The Lewis-Palmer School District 38 board voted on Oct. 19 to start an application that would make the district the authorizer of Williamsburg Academy of Colorado, an online school whose current authorizer is being dissolved. It also postponed three policy revisions a parent had asked it to revisit, and heard parents and a coach protest the resignation of Lewis-Palmer High School’s cheer coaches.
Williamsburg Academy
The board directed Superintendent Amber Whetstine to pursue a multi-district online school application with the Colorado Department of Education and to open preliminary negotiations with Williamsburg Academy of Colorado, a tuition-free online public school for grades 6 to 12. The vote does not commit the district to a partnership. Any agreement would come back to the board for approval, which Whetstine’s timeline puts in late spring 2027, after the application goes to the state by Jan. 1 and the state replies by April. The vote was 5-0.
Williamsburg needs a new authorizer. Its current one, Education reEnvisioned BOCES, a board of cooperative educational services, is being dissolved by School District 49, with operations ending on June 30, 2027. In August the State Board of Education gave D49 emergency authority over four of the BOCES’s online programs, Williamsburg among them, for the 2026-27 school year, on condition that each find a permanent authorizer for 2027 and beyond.
Under the arrangement Williamsburg proposed at the board’s Oct. 6 work session, D38 would hold accountability for the program’s quality, its finances and its reporting to the state, while Williamsburg would run staffing, admissions, curriculum, special education, testing and diplomas. Williamsburg says it enrolls more than 1,000 Colorado students; the state counted 715 there in 2025-26. Its presentation put its graduation rate at 92%, against D38’s 93.2%. The state’s four-year graduation rate for the school was 54.1% for 2024-25. It projects that the district and the online school together would reach about 8,100 students by 2030-31, against about 6,050 for D38 alone, assuming D38 keeps shrinking by 1.1% a year and Williamsburg grows by 20% a year.
Whetstine summarized feedback from the district’s principals, its staff collaboration committee, its Parent and Community Advisory Committee and its Financial Transparency Committee. The benefits they cited included broader course offerings, live lessons with Colorado-licensed teachers, and more students and revenue. The risks included an untested effect on the district’s state test results, oversight work beyond the district’s capacity, and the chance that students would leave D38’s own schools for Williamsburg. She said concerns had also come up about the district’s current online provider, and about whether it would keep that option alongside Williamsburg. The district’s online secondary program gets its courses and teachers from Colorado Digital Learning Solutions, a nonprofit, according to the program’s 2026-27 handbook. Williamsburg’s presentation compared its students with D38’s using projections from its own Renaissance Star tests, which its notes describe as “projections, not state test results,” and promised to raise state-test participation to at least 80% by 2027-28.
One board member said that much more education would move online and that the district “might as well stay ahead of it”. Another confirmed with Whetstine that the vote was only to continue the review.
Three policies postponed
On a motion by Todd Brown, seconded by Tim Bennett, the board voted 5-0 to approve revisions to three policies recommended by the Colorado Association of School Boards: DJB on federal procurement, GBI on criminal-history records and JLF on child-abuse reporting. It postponed three others to its November meeting: JLCB on student immunization, JKA on physical intervention and restraint, and GBEB on staff conduct.
The postponement followed a request during public comment from Kristy Davis, who said she was a parent of two Monument Academy students and the El Paso County chapter chair of Moms for Liberty. She asked the board to pull JLCB for further review, to add to GBEB a sentence barring any staff member from “unlawful sexual behavior or contact with a student,” and to restore parental-notification language to JKA. When the policies came up, Ginger Schaaf said a constituent had raised the staff-conduct language. Whetstine said she had written to Davis over the weekend explaining that some of her suggestions already appear in other district policies, and that the revisions as presented follow the association’s recommendations under current law. Ron Schwarz, the board’s president, asked whether waiting four weeks would cause any harm and was told it would not.
The special meeting
Before the regular meeting, the board met in executive session to discuss a complaint, filed under district Policy KE on public concerns and complaints, against Whetstine “regarding the adequacy of her findings in an investigation.” According to the agenda, a community member appealed after school and district reviews, and the board agreed on Sept. 21 to take it up. Back in open session, on a motion by Patti Shank, seconded by Bennett, the board voted 4-0, with Brown abstaining, to uphold the superintendent’s determination and to have Schwarz send the decision to the complainant in writing within the time the policy allows. Schwarz said afterward that the board’s deliberation had been “very narrow in focus,” limited to the specific complaint and policy, and that “several broader items” were being handled at the district and school level.
Neither the agenda nor the meeting identified the complainant or the investigation.
Public comment
Five people spoke. Four addressed the cheer program at Lewis-Palmer High School. Scott Krell, who said his daughter is a cheerleader, told the board that the entire cheer coaching staff had resigned two weeks earlier, and asked for apologies to the coaches and athletes and an account of how it had happened. Lindsey Schmidt said she was one of the coaches who resigned, and that 16 athletes and four coaches had been affected. Speakers said a single parent’s complaint had been allowed to override the district’s process, and named a board member and the superintendent. The board does not respond to public comment under its Policy BEDH, and none did during the comment period.
Later, during board members’ comments, Brown said he had never used his position to give his own children an advantage and that the speakers’ comments “weren’t really rooted in reality.” Because the matter is a personnel one, he said, the public would never learn “what really happened.”
Monument Academy
Monument Academy’s board president, Lindsay Clinton, and executive director, Collin Vinchattle, presented the charter school’s annual report. The school says an anonymous donor has given $17 million toward a performing arts center with about 750 seats. Reagan Powell, one of two Monument Academy seniors who presented earlier as the board’s student representatives, said construction had started the week before, and Clinton said a ceremony would follow on Oct. 20. She called the gift “the largest ever gifted to a Colorado public school”.
The school merged its 2014 and 2019 bonds into a $44 million issue in May, including about $4.65 million for a new track and field, its report says. Asked by Schwarz, Vinchattle said about $39 million of principal had been refinanced, that the 2019 bonds had carried a rate “in the sixes” and the new 10-year bonds about 4.8%, and that the school expects to save about $700,000 a year for the first two years. Schwarz also asked that future reports separate operating results from capital funds. The school reported a pre-audit general-fund surplus of $279,367 for 2025-26, made up of $999,020 at the elementary school and deficits of $140,605 at the middle school and $579,049 at the high school. Its elementary school is on an Improvement plan under the state’s preliminary 2026 ratings, with 51 of 100 points; its secondary school is on a Performance plan, with 82.2.
Enrollment and finances
Brett Ridgway, the district’s chief business officer, said early figures show about 200 more students than budgeted, counting preschool, with 83 more at Monument Academy and 119 more at the district’s own schools, about 150 of them in the homeschool enrichment program. He called the numbers “very preliminary,” a count of heads rather than of funded students, and said the final October count would come to the board in November and an amended budget in January. The district’s summary, dated Oct. 5, shows 6,193 students in kindergarten through 12th grade against 6,028 budgeted; its traditional schools are 34 students below budget, with Lewis-Palmer Middle 31 short and Palmer Ridge High 27 short.
Ridgway also said the district’s new self-funded health plan has built up about $860,000 in reserves against roughly $4 million in expected annual claims, and that cash set aside to demolish the buildings at the Grace Best Education Center, in downtown Monument, remains in the general fund. In March the board adopted a resolution to explore leasing the site to the Monument Athletic Foundation for a privately built indoor sports complex, and committed the district to demolishing the existing buildings there, including asbestos removal.
Other business
On a motion by Tim Bennett, seconded by Patti Shank, the board voted 5-0 to approve the district’s and schools’ Unified Improvement Plans for submission to the state. The district plan makes student growth its priority: its middle schools’ median growth percentile in English was 37, against a state expectation of 50, and in math 47. It targets at least 50 in each within two years.
On a motion by Patti Shank, seconded by Todd Brown, the board approved its consent agenda 5-0. It included $119,584 for new playground equipment at Ray E. Kilmer Elementary School from Performance Recreation of Pueblo, paid from the 2026-27 capital budget after a $75,654 matching grant from Play & Park Structures’ Healthy Kids Initiative.
In her report, Whetstine said Palmer Ridge High School has been approved to offer a U.S. Army Junior ROTC program from next school year, and that three Palmer Ridge seniors, Ryan Taix, William Guttormsen and Keegan Mulloy, are National Merit Scholarship semifinalists. The board recognized Grace Shin of Lewis-Palmer High and Taliah Kellar of Lewis-Palmer Elementary, whose designs are among the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s six “I Voted” stickers. It also honored Debbie Szymanski, an early-childhood teacher at Bear Creek Elementary, who received a $1,000 Extra Yard for Teachers grant from the College Football Playoff Foundation. Ridgway’s work on the state’s school-funding schedule earned the district a 2026 Pinnacle of Achievement Award from the Association of School Business Officials International.
The board’s next work session is on Nov. 3 and its next regular meeting on Nov. 16.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: D38’s Board Sets June Deadlines on Pay and Retention, the August meeting where the board set its 2026-27 goals · Monument Academy’s Elementary School Made $1 Million. Its High School Lost $579,000., the charter’s finances campus by campus · The State Released 2026 Test Scores. Where D38 Finished Among Its Peers., the results behind the improvement plans · A Quiet Downgrade: How D38 Lost Its “Distinction”, the slide in student growth the plans now target
District record: Oct. 19 agendas and attachments, BoardDocs · Williamsburg discussion slides · Williamsburg’s authorizer presentation · Monument Academy operations report · Monument Academy slides · October enrollment summary · September financial summary · District Unified Improvement Plan · Improvement-plan work-session slides · Kilmer playground approval, invoice and purchase order · Superintendent Spotlight slides · Athletic-complex resolution, March 16, 2026 · Online secondary program · National Merit announcement
Williamsburg and its authorizer: School District 49, “State Board of Education Grants D49 Authorization of Online Schools,” Aug. 20, 2026 · Colorado Department of Education, SchoolView profile of Williamsburg Academy of Colorado · CDE, multi-district online school certification
Video: LPSD38 Media, “Board of Education Meeting – 10/19/26”
Methodology
This article draws on a transcript the Independent made of the district’s live stream with automatic speech recognition. Machine transcription misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels, so names were checked against the agenda, the district’s attachments and its website, and figures come from the meeting documents wherever the documents carry them. The Independent’s editor watched the recording to confirm who spoke and who moved and seconded each motion; where the camera was not on the board, remarks are not attributed. Vote counts come from the roll calls as recorded in the Independent’s transcript and in YouTube’s automatic captions. The two differed on the special-meeting vote, and the editor confirmed the abstention on the recording. Enrollment figures are the district’s own early-October summary, not the state’s certified count. Monument Academy’s financial figures are pre-audit, as its report states.
Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/schools/d38-williamsburg-online-school/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.
