Former Board President Enters the RE-2 Political Arena
Trevor Phipps
With the conclusion of the school year, many community residents are starting to switch gears and prepare for a pivotal, high stakes local election that could determine the political and fiscal fate of the RE-2 District.
In essence, three elected seats are up for grabs this November.
Even though 2025 is an off-election year in most places with little drama, that won’t be the case in Woodland Park, as the winners of these positions could have major impacts on which direction the RE-2 Board heads in the next few years.
To date, only former School Board President Carol Greenstreet has publicly announced a run for one of the open seats. At press time, only one other candidate has pulled an application to compete in the school board election in November.
Greenstreet is no newcomer to the school board scene as she filled a vacancy to serve as a school board director in 2010. Greenstreet stayed on the school board until she resigned in 2019. During her tenure, she served as board president for a total of four years.
According to Greenstreet, she resigned in 2019 because she changed her work schedule from full time to part time. “I couldn’t make it work anymore,” Greenstreet said. “I actually probably would have stopped a little bit earlier, but I committed to stay on for the first year of a superintendent that we had just hired. So, at the end of his first year, I stepped off, and Chris Austin was the one who replaced me.”
Greenstreet is now retired, and she says she is ready to serve her community again. The local schools have always held a place in her heart ever since her children started attending the local school district.
Ever since she resigned, she has kept up with what has been going on with the school district, and she has attended or watched every school board meeting. “For the last couple of years since they have lost all of the previous administrators and people that had been working in the finance area for the district for a while, they have struggled with getting budgets that were correct,” Greenstreet said. “And that’s really concerning to me. It was for sure played out in the audit this year that the budget was off.”
Greenstreet said she understands how complicated a school district’s finances and budget can be. She said it took her four years of serving on the school board to grasp the complicated concepts of school finances. She hopes she can now use her previous experience to help fix the issues that developed, especially following a tough transition period when the district lost their experienced finance staff.
Greenstreet also said that she understands the importance in having public meetings and making all of the important decisions while under the public eye.
“Somehow this board seems to come to meetings with decisions already made,” Greenstreet said. “I think returning to a little bit more of a focus on learning and learning together as a full board before decisions are made is important.”
Battle Over School Board Leadership Continues
Ever since a slate of “conservative” school board members got elected to serve on the board of education for the Woodland Park RE-2 School District in 2021, the community has been divided, and controversy has sparked. Over the last four years, the local school district has been in the spotlight for various reasons, and they have frequently made national news headlines.
The last school board election in 2023 got extremely heated. The school board candidates quickly grouped together, with many calling the non-partisan school board race a Republican vs. Democrat fight.
In the end, two members part of the conservative slate (Mick Bates and Cassie Kimbrell) narrowly won by a margin of under 200 votes. Keegan Barkley, who was perceived as running on the other side, meanwhile, was elected after defeating incumbent board of education director David Illingworth.
This time around, all of the school board director seats, excluding two (Mick Bates and Keegan Barkley), will be under contention. These include the seats held by school board directors David Rusterholtz, Cassie Kimbrell and Suzanne Patterson.
Greenstreet cited her past experience as a big asset. Moreover, she believes the district has been moving in the wrong direction for the past few years. “When you look at the families that are choosing to take their kids still to public schools, but to a different district, boy that’s gone up,” Greenstreet said. “Prior to the last three years, it averaged at about 400 students that chose some different public school. Now we have 600 that choose to go to different public schools. And the home school population has increased from four percent to 10 percent in the last three years. So, there is something the parents aren’t happy about.”
Greenstreet believes a loss of trust has occurred between the school board and community. Greenstreet hopes that if she is elected, she can restore the public’s trust in school district leadership and bring back the community partnerships that once existed.
“I think because of my history of working on a board that had solid community partnerships, I can bring some health and healing back to those,” Greenstreet said.
