On Aug. 10, the first day of school, Montezuma-Cortez school board Vice President Laura DeWitt opened her fifth grader’s new reading curriculum and found a map putting Houston next to the Florida panhandle, as Chalkbeat first reported.
That was the least of it.
The district’s elementary schools had opened the year on Bluebonnet, a K-5 reading program Texas built for Texas children. This was not a Bible class. Scripture was the reading material – what children heard, discussed and wrote about. Kindergartners got Genesis, first graders the Prodigal Son, second graders Esther.
The First Amendment’s establishment clause bars government from favoring one religion. Colorado’s constitution is more explicit. Article IX, Section 8: “No sectarian tenets or doctrines shall ever be taught in the public school.”
The curriculum is not too religious for the secular parent, rather too sloppy for the devout one. Bluebonnet's Esther acts on faith in God; the Book of Esther never mentions God, a Southern Methodist University religion scholar told Chalkbeat (Journal, Aug. 8). Texas is spending $8 million to fix thousands of errors. DeWitt found more, “robot errors,” apparently written by AI. Families who take Scripture seriously should be first to object when a state agency teaches it badly, by chatbot.
In May, the school board signed off on Houston's “New Education System” school-improvement model, paired with a curriculum on Colorado's approved list. Houston swapped in Bluebonnet in late June. The document Superintendent Eddie Ramirez signed that month named Bluebonnet.
“I signed the document thinking that it was vetted by the lawyer, and that it was agreed upon,” Ramirez told the board.
A poor excuse. Lawyers decide whether a contract is enforceable. They don't decide what 5-year-olds read. Ramirez resigned Monday, after eight months as superintendent.
The board never voted on the switch. The district knows how. In 2022, choosing new English lessons, it displayed four candidate curricula at the administration office and held a public meeting to walk families through them (Journal, Feb. 8, 2022).
Asked whether Bluebonnet was evidence-based and met Colorado standards – the state's only requirement for off-list curriculum – board Secretary Mike Lynch said he didn't know. Days later, as The Journal reported, Ramirez released a letter claiming a district review found “approximately 95% alignment” with those standards.
The district did not choose Bluebonnet for its Scripture. It chose it because Houston had. That may be worse. Nobody weighed the curriculum at all – not Genesis, not the Texas Pledge of Allegiance, not the map.
The context matters. Montezuma-Cortez was a founding member of Colorado Leaders for Academic Success, the conservative alternative to the Colorado Association of School Boards. At least half of its member districts have been in court over book bans or transgender students. Its executive director is Dan Snowberger, Durango School District's superintendent from 2012 to 2021. In April, the board voted to quit CLAS. The only no vote came from Lynch, CLAS's president.
The argument runs the other direction, too. When the Durango School District pulled Black Lives Matter and pride flags from classrooms in 2024, then restored them, opponents called it ideological content imposed on children whose parents were never asked. It applies with far more force to a curriculum. A flag is on a wall. A curriculum is the assignment, the reading, the test.
Give Montezuma-Cortez its due. Two of its three elementary schools sit far below the state average, and wanting a turnaround is the job, not a culture war. The failure was skipping every step built to catch a mistake – and its own consultant said the model works “regardless of curriculum.” The district never needed Bluebonnet.
In that same letter, Ramirez promised to edit the materials so the curriculum would not be a “vehicle for religious instruction” – conceding it was one (Journal, Aug. 9). The promise lasted three days. The board rejected Bluebonnet 4-3, and teachers spent day three improvising.
Chalkbeat's Ann Schimke found the thread on social media, dug through July and published Aug. 6. The Journal followed, asking every board member who was consulted and on what merits. None answered. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit newsroom that has covered Colorado education for a decade and lets us republish its work.
Board Vice President DeWitt put it plainly: “Even if reporting is at times critical, the community needs to be informed and it's helpful.”
A district that answers to parents and prizes local control handed its children a curriculum picked in another state and adopted without a vote. That should not have happened. The board owes the community a full accounting.
