February 01, 2012 07:39 PM UTC

"Voucherfying" Douglas County School Board Endorses Romney

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• by: Colorado Pols

Check out the press release we just received from Mitt Romney’s campaign:

Boston, MA – Mitt Romney today announced the support of the members of the Douglas County Colorado Board of Education.

“I’m truly grateful to earn the support of the members of the Douglas County Board of Education for my education reform agenda,” said Mitt Romney. “They share my vision of taking control of our children’s curriculum out of the hands of the federal government. Our kids are served best when these crucial decisions are made at the local level.”

Announcing his support, Douglas County School District Board of Education President John Carson said, “We are very proud to be supporting Mitt Romney. He is committed to making our education system more effective by reducing needless federal intrusion, empowering local officials, and promoting choice and competition. He is also a proven leader who has shown time and again that he can turn around troubled enterprises. That is exactly what the bureaucratic U.S. Department of Education needs today. I look forward to having a President Romney in the White House and unleashing our schools and our students to achieve their full potential.”

For starters, we didn’t know that Colorado public school boards could legally do such a thing–oh, wait up folks, that’s why it says “board members” instead of, you know, the Board as a unit. The fact that it is all of the Douglas County Board of Education members endorsing, though, lets the release be worded in such a way that this distinction doesn’t really matter!

Seriously, that’s clever. We’re acknowledging the cleverness.

And as Colorado’s most politically controversial public school board by orders of magnitude after instituting a religious school voucher program (halted for now by court injunction), the endorsement of Mitt Romney, and Romney’s warm thanks from Boston HQ for their endorsement, might indeed affect next Tuesday’s GOP caucuses. Although the Douglas County school board’s support could be considered politically toxic in a general election, as some Jefferson County school board candidates discovered last fall, on the right these people still enjoy a folk-hero kind of status for leading the state into a litigious school voucher showdown.

Relax, queasy moderates, there’ll be plenty of time to drop them like a hot brick before the fall.