For the past eight months, the Park County RE-2 School District has refused to show Park County educators any semblance of respect, while also refusing to show the taxpayers of this community any semblance of financial transparency.

Thursday night’s School Board meeting was nearly derailed when school board President Kim Bundgaard initially refused to move the meeting to a larger capacity room. After police and firefighter intervention, she relented and the meeting was moved to the multipurpose room.

When the meeting finally began, educators, students, parents, and community members, one after the other, told the school board that they must be transparent. They told the board that they must work with Park County educators to come up with solutions to keeping and attracting the very best educators for Park County students. They told the board members they should resign if they were unwilling to work with SPEA. Community feedback was greeted with eye-rolls, laughs, and general dismissiveness from the seated board members and superintendent.

On Friday, SPEA offered a proposal aimed at getting our students back to school. SPEA offered a Memorandum of Understanding that would bring in an independent, third-party, neutral fact finder to review and form an unbiased opinion of the District’s finances. If agreed to, the MOU would be included within the Professional Agreement and we could have brought the agreement to our members and potentially get back to work Monday.

Instead, the District rejected the proposal for a neutral third-party fact finder, which would bring transparency to the District’s finances and the Park County community, and offered a statement admonishing SPEA for the things they “gained” in their counterproposal, while not acknowledging publicly what they weren’t offering, including financial transparency to Park County taxpayers. The District then stood up and walked out, refusing to schedule any additional mediation sessions, essentially mounting to a “take it or leave it” offer.

What are they afraid of?

It is abundantly clear that the Park County School Board as it currently exists does not want to put Park County students first. Their main concern is operating in secrecy. It is also abundantly clear that it’s time for Kim Bundgaard, Jan Toyne, and Leslie Rhyner to resign TODAY.