We've all heard the news about Liberty Common School expanding and adding a high school. The expansion is a testament to Colorado's innovative approach to public education, where publicly financed charter schools operate in parallel with the local school district. Liberty Common was Fort Collins's first charter school. Two other charters in the city include Ridgeview Classical Schools and T.R. Paul Academy for Arts and Knowledge.

Unfortunately, each of Fort Collins's charter schools has been caught up in one controversy or another. The T.R. Paul Academy worked against the local Poudre School District (PSD) to obtain its charter directly from the state's Charter School Institute. At Ridgeview Classical Schools, the issues are numerous and troubling, although Ridgeview has managed to stay out of the news for a while now, which I think is a good sign. At Liberty Common, controversy erupted over the school's intent to promote creationism (at least that's the way I remembered it from ten years ago).

Given the publicity surrounding Liberty Common's expansion, I decided to ask the school about its curriculum and creationism. I engaged in a Twitter dialogue with the school, which is reproduced below. I originally captured the dialogue as three screen-shots, which you can examine here, here and here.

1. Twitter post by LibertyCommon – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 8:47 AM


2. Twitter post by 3Dsound – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 8:53 AM


3. Twitter post by LibertyCommon – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:25 PM


4. Twitter post by 3Dsound – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:28 PM


5. Twitter post by 3Dsound – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:37 PM


6. Twitter post by LibertyCommon – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:38 PM


7. Twitter post by 3Dsound – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:40 PM


8. Twitter post by LibertyCommon – Friday, June 25, 2010 at 4:42 PM


After that last post, Liberty Common blocked me from its Twitter feed.

I didn't know it at the time, but Liberty Common's Twitter posts are authored by Bob Schaffer, who is the Director of Secondary Schools at Liberty Common and the elected Chairman of the Colorado State Board of Education. Also, Schaffer represented Colorado's fourth congressional district as a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1997 to 2003.

It's hard to understand why Bob said I "oppose public education" and "have little regard for truth or facts." I had asked Bob directly about the history of creationism at Liberty Common and had supplied him with a third-party source to support my inquiry. Bob's response seems overheated and a surprise to hear from an elected official who claims to be "one of Colorado's foremost and most experienced education policy leaders and experts."

It made me wonder what Liberty Common had to hide.

As it turns out, there isn't much to the controversy. Certainly, there's nothing Bob Schaffer couldn't have easily addressed – although it does appear that Liberty Common denigrates evolution for creationist purposes.

On October 9, 1999, Liberty Common adopted a policy that removed evolution from the science curriculum and asserted the following rationale for doing so:

Discussions of evolutionary theory can lead to discussions of whether or not supernatural forces play a role in the mechanism of evolution or the origin of life. These topics extend beyond the scope of science and will not be taught at Liberty Common School.

Parents at Liberty Common objected to this policy and believed it was a creationist stratagem aimed at diminishing the teaching of evolution.

On October 23, 1999, the PSD Board of Education agreed with the parents and ordered Liberty Common to reinstate the teaching of evolution. Liberty Common ignored the request.

The case was brought before an administrative law judge for review. The issue before the judge was not Liberty Common's curriculum, as such, but whether PSD overstepped its chartering authority when it ordered Liberty Common to change its teaching policy on evolution.

The judge didn't rule on the case until December 2002. You can read about that ruling in the Coloradoan article reproduced below, where the highlighting is mine. Basically, the judge agreed that PSD had the authority to intervene when Liberty Common violated its charter.

What should we make of all this? ...That a charter school – like every other public institution – benefits from accountability and oversight, which is a concept that I hope Bob Schaffer supports.

Judge: PSD Mediation Wasn't in Violation of Contract
by Stacy Nick (Saturday, 21-Dec-02), Coloradoan, page B1

A Denver administrative law judge has found Poudre School District didn't violate its contract with Liberty Common School when it intervened in a parent's complaint against Liberty's science curriculum.

The ruling, issued earlier this month, ends a nearly 3-year-old grievance.

The issue began in 1999 when an LCS parent claimed the school had dropped part of the curriculum to avoid teaching human evolution. When the school district became involved, LCS board members asked for mediation, saying PSD violated the contract.

At the time, LCS, founded in 1997, was the district's only charter school. It has its own board of directors and policies.

In a nonbinding resolution, administrative law Judge Nancy Hopf ruled PSD did not violate the contract and further decided that, since the district had already drawn up a new contract with the school, the issues raised no longer were ongoing and thus moot.

But the district was not completely off the hook.

"Ongoing relations between the parties were clearly affected in a negative way by the manner in which the district had chosen to proceed," Hopf said in her ruling.

Some of these issues came up because the district hadn't developed communication and a relationship with Liberty, said Joe Hendrickson, PSD assistant superintendent of elementary school services.

"(Charters) were so new to us that the board was probably foreseeing more of a role in them," Hendrickson said.

Under current PSD board regulations, the district gets involved in grievances with charter schools only when it is a matter of state law or a violation of a charter school's contract. In 2001, PSD signed a 18-year contract with Liberty.

The ruling came as a surprise to both sides, namely because neither thought it would ever come.

"When I first received (the ruling), it took me a second to remember what this was about," Hendrickson said.

Liberty Headmaster Russ Spicer hadn't even heard that the ruling was in.

"This is one of those things that two or three years ago seemed pretty important," said Spicer, who was Liberty's dean of students when the mediation began, "but at this point, (the ruling) won't change how we deal with things."

If you're interested in this dispute over curriculum and creationism at Liberty Common School, you can read about it in the following articles, which are listed in chronological order.

Brian Weber (26-Sep-99), Parents, students alarmed at lack of evolution studies, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, Colorado].

Coleman Cornelius (24-Oct-99), School's evolution curbs challenged, Denver Post [Denver, Colorado].

Brian Weber (27-Oct-99), School ordered to remove ban on evolution policy – violates contract, Poudre Board contends, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, Colorado].

Deborah Frazier (28-Aug-00), School has monkey on its back: Ban by Liberty Common on teaching human evolution violates its policy, some say, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, Colorado].

Editorial (29-Aug-00), A charter ducks its duty the issue: A charter school clashes with district over evolution – Our view: It should deliver on its promises, Rocky Mountain News [Denver, Colorado].

Stacy Nick (13-Dec-00), PSD, Liberty Common await mediation ruling, Coloradoan [Fort Collins, Colorado], pages A1, A11.

Michael F. Antolin and Joan M. Herbers (2001), Perspective: Evolution's struggle for existence in America's public schools, Evolution, 55(12), pages 2379–2388.

Stacy Nick (21-Dec-02), Judge: PSD mediation wasn't in violation of contract, Coloradoan [Fort Collins, Colorado], page B1.

Matt Young (03-Oct-10), Publicly funded parochial school in Fort Collins, Colorado? Panda's Thumb [blog that discusses evolutionary biology and the creation-evolution controversy from a scientific perspective], online at pandasthumb.org (accessed 05-Oct-10).