Student group starts recall effort against Pueblo school board
Some students who marched with teachers in the strike in Pueblo last week have now started a recall effort against three school board members.
Max Markuson DiPrince, a high school senior, is a leader of the group SCOT, which stands for Student Coalition for Our Teachers. SCOT turned in a petition Friday to be certified by County Clerk Gilbert Ortiz.
DiPrince said many students are unhappy that the board failed to prevent the strike by not following recommendations from an independent fact-finder on pay and benefits for teachers and special education instructors in School District 60.
“Impacts of the strike are not the sole reasons why we are intending to recall them,” he said. “Instead, we’re focusing on other things such as the lack of transparency, poor fiscal management and their lack of communication with us.”
The recall effort targets Barb Clementi, the board’s president; Frank Latino, the vice-president; and Bobby Gonzales, a board member. All three are senior board members, elected in 2015, whose terms expire in 2019.
If Ortiz certifies the petition, which could happen in one to two weeks, the students will have two months to gather 23,000 signatures for each board member, for a total of 69,000 signatures. If the effort is successful, a recall election would be held in November.
“It’s definitely going to be a challenge,” DiPrince said. “Many students have summer jobs, vacations and other summer plans, or are getting ready for college. But this is something worth doing. We’re holding our elected officials accountable and trying to change the system ourselves.”
Ortiz said the effort has a chance to succeed.
“There’s a lot of support out there for teachers and students,” he said. “We saw it during the strike. But getting 69,000 signatures won’t be easy. Only 55,000 people voted in the last election. All the school board members are at-large members, not assigned to districts, so that’s why so many signatures are required.”
KRDO NewsChannel 13 spoke with many citizens Friday who agree with and support the recall effort.
“All they need is to get 23,000 people to sign for all three members, and it’s a success,” said Randy Hall, a Pueblo resident. “But I’m not sure this is the best way to go about it. I recommend they spend more time figuring out what the issues were, what they felt like they were slighted in, and make sure those things don’t happen in the future.”
DiPrince hopes the three target board members have been replaced by new members when he returns home for Thanksgiving break from Creighton University.
