Colorado students employ civil disobedience that school board sought to censor

Protesting the conservative school board's efforts to censor their history curriculum, more than a dozen students were escorted out of a Jefferson County Board of Education meeting in Colorado on Thursday night after disrupting proceedings by reading from their history textbooks and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The students employed one of the very tactics that school board member Julie Williams was seeking to downplay through a proposed curriculum review committee: civil disobedience. In late September, Williams' proposal—to establish a committee to ensure that the district's history texts promoted positive aspects of the United States and avoided encouragement of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—prompted mass student walk-outs and teacher 'sick-outs.'

Many of the students involved in Thursday evening's action were organizers of the September protests.

According to Chicago Public Radio, "the disruptions started when board members refused to let students speak, after they didn’t speak in the order they were called. A few minutes later, one student after another stood up in the public meeting, reciting historic acts of civil disobedience from history textbooks."

The report continues:

When asked to leave the room, students at the podium left or were escorted out peacefully. After another group of students read aloud from history books and were escorted out, about a dozen students stood up in the packed meeting to read the Pledge of Allegiance. They then filed out.

Along with the students were “legal consultants,” law students taking descriptive notes of the scene. That didn’t please one security guard who lobbed several insults at the law students.

Standing in a circle outside the education building, a set of sprinklers suddenly came on. When the students moved out of the way, those sprinklers came on. The pattern repeated until all the sprinklers were on but the students didn’t leave. A security officer came out and informed the group that they were trespassing.

Student organizer Ashlyn Maher, a member of the recently formed JeffCo Student Network for Change, didn't get a chance to speak at Thursday's meeting. She posted her speech on Facebook.

"Our problem is that you, the board majority, passed a redundant, and highly opposed curriculum review committee because you have other motives," Maher said. "You want to limit what we learn so you can push your own political opinion. Our problem is that the nation you want to build consists of people who cannot think critically. We as students want to develop our minds. Critical thinking is our ticket to the future. Do not limit what we learn...Do not try to fool us...Do not pretend that patriotism is turning a blind eye and a passive mind to the changing world around us."

Chalkbeat Colorado reports that "as part of their demonstration, the students said they had four demands: a public apology from the school board’s conservative majority for referring to students as 'union pawns;' a reversal of an earlier decision to amend content review policies; proof from the board that they listen and act on community input instead of what students called an 'ideological' agenda; and more resources for classroom instruction."

Watch security guards take books away from the students in the video of the action below: