September 02, 2011 09:23 PM UTC

GOP's "Nonpartisan" JeffCo School Board Candidate Slate Set To Roll

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Back in May, we discussed what appeared to be an incipient campaign by partisan Republicans–led by controversial Jefferson County school board member Laura Boggs–to push Republican candidates in the nominally “nonpartisan” school board elections this November.

In June, Boggs held a meeting at the Arvada Public Library to discuss JeffCo school board elections in November, with a relatively new “Tea Party”-sounding group, Revive Our American Republic (ROAR), hosting the event. As we noted then, ROAR’s registered agent is ubiquitous GOP attorney John Zakhem–meaning that despite the “Tea Party”-sounding name, in every way an organ of Republican Party usual suspects.

Well, taking a look at the new “2011 election preview” page on the Jefferson County GOP’s website, any pretense of “nonpartisanship” that may have existed has now been dropped.

2011: Jefferson County Board of Education

District 3 – Preston Branaugh (R)

District 4 – Jim Powers (R)

We’re not sure what motivated Republicans to go masks-off in this “nonpartisan” race, but it’s broadly assumed that a conservative majority on the JeffCo school board, which would be the result if both of the above candidates prevail, will result in an attempt to create a religious school voucher program similar to that instituted in Douglas County following an eerily similar coordinated partisan takeover.

The difference, of course, is that Jefferson County is the largest school district in Colorado. So if you’re not yet paying attention to what’s going on here, we expect you will be very soon. It’s likely these GOP “nonpartisan” candidates will see heavy air support from mainline Republican donors, pro-voucher education groups, religious advocacy, and ideological conservatives of all stripes.

Conversely, if you go to the website of the JeffCo Democrats, you’ll see nothing to indicate a school board election is even taking place as of this writing. So, uh, maybe that’s where we’d start…

(Cross-posted from JeffCo Pols)