A growing number of Puebloans are calling for the removal of three board members for Pueblo County School District 70 over alleged governance concerns in recent months.

A newly formed coalition known as WeAreD70 is calling for Ann Bennett, A.J. Wilson and recently appointed Susie Carnes, along with the board’s attorney, Brad Miller, to resign.

An online petition launched in late February demanding the resignation of Bennett, Wilson and Miller has garnered over 1,000 signatures as of Friday afternoon. Additionally, a legal letter submitted to the board on March 4 called on the board to return to open session, invalidate the appointment of Carnes and conduct a new vote for the vacant board seat.

WeAreD70 spokesperson Andrea Naglich said the resignation demands are in response to board actions over the past year that have been legally questioned and excluded public input or notice.

Specifically, she said more people began following the board when an email from June 4, 2025, between Miller and then-Board President Anne Ochs revealed that the eventual approval of the contract school Riverstone Academy was to initiate a U.S. Supreme Court case regarding public funding for religious schools.

When Ochs was later questioned about the school’s opening and her own involvement with its contractor, Education ReEnvisioned BOCES, she abruptly resigned from the board during a Dec. 9 meeting, The Gazette’s news partner KOAA previously reported.

“The whole community didn’t realize how bad things had gotten with that board,” Naglich said.

Board members Bennett and Wilson could not be reached for comment.

Board vacancy

Following Och’s resignation, Bennett became board president and the board interviewed four candidates to fill the vacancy: Carnes, Jonathan Lewis, Tara Stroesenreuther and Adolph Vigil.

A Feb. 10 meeting ended abruptly after board members couldn’t agree on who should fill the vacancy.

Per Colorado law, a school board has 60 days to select someone to fill the vacancy. If the board is unable to appoint a new member within the timeframe, then the board’s president can make an appointment without a consensus vote.

In D-70’s case, the board deadline was Feb. 14 and Bennett unilaterally selected Carnes to fill the vacancy outside of a public meeting.

Near the beginning of a Feb. 24 meeting, board directors Michelle Erickson and Mark Emery raised concerns about Carnes’ appointment since the previous meeting was never adjourned. Miller told the board that Erickson’s prepared statements were “improper” and that they needed “to move into a meeting” before any board business could begin.

Neither Erickson nor Emery voted to approve the meeting agenda and Bennett then moved to adjourn the meeting before leaving. This also wasn’t approved by Erickson or Emery. Wilson and Carnes, who was due to be sworn in, were both absent from the meeting.

A recording of Carnes getting sworn in on Feb. 25 would later be uploaded online.

The legal letter was submitted to the board by attorney Eric Maxfield, who is representing Lewis, Stroesenreuther and Vigil.

The letter alleges that the board didn’t comply with Colorado’s open meetings law or its board of education vacancy law and requests that Carnes’ appointment be declared invalid and reheard at a public meeting and that the board adopt objective appointment standards.

When naming each board member in the letter, Carnes is named as “Director-in-Error.”

The letter concludes with a request for response within five business days.

‘Feels like a predator’

In addition to the concerns surrounding Colorado’s Open Meeting Laws, WeAreD70 also noted the details surrounding legal uncertainties of Riverstone Academy as just cause for Miller’s removal.

Following the swift approval from the D-70 board in June, Riverstone opened this fall, with some referring to it as “Colorado’s first public Christian school,” which brought almost immediate scrutiny from the Colorado Department of Education over its right to public funding. The building that the school operated out of this year was forced to close last month, following threats from Pueblo County to shut down its utilities for being out of compliance with multiple county codes.

Last month, Riverstone filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado, alleging religious discrimination.

Naglich said that all of the circumstances surrounding the contract school to date, starting with the leaked June email suggesting that it was ultimately headed for a lawsuit, have rallied the community to demand change.

“That feels like a predator, like he’s preying on our community. That he thinks we’re stupid,” she said of Miller. “Nobody wants to be the Supreme Court test case for this.

“We have religious people in our community, we have non-religious people in our community and we’ve gotten along for decades in supporting our local schools. … None of us asked for this.”

Miller told The Gazette in an email that he wasn’t aware of the Pueblo petition and added that any such effort against him “likely is because progressives were unsuccessful in bullying the board of education into appointing one of their preferred candidates to a vacant board position.”

A similar online petition was started by residents of Academy District 20, urging its board to reject hiring Miller as its new legal counsel over concerns about “conflicts of interest, transparency, cost escalation, and the misuse of public school districts as ideological legal test cases.” D-20 would ultimately hire Miller’s firm as its representation.

In response to the D-20 petition, Miller wrote the following:

“I suspect that effort was in opposition to my consistent stance that parents are the authority in their child’s education and that the efforts by our state legislature to afford children the agency to make adult-type decisions is constrained by SCOTUS decisions like the holding last week saying that California cannot legally exclude parents from decisions about children and their gender or pronouns.”

Maxfield has previously represented Erin O’Connell, a Woodland Park resident who successfully sued Woodland Park District RE-2’s board over open meeting violations in 2022 when Miller served as its legal counsel.

Last year, School District 49, under the legal advice of Miller, spearheaded a lawsuit against the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and the Colorado Civil Rights Division over district policies dictating students’ participation in athletics and activities based on their biological sex rather than gender identity.

While D-49 and other districts and charter schools named as plaintiffs would settle with CHSAA last December, litigation remains ongoing with the other defendants. In January, a federal judge recommended dismissing the lawsuit on the grounds of school districts’ ability to represent themselves and all of their students.