeffco local board and allow running forensic audits to uncover financial irregularities if any. The Jeffco district board can also be voted out in 2027 and 2029. This is an uphill battle as Harris creamed Trump by 20% in 2024 in CD7 for which Jeffco is the most populous county.
Voters can force reforms on the Jeffco schools as follows:
In the 2026 Midterm elections:
Voters must form parental and concerned community groups
These groups must canvas voters, encouraging them to vote, and preferably to vote as follows in 2026:
1. Vote YES on proposition 134. This proposition bans boys from girls teams and resolves the boys on girls teams and related litigation.
2. Vote STEVE BARTON for the Congressional District 7 seat on the State Board of Education (SBOE). A win flips the SBOE to be more conservative than it is now. The SBOE and DOE can then audit Jeffco schools, revise State curriculum standards to focus more on basic skills and less on social and race indoctrination, and revise State rules to require parental input and send those rules to Jeffco. This will affect school districts statewide including Jeffco.
Vote conservative candidates for State House and State Senate seats because they can help trim waste and overspending on healthcare thus preserving the State education budget (of which Jeffco gets a massive slice through the SBOE and DOE) and repeal some awful legislature-imposed DEI curricula. As Jeffco is split among several House and Senate districts, I cannot give specific names here.
In 2027, for the November 2027 odd-year election:
To complete reforming Jeffco schools, it is necessary to replace the local Jeffco school board. Jeffco has a 5-member board with 4 year terms, 2 expire in 2027 and 2 in 2029. Concerned parents must:
1. Organize parental and concerned community groups to select 2 conservative candidates to run as a slate against existing members and/or union-sponsored candidates for the Jeffco local board. As Jeffco has board districts, candidates must reside within the board district for which they run-this excludes me as I live in another school district within CD7. Please contact Jeffco schools to determine board district boundaries.
2. Contact Jeffco schools in June 2027 to approve petition formats and, between 90 and 67 days before the November 2027 election, circulate and submit signed petitions to put the 2 candidates on the ballot. Each petition must also be signed and notarized by the petition circulator. Since many signatures will be rejected, get at least 100 signatures for each candidate. Signatures must be of registered voters having addresses within the Jeffco district. Petition circulators can verify names and addresses against the Jefferson County voter registration database.
3. Fund these 2 candidates well – but expect union-favored candidates to be better funded. Campaign literature and advertising are not cheap.
4. Campaign hard by word-of-mouth, facebook, instagram, texting, phone, door-to-door, etc. to inform voters and get out the vote district-wide to elect your 2 conservative candidates in the October-November 2027 election. This will not be easy.
In the November 2029 odd-year election:
Repeat the process proposed for 2027 with a slate of 3 candidates to expel remaining local board members. Once this is done, the new local board can make many changes in Jeffco.
Recall Alternative
Jeffco school board members can also be recalled before their terms expire in 2027 and 2029 To do so requires circulating a petition for each board member to be recalled, and obtaining 15,000 valid signatures on those petitions—as many signatures will be rejected that requires 20,000 raw signatures of Jeffco voters for each petition.
Paid for by Barton Campaign, registered agent Steven Barton. © 2026 Steven Barton