From the start, Jocelyn Wallen, a senior at Standly Lake high school, wasn’t optimistic. “I expect them to talk about it,” she said, “but ultimately to pass it.”



She spoke to me an hour before the school board meeting that was to prove her cynicism correct began. But many of the more than 400 people with whom she had gathered outside the Jefferson County school board building seemed hopeful.

They were there to protest against what they see as egregious overreach by the conservative majority on the Jefferson County school board. They chanted slogans and waved signs saying “Get Koch Industries Out Of Our Schools” and “We Have The Right To Know Our Past!” Several students, Wallen included, addressed the assembled crowd from the back of a pickup truck.

“Just because we’re teenagers, doesn’t mean we’re apathetic about education!” said one.

While the students addressed the crowd on the green, hundreds more were already queueing to get into the meeting-room itself. As the marchers set off along Golden’s main street waving their banners, others began to file in to the fifth floor meeting room, escorted to the lifts in small groups by security guards.

Last November, this district, in the suburbs of Denver, elected a new conservative majority to the board: president Ken Witt, John Newkirk and Julie Williams. It was Williams, who has emerged as the most controversial of the three, who proposed a new committee, answerable to the board, to review a new Advanced Placement history curriculum that has proven controversial on the right – and it was that proposal which spurred the protests.

In her original proposal, Williams said she wanted to make sure the materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights”, and do not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters against proposed changes to the national history curriculum march outside the Jefferson County school board meeting in Golden, Colorado. Photograph: RICK WILKING/REUTERS

Newkirk, to be fair, stripped the proposal of its original, baldly political language – but the damage was already done. Teachers staged sick-outs in protest against what they saw as Tea Party mission creep on the board, and then students in the thousands began walk-outs across the county.

Other than Newkirk, the conservatives on the board didn’t help the situation one bit. Ken Witt told the conservative news site Breitbart earlier this week that the protesting students were mere “pawns” for the teachers’ unions. Those comments drove the students into an ecstasy of outrage.

On the green, after all the students had spoken, Scott Kwasny, the communications director for the Jefferson County Education Association, a teachers union, stood up and gestured to them. “None of these kids look like pawns to me,” he shouted, and the crowd cheered.

Inside, the meeting was called to order. For almost three full hours, a torrent of students, teachers and parents paraded before the board and the assembled news cameras, almost all of them to berate Williams, Newkirk and Witt. Emotions ran extremely high. Two of the students who had addressed the crowd outside presented a petition with 40,000 signatures, printed out in full – 3,700 pages – to the board. People waved copies of the Colorado constitution and Orwell’s 1984. Voices cracked with emotion.

When one commenter stood up and said he thought the students “probably hadn’t read the proposal”, pandemonium erupted, with loud shouts of “Yes we did!”

Williams spent most of the meeting bobbing up and down almost imperceptibly, as if she were vibrating in tune to the anger directed at her. Occasionally the tight smile on her face twitched slightly. Newkirk retained the aloof, slightly disbelieving air of a Victorian schoolmaster, while Witt seemed almost to revel in the torrent of vitriol, his “thank you” to each petitioner sounding more and more sarcastic with every repetition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters against proposed changes to the national history curriculum march outside the Jefferson County school board meeting. Photograph: Rick Wilking/Reuters

Applause was banned in the room – many showed their support for speakers Occupy Wall Street-style, by waving their hands in the air. But the rule was impossible to enforce; as the hours ticked by, the audience booed and jeered, clapped and cheered.

There was a small but vocal contingent of conservative supporters in the room, wearing matching “We Support Julie Williams” T-shirts and waving flags; at the beginning of the meeting they brought her a bouquet of flowers with a flag in it, which sat in front of her desk for the duration.

Outside, the marchers had returned and were crowded back on the grass, watching a live stream of the meeting from a projector. Small children threw a football around; the local cinema provided popcorn. Out there, where there were no rules of conduct, the cheers and jeers were much louder. Someone walking past would be forgiven for thinking the crowd were watching some big sporting event.

After the public comments, there was a short break. Ashlyn Maher, a senior at Chatfield high school, who as part of various groups stood up to address the board no fewer than three times, told the Guardian she’d love to be optimistic about what was to happen next. “But considering the board’s history …”

Then, after some ceremonial business was dispatched – a bemused man from Kaiser Permanente handed an oversized cheque to the winners of a relay race – the board got down to the business of debating the proposal.

Lesley Dahlkemper and Jill Fellman, the minority on the board, mounted a fierce assault on the conservative majority – you could barely breathe in the room for acrimony. Dahlkemper, a former NPR contributor, whose acidic exchanges with Witt were a source of constant entertainment over the course of the evening, demanded that Williams’s amendment be “killed”. She was denied by a 3-2 vote.

Then, a new motion, described as a compromise, was presented. Dahlkemper and Fellman objected, demanding they have more time to consider the proposal, but were overruled. At one point, Newkirk said of the AP history course that “if they’ve got nothing to conceal, they’ve got nothing to fear,” a comment for which Dalhkemper shot him a look of undisguised horror.

Finally the crowd, which even after five hours of meeting was still packed to the rafters and chanting “recall”, could only watch as the board voted 3-2 to pass the new proposal.

The consensus afterwards was that Witt, Newkirk and Williams got their way through something of a bait-and-switch – this wasn’t Williams’s proposed committee, exactly, but it was close enough.

Nicky Woolf (@NickyWoolf) Witt pushes ahead with the vote - it passes. 3-2. Shouts of "RECALL." "Silence," shouts Witt. #Jeffco

The new proposal, which Dalhkemper and Fellman had less than a day to process, does mandate greater community involvement and would even see students added to the committee. But the bottom line is that there will be a curriculum review committee, and it will answer to the board.

Afterwards, Williams told the Guardian she was “very happy” with the outcome. “It meets all my objectives,” she said. Asked if it had been difficult sitting up there, with all the anger directed at her, she replied, “When you know what you’re doing is the right thing for our children, you do it.”

Dahlkemper was not so pleased. “We had a real opportunity to listen to our community and to respond to our community,” she said, adding sardonically, “I’m not so sure we did that.” Asked how she felt, she paused. “It’s been”, she said, with heavy emphasis, “a difficult 10 months.”

This controversy may have centred around AP history classes, but these students have experienced a crash course in realpolitik, red in tooth and claw. “I guess if I go into politics, I should be expecting more of this,” said Mali Holmes, a senior at Evergreen high school and one of the students who addressed the crowd at the rally outside. She wore a badge that says “Fox News Called Me A Punk”, in reference to a comment made on-air about the student protesters by anchor Gretchen Carlson.

Holmes said she was “really frustrated; very upset”, by the result. Other students, several of whom stayed until the meeting’s bitter end – around midnight, more than seven hours after the rally on the green – looked almost on the verge of tears. Several of them stayed to the end to hug Dahlkemper, whom they idolise.

But Holmes also said that this process had been a bonding experience, and given her the chance to meet students from other schools across the district. A group of them is meeting on Saturday to discuss where they go from here. Every school will be represented, she said. They want to campaign to recall the school board. “The students are not going to back down.”