The Woodland Park School District’s Board of Education voted to pass its budget for the 2024-25 fiscal year during its regular meeting Wednesday evening.

Among the major differences in the budget included decreased expenses in instructional staff, support staff, school administration, operations and maintenance because of the merging of the district’s middle school and high school starting next year.

Another component the budget detailed was how the contested 1.09% sales tax would be spent in the district.

During a breakdown of the budget, Superintendent Ken Witt, acting as the district interim chief financial officer, presented the board with a pie-chart breaking down the district’s use of $3,234,463 in tax dollars into six categories for its public schools and charter schools for next year.

The categories were educator salaries and benefits, certificate of participation (COP) lease payments, facilities and maintenance, safety and security, technology and innovative programming. The salaries and benefits and COP payments would take up the bulk of these funds at 70.1% and 22.3%, respectively.

Given recent criticisms by Woodland Park’s City Council in May, some community members at the meeting echoed their concerns about the district’s transparency with the tax dollars and how they were being spent in the district.

With these recent concerns in mind, board secretary David Rusterholtz asked superintendent Witt about the feasibility and additional cost of specifying these allocations going forward.

“I would like to see, because it’s so important right now, that we provide or have a breakdown of the sales tax money.”

Witt answered that “It would be expensive, but it can be done.”

The board would pass the appropriation of next year’s school budget with a 4-1 with Keegan Barkley as the dissenting vote.

Other board actions

Later during the meeting, the board voted to add the U.S. citizenship test to the district’s requirements for high school seniors starting in the 2024-25 school year.

The district’s chief academic officer Ginger Slocum explained to the board that the test was suggested for its schools to align closer with the district’s purpose statement and to prepare the students to be good American citizens.

She said that it would not be a new class, but a new unit taught to juniors and seniors in existing classes and that the test would require students to answer 6 out of 10 questions correctly to pass.

She added that one history teacher ran a preliminary course with his class this past year where 96% of the students passed the test and that much of what is asked in the test is already covered in current curriculum.

“This is a pretty common graduation requirement across the country,” Slocum said. “Several states require this as an entire state.”

As of 2017, 17 states require the test to be taken in its public high schools.

Towards the end of the meeting, the board entered executive session to review superintendent Witt’s contract.

Throughout Witt’s tenure starting January 2023, the administration decided to merge Woodland Park’s middle school and high school, impose a so-called employee gag order against the district’s teachers and declining to reapply for $1.5 million in grants toward mental health services.

Another controversial decision was the adoption of the social studies curriculum standard known as the American Birthright .