After the first meeting and a workshop with the school board, three of whose members were recently elected, Mick Bates announced his resignation.  

 “I’m very proud of what we did as a conservative school board,” he said.

In a time when cellphones are diverting students’ attention from their work, Bates and the board required students to check their phones in the morning.  

“That policy was well-received,” he said.  

However, over the last several years, Bates and the board took heat from the public over the hiring of Ken Witt, the controversial superintendent whose policies were supported by some but antagonized others.

“There are things I would have done differently if I had it to do over again,” Bates said.

Under Witt, the board approved opening the charter school Merit Academy, a contract school with ERBOCES. In the past, the Colorado Department of Education turned down a request from a previous board to open a charter school.

Witt is the executive director of ERBOCES – Education Re-Envisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, a role he served while launching the academy.

Nonetheless, the academy’s enrollment continued to increase, and each year added a grade. Currently the academy educates children from kindergarten through 12^th grade.

In many aspects, however, Bates and the board were blindsided by many of Witt’s decisions such as closing Gateway Elementary School with no advance notice.

“We had a superintendent who wasn’t very popular,” Bates said. “He didn’t live in the district and that’s important.”

Through his time serving on the board, Bates was the subject of scorn by many in the community who spoke publicly against him as the president. Many of the comments were rude and out-of-line; at least one speaker was almost removed by security but was not.

“I’m thick-skinned and to take that kind of abuse I had to just let it go,” he said.

One of the public speakers accused the board, Bates in particular, of banning books.

“We did not ban books; we created a section for books for a mature audience,” he said. “Students need their parents’ permission to check out books in that section.”

Bates acknowledges being disappointed in the election results where Kassidi Gilgenast, Laura Gordon and Carol Greenstreet won handily.

“The turnout for conservatives was poor,” he said.

By “conservative” Bates, like Witt, intended to focus on academics.

“I wanted to concentrate on the ABCs, reading and writing,” he said.

During the first work session of the new board, Karen Hamlow, director of academic services, talked about the effects of Witt’s dropping the annual grants that funded counselors for each school. There are more behavior problems and absenteeism, Hamlow said, since the grants were dropped.

Bates balked at Hamlow’s conclusion, defended the former superintendent’s order. 

“There was too much of the peripheral stuff,” he said.

The peripheral stuff included a resolution passed by the board after the November national election declaring that there are only two genders.  

“So many of the kids don’t even know what transgenderism is,” Bates said, adding that instead of focusing on students’ changing their pronouns, the schools should focus on grades. “I want to focus on the kids,” he said.

In fact, Bates highlights the district’s academic rating which, under the former school board, moved from 69^th in the state to 10^th in test scores.

“That is spectacular and I’m very proud of that,” he said.

But during the meeting in December, the board rejected his idea to go ahead and hire the interim superintendent Ginger Slocum and save $8,000 paid to the search firm.

“She was the principal at Columbine and she lives here,” he said.

Bates figured there was a message in the vote.  “There is no point in my being there,” he said.