🚨This is a big deal out of COLORADO — but dissolution cannot be the end of this story.
Education reEnvisioned BOCES — the publicly funded education cooperative behind Colorado’s so-called “public Christian school,” Riverstone Academy — is being dissolved.
And it is VERY important to be clear about what happened here. This was not simply an education organization that made a few bad administrative decisions.
👏Riverstone was deliberately created as an attempt to establish an explicitly Christian school inside the public education system — using public education infrastructure and public money — and to generate a court case challenging the constitutional limits on publicly funded religious schools. 😡
👉Emails obtained by reporters showed that the school was intended to produce a legal test case that supporters hoped could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Riverstone is now closed. Its religious-discrimination lawsuit collapsed. A judge has invalidated the agreement that helped allow it to open. And ERBOCES itself is now being dissolved.
But this cannot become:
“Well, they’re gone now. Problem solved.”
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
🕵️♀️There are still very serious questions about where the public money went, who approved it, whether it was lawfully spent, who benefited from it, and what public officials knew when they authorized these arrangements.
Riverstone alone received roughly $300,000 in public funding. And that is not the only money that deserves a second look.
Colorado has already been auditing ERBOCES, and reporting has raised questions about other large expenditures involving publicly funded programs and private religious education.
Dissolution should not erase accountability.
-Audit it.
-Follow the money.
-Preserve the records.
-Investigate the contracts.
-Determine who authorized the spending and under what authority.
-Recover public funds where the law allows it.
-And if laws, ethics rules or public duties were violated, hold the people responsible accountable. 👈👈👈👈
Because shutting down an organization is not accountability if everyone responsible simply walks away while taxpayers absorb the loss.
Public money does not become untraceable just because the entity that spent it dissolves. 💸
🚨This was an intentional effort to push the boundaries separating public education from sectarian religious education.
The public deserves to know exactly who designed it, who approved it, who funded it, who benefited from it — and where every single public dollar went.
Do not let dissolution become an escape hatch.
Read the Chalkbeat reporting:
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