Colorado Times Recorder originally published this story on October 16, 2025.
The phone call came through around 9pm while Cyndi Eldredge was watching television with her husband. On the other end of the line was her boss, Montezuma-Cortez School District superintendent Tom Burris, launching immediately into one of his frequent tirades. Eldredge thought he sounded impaired. Given everything that had been going on in the district, and her own increasing discomfort with it, she decided to listen to her intuition: she recorded the call.
“I looked at my husband, because I knew something was going on, and I said, ‘give me your phone,’ and he’s like, ‘what?’ So I took his phone, went to video, and pressed the button to video record it.”
Eldredge recorded in spurts for the next 90 minutes, as the call between two cell phones in one of the state’s most rural quarters kept dropping due to lost signal. By the time she got her boss off the phone around 10:30pm, Eldredge had six separate recordings of the call, covering 76 of the last 90 minutes.
“She’s an evil fucking bitch,” Burris can be heard saying of one teacher on the call, before saying that another employee can “go right straight to fucking hell.” In the long call, the superintendent discussed sensitive matters, hurled abuse in the direction of his employees, spread rumors, and made threats.
Though the existence of the recordings has been made public before this, the recordings themselves have never been published until today. We have stitched together Eldredge’s six recordings, with noticeable gaps in between them, and have redacted the names of the many employees Burris spoke harshly of. The recording of the phone call can be found in full at this link.
Within two months of that June 13, 2024 phone call, Eldredge had been terminated from her position as the head of human resources for the school district, and Cortez police had opened a criminal investigation into Tom Burris – a new low point for a superintendent whose tenure teachers, parents, former district employees, and community members have told me had already been marked by dysfunction, bullying, and alleged shady dealings.
“There is an extreme lack of transparency, and it feels intentional,” a district parent told me.
Now, 16 months after the infamous phone call between Burris and Eldredge, with the charges against Burris long-since turned into a friendly diversion agreement, chaos and fear reign in the underfunded, under-staffed district, where nearly a dozen teachers told me with absolute certainty that they would be fired if they spoke on the record. Some fear Burris, whose reputation for summary terminations is well-known in the district, and has attracted lawsuits which the district’s taxpayers are now responsible for. Others fear the local school board which Burris ostensibly serves, which some teachers see as having abetted the superintendent’s bad behavior, and others believe has had the wool pulled over its eyes.
Almost every district employee and many of the community members I spoke to are wary of someone else as well: the school board’s attorney, Brad Miller. Many are concerned that Miller wields outsized influence on the district.
In an era marked by culture war battles in school districts across the nation, the fight in Montezuma-Cortez is a different breed. The tension and bad blood in the small, rural community in Montezuma County in the Four Corners area, has not been fomented by book bans or critical race theory or issues of gender and sexuality “We don’t have the same sort of partisan issues, maybe unlike other districts,” a longtime member of the community told me.
Instead, the conflict consuming the school district is about the nuts and bolts of education, about how resources are allocated, and about who gets to decide. The fight is also about the fundamentals of good governance: transparency and accountability. It is about the district’s leaders, and the environment they have created in the institution they lead. And it is about the impacts of that environment on the teachers, parents, and students doing their best to thrive in a dysfunctional school system.
This is not a story about a troubled district’s recent past, though; it’s a story about its future. Three weeks ago, Tom Burris announced his resignation, giving the school board 60 days to pick his replacement, but vowing to stay on in his role until the end of the school year if the board could not pick a replacement within the allotted time. Now, with Miller’s legal and strategic guidance, the board is rushing through a mid-year superintendent search process, scheduled to take place over just 35 days. If all goes according to the plan the board laid out in September, they will pick a replacement for Burris at their October 21 meeting – two weeks before five of the board’s seven seats face the possibility of being turned over in the November election.
“They need to stop and take a breath,” one community member told me about the board’s rush to pick a new superintendent before the election. With the vote to fill the job scheduled for this coming Tuesday, however, the board shows no intention of taking a breath.
I.
The beginning of the dysfunction unwinding itself across the Montezuma-Cortez School District can most easily be dated back to early 2022, when two new arrivals alighted on the district from different directions: a new superintendent, and a new attorney.
At the time, many in the struggling, underfunded district were ready for a fresh start. On the heels of local tensions spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, the board had just removed a superintendent who had been on the job for less than seven months. Operating on a budget well below the per-pupil average for Colorado, and in the middle of their second year “on the clock,” as the state terms underperforming districts on improvement plans, some hoped that the new hires would right the ship.
Tom Burris, the superintendent hired in March of that year, was no stranger to the district: he worked in the district’s middle school earlier in his career, before moving to New Mexico. When the district found itself without a superintendent in the middle of a school year, sources tell me that then-board member Sherri Wright reached out to Burris and asked him to come home to Montezuma County to take the top job.
Wright, who now serves on the Colorado State Board of Education, did not respond to my request for comment.
The familiarity of Burris’ name was a double-edged sword. Much of what locals and district professionals had heard about the man was unflattering.
Burris did not respond to questions or requests to comment on this story.
“‘If they bring him into this position, we all need to resign, because he will destroy our careers,’” Eldredge recalls a colleague who had known Burris during his past tenure in the district telling her at the time.
“His reputation was bad when he left,” longtime community member M.B. McAfee told me. “When he was here before, he was seen as a bully.”
With so much going sideways in the district, though, even some of Burris’ critics were hopeful that he was the man for the job. “I thought, well, okay, he knows what to do as a superintendent, he sort of brings the right skillset to the table, if you will,” McAfee told me of Burris, despite what she knew of his reputation.
For those in district administration who were not swayed to Burris’ side by the power of hope alone, the new superintendent took other measures. “Buy my loyalty, that’s what he did,” Eldredge, then the district’s head of HR, told me.
A longtime human resources professional, Cyndi Eldredge had never worked in a school district before taking the MCSD job in 2021. The fifth generation of her family in the Four Corners area, Eldredge’s life had taken her away from Montezuma County a few decades earlier, but she never lost her ties to the area. When she suffered the loss of a child in 2020, she knew home was the only place to be. Luckily, it seemed at the time, the school district was hiring.
“It kept my mind busy in the midst of the grief that I was experiencing,” she told me. Plus, there would be a support structure in place to help her learn the school-specific bits of HR law and policy which had not factored into the earlier parts of her career.
“I felt that I was qualified enough to apply and, if I was successful in obtaining a role, then I would have mentors who would guide me in the ways of a school district,” Eldredge said. Or, that was the plan, at least. “Unfortunately, I was selected for the role.”
The plan never came to fruition: due in part to the stress of the first full school year conducted under the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every high-ranking role in district administration turned over within months to either side of Eldredge’s hiring. There was no training or mentorship.
“I walked in the door and they just threw all of this stuff at me,” she said. “It was definitely a transition.” By her ninth month working for the district, she had served under two separate superintendents – with a third having departed the district the week before Eldredge started – and even served as a co-interim-superintendent herself prior to Burris’ hiring in March 2022. That was when her real trouble started.
“When he came on board, he knew that we were wary of him,” Eldredge said of herself and a handful of other senior members of district administration who were aware of Burris’ reputation. “And so the first thing he did was he moved us, I think, 15 steps on the salary schedule.” According to Eldredge, Burris bumped her pay, and the pay of two other skeptical administrators, from $60,000 to $95,000 per year, buying their loyalty, as she put it. “Not knowing all the rules of salary schedule within the district, I didn’t know he couldn’t do that,” she said.
Through what has been described to me as a combination of flattery, manipulation, bullying, and pay increases, Burris quickly consolidated his control over the district.
The district’s other new arrival in early 2022 was Brad Miller, an education attorney from the Front Range who is well-known in political circles as one of the primary movers and shakers for education reform in Colorado. At the time, the district had other legal counsel. By April, that counsel had been mostly supplanted by Miller, whose practice is located in Colorado Springs, a more than 400-mile drive from the district.
“He was brought on as a ‘second option’ and then the previous counsel just wasn’t there anymore,” Cayce McCain told me. McCain, a district parent, is also an employee of San Juan BOCES, but made it clear that she was strictly sharing her view and experiences as a parent and community member and not in any way speaking on behalf of that organization.
Miller represents a large number of the state’s charter schools, along with a handful of public school districts, including Woodland Park, Elizabeth, Las Animas RE-1, the tiny Creede school district in Mineral County, and Montezuma-Cortez’s neighboring district, Mancos RE-6. At the time of his hiring in MCSD, Miller was embroiled in lawsuits for his clients in the Woodland Park school district.
With the recent turnover in administration, a new superintendent, and his pre-existing relationships with a few members of the school board, McAfee thinks she knows exactly what Miller saw in the district: opportunity.
“It was a perfect combination for Miller to step in and say, ah, I can maneuver this district like I have others.”
In the three years since his hiring, it appears that Miller has done just that.
While Miller is billed as an attorney, he is more than that. Ever-present and highly connected in the state’s education politics, Miller is a de facto political operative, and highly skilled at what he does. In addition to representing charter schools, school districts, and education reform organizations, Miller and his firm play an integral role in building and maintaining the political ecosystem in which his clients work and operate.
He has spent more than a decade as the brains behind Education ReEnvisioned BOCES (or ErBOCES), one of the main vehicles in the state for advancing a specific kind of education reform. More recently, Miller led the creation of Colorado Leaders for Academic Success, or CLAS, which presents itself as an alternative to the Colorado Association of School Boards, or CASB. The group, where membership reportedly costs $3,000 (or, possibly, a $1,000 annual fee, according to recent reporting by Colorado Public Radio) and the majority of members are represented by Miller, aims to help school districts and school board members with policy governance, professional development, communications, lobbying, and networking, giving the group far-reaching access and influence in member districts.
When Miller takes on a district as a client, these other organizations are often found in tow. Montezuma-Cortez school board member Mike Lynch, for instance, is a CLAS board member. Last year, the district joined the association as one of only six districts to do so. Former MCSD assistant superintendent Lis Richard, meanwhile, is on the board of ErBOCES.
“It’s resource extraction,” one teacher told me, referring to the assorted Miller-affiliated organizations seeking and sometimes finding business in the district after his arrival. “Let’s be honest: Burris seems either too arrogant or too naive to realize that Brad Miller is using him to drain our district’s resources,” a post in a local community Facebook group read. “And our school board? Largely silent.”
Miller’s work in the state has been so broad, and has had such an impact on an array of school districts, that patterns have emerged. There is a pattern, for instance, in the manner in which Miller enters school districts. He tends to arrive by way of a personal relationship or connection with a school board member, often joining existing counsel as an extra attorney of sorts. Then, in Woodland Park like in Montezuma-Cortez like in Jefferson County, the existing counsel disappears from the frame for one reason or another, and Miller is left standing.
Another pattern: Miller’s clients have a tendency to attract lawsuits for alleged violations of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law (COML), which is intended to prevent elected officials from concealing the work of government in smoke-filled rooms. Going back to his tenure in Jefferson County Public Schools ten years ago, Miller’s clients have found themselves sued time and again for alleged violations of the transparency law. In October 2023, Miller advised the board in Elizabeth School district on the legality of changing agendas for regular board meetings. The advice led to actions which resulted in a lawsuit, which the school district lost earlier this year.
In Woodland Park, Miller’s clients also triggered lawsuits regarding COML violations and, in 2022, were ordered by the 24th Judicial District to comply with the law. Another lawsuit stemming from COML violations in Woodland Park was heard at the state Supreme Court last month.
“The increase in [the board’s] tendency for this behavior does seem to coincide with Miller’s arrival at the beginning of 2022,” McCain told me. “And I can say I have never seen legal counsel be so present in board meetings, and I have never seen legal counsel be so involved in their decision making as Mr. Miller has been.”
Perhaps the most prominent Miller pattern is what often happens to districts’ legal expenses after he is brought onboard: they go up. Sometimes, they go up substantially. In Woodland Park, for instance, the district’s legal expenditures increased by more than 900% after Miller was hired, driven by a combination of Miller’s hourly rate and the increased number of lawsuits his clients attracted.
I requested several years’ worth of legal invoices from MCSD in order to compare legal spending before and after Miller’s arrival in the district. Unfortunately, after weeks of delays, artificially erected barriers, and lax compliance with the state’s open records law, the records ultimately remitted to me by the district are missing a full year of Miller’s invoices. Notably, the withheld records cover the time period most relevant to this piece: the district did not hand over a single Miller invoice for the time period between June 2024 and July 2025.
Despite the complications presented by the improperly excluded records, certain conclusions can still be reached. Prior to Miller’s arrival in the district, MCSD was represented by Caplan & Earnest, a firm specializing in education law which represents dozens of districts in the state. On average, based on the invoices provided to me by the district, Caplan & Earnest billed MCSD $1,265.16 per month during their last two years representing the district.
After the switch, Miller’s firm, Miller Farmer Carlson Law, drove that average up. Based on the invoices provided to me, Miller has billed the district an average of $2,757.47 per month since his first invoice in March of 2022, more than double the average billed by Caplan & Earnest.
Before settling in at that average, the escalation was stark. Miller’s first invoice to the district, in March 2022, was for $945. The following month, he invoiced MCSD for $3,781.50. The month after that, the bill came to $6,846.50.
The inclusion of the year of withheld Miller invoices could either raise or lower our calculation of the monthly average he has charged the district since March 2022, but there is no way of being certain until the district provides the records. What is clear is that the average amount of those missing invoices would need to be quite low for Miller’s average to be competitive with Caplan and Earnest’s.
In addition to Miller’s invoices, the district has been billed for legal services by Miller allies, like First & Fourteenth – a firm specializing in culture war issues which is currently charging the district for its involvement in a lawsuit against the Colorado High School Activities Association – and Illingworth Law, which is run by a former client of Miller from the Woodland Park school board and represented Burris in his personal legal matters.
Just this month, Illingworth billed the district for more than $10,000.
II.
By the time Cyndi Eldredge’s phone rang at 9pm on June 13, she had been working under Burris for two years. Despite the pay increase and early charm offensive, she had seen enough in the past year to be wary of the superintendent: the way he shifted blame to everyone but himself, his frequent tirades about various members of staff, his method of management-by-bullying.
From her role at the helm of the Human Resources department, Eldredge had an unobstructed view into Burris’s treatment of employees, his relationship with the school board members who were meant to oversee him, and some of his less-than-conventional contract requirements.
“He got the board to change his contract,” Eldredge told me. “He got them to put in a clause that if he worked more than 140 days per year that they would pay his [PERA] penalty. He also, from the get-go, said, ‘I want a district truck, and I want to pick out the one I get, and I want a district credit card that I can use for my personal expenses.’”
As the 2023-24 school year wound down in the weeks prior to the call, Burris had pushed Eldredge towards another ethical line she did not want to cross: manipulating teacher renewal contracts at the last minute without notifying the teachers.
“May comes around, and we get all the contracts done, and at the last minute he says, ‘I want you to change the contracts and I want all teachers to be here at 7:30am and stay until 4:30pm, and it’s going to add half an hour to each of their days, but if they don’t sign it, then I don’t want their contracts renewed,’” Eldredge recalled Burris saying.
According to Eldredge, Burris asked her to include the new paragraph in the middle of the contracts and send them out to the teachers without notifying them of the change. In a small act of rebellion, Eldredge included a DocuSign checkbox next to the added paragraph, ensuring that teachers would have to see it before being able to sign. When the contracts landed in inboxes, suddenly requiring the already underpaid teachers to work multiple extra hours a week for no additional compensation, many were furious, and plans started forming for a group of teachers to speak out at the upcoming June school board meeting.
This was the context in which Tom Burris called Cyndi Eldredge on June 13.
“It was about 9 o’clock and he called me and immediately started bashing employees,” Eldredge told me.
In the early bits of the call, Burris worked his way through a mental list of district employees he guessed might speak at the board meeting. In addition to his colorful descriptions of his employees, Burris’ ranting was interspersed with regular threats to punish – either formally or reputationally – those who spoke against him.
“That motherfucker has skated for the last two years,” Burris says of one teacher in the recording of the call. “If he comes up there [at the board meeting] and says something, I’m gonna go after him. I will make him look like shit. He better not come to the board and complain about work hours.”
“She’s a greedy fucking bitch,” Burris said of an employee who was displeased by the addition of hours without additional compensation.
“I am gonna bury them. Fucking bury them,” Burris told Eldredge, referring to teachers who might speak out.
Though the contracts and the possibility of teachers speaking at the board meeting were the initial topics of discussion, the conversation eventually extended in a more serious direction. It is because of that secondary topic – the one which led to Tom Burris’ indictment – that the existence of Eldredge’s recordings has been previously reported.
Nearly a year before the phone call (based on dating from the Cortez Police Department), Burris claimed to have been approached by the parent of a student in the district, with concerns that the student may have been engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a teacher. As an employee of the school district, Burris is considered a mandatory reporter under the law, meaning he is required to inform police about any such suspicion. According to Burris, though, the student’s parent had asked him not to take any action, and he had agreed.
When Burris told Eldredge about the allegations, months after he had first been informed, she encouraged him to tell the police, or, at the very least, contract an outside group to conduct an investigation. Burris refused.
“I suggested having an outside investigator come in and look into it,” Eldredge told me. She recalls Burris responding with something to the effect of “What are we going to do if they find something and we’re sued?” Text messages provided by Eldredge support this version of events.
When the topic of the June 13 phone call turned to the allegations, Eldredge again reiterated that action should have been taken. Burris responded that they “didn’t have any hard evidence,” something which is not required for mandatory reporters to report concerns. Notably, Burris told Eldredge during the recorded phone call that he had informed the school board of the allegations, as well. No members of that board filed a report with the police, either.
When I asked MCSD board member Mike Lynch about his response when Burris informed the board of the allegations, he said the question was “a mischaracterization of facts” and suggested I research more. In the audio recording of the phone call, Burris specifically mentions Lynch in this context, saying that when he shared the allegations with the board in executive session, “Mike Lynch was [Burris pauses], I think you could have slapped him and he would have been less offended.”
By the time of the phone call, the teacher in question had been terminated for unrelated reasons. An investigation by the Cortez Police Department determined that there was no inappropriate contact between the teacher and the student. The validity of the allegations, however, has no bearing on mandatory reporters’ duty under the law.
That’s why, weeks after the phone call, when Eldredge told her friend and former school board candidate, social worker J.J. Lewis about the situation, he took the information to the police. As a social worker, Lewis is also a mandatory reporter, and felt that he had no choice.
“Any individual working for the school system is a mandatory reporter, and it is concerning that it took a mandatory reporter outside of the school system to expose this suspected behavior,” Lewis told the local Journal last year. Lewis, who now faces a defamation suit from Burris, did not speak with me for this piece.
In the weeks between the phone call and Lewis’ conversation with the police, conditions in the district had taken another turn for the worse – and, shortly after voicing concerns to attorney Brad Miller, Cyndi Eldredge had found herself out of a job.
III.
The back half of 2024 was a dramatic affair for the Montezuma-Cortez school district. Much of the turmoil was reported at the time in the local Cortez Journal and the nearby Durango Herald, but warrants summarizing, because what started with the last-minute amending of teacher contracts spiraled into a series of events which are still shaping the district.
As Burris feared during his call with Eldredge, teachers did in fact show up to the board meeting on June 18, 2024 to voice their discontent with the contract amendment and the broader dysfunction within the district.
A glaring sign of the eroding trust within the district, one teacher said during the meeting’s public comment period, was “the number of staff members who chose not to attend this evening for fear of reprisal from the district.”
Another teacher who spoke at the meeting, Lissa Lycan, put it succinctly. “In the short term, we would like to have some clarity on our contracts,” Lycan said. “In the long term, we request that the board work with staff and Mr. Burris to rebuild trust.”
The June board meeting was not the only thing which failed to break in Burris’ favor that summer. The following month, after learning that Cortez authorities were looking into the allegations that Burris had failed in his mandatory reporter duties, Eldredge shared her recording of the phone call with police. In August, the Journal broke the news publicly, and, in September, Burris was arraigned on charges of failing to report allegations of possible sexual abuse of a student by a teacher.
Despite not representing Burris in a personal capacity, Miller was on-hand to run interference for the superintendent. At a special board meeting after news of the allegations broke, Miller made a statement downplaying the matter.
“In this case, the public record informs us that two individuals, an ex-employee who was recently terminated for unlawful behavior, and a member of the community who unsuccessfully ran for this board, made claims that the superintendent was made aware of inappropriate sexual behavior between a student and a staff member,” Miller said in a statement, impeaching the sources of the allegations and adding that the public record did not indicate that any inappropriate or sexual behavior had in fact taken place.
As for the “ex-employee recently terminated for unlawful behavior” referenced in Miller’s comments – that was Cyndi Eldredge, but she recalls the reasons for her termination quite differently.
According to Eldredge, she was fired for the exact same thing as numerous other staff over the past two years: speaking up about Tom Burris’ behavior. After witnessing the superintendent dispense a particularly brutal and inappropriate tongue-lashing to another employee during a meeting, Eldredge agreed to write a letter to the school board supporting the employee’s complaint against Burris. The letter was presented to the board during executive session at the June 18 board meeting.
“Well, during executive session, Brad Miller came out, he called me into the hallway, and he said, ‘I explained to the board that this [the letter] is strictly confidential, but I cannot guarantee that they won’t go to Tom,’” Eldredge told me. “And I said, Brad, I need to know who I go to if I have some issues, and he said, ‘you come to me.’”
After the meeting, Eldredge took off on a long-scheduled vacation. When she came back, she says she was called into Tom Burris’ office, told simply that she was “no longer in line with the district,” and fired. In a move uncommon for school districts, she was also offered a severance package.
Then she received an email from Brad Miller.
“I would encourage you to sign this soon,” Miller said about the severance deal in an email back-and-forth. “The District has been seeing evidence that you recorded meetings of the lead team and shared them with others. This could cause them to choose to revoke this offer very soon.”
Though he had the details wrong, and though she had only told a few people about the phone call with Burris, Eldredge got the gist: they knew about the recordings, and the severance offer was contingent on those recordings never seeing the light of day.
The following day, the severance offer was rescinded.
In response to questions for this piece, Miller claimed that Eldredge was “properly terminated for cause,” citing a host of reasons including “serially violat[ng] law and policy in her role in HR.” Eldredge says she was not informed of these reasons at the time of her dismissal, and they are not mentioned in Miller’s emails to Eldredge after her dismissal.
Eldredge has paid a price for speaking out. The district appealed her unemployment claims, and she has accrued legal fees fighting back. She sold her house. Though she fears that her husband, who still works for the district, will be fired as a result of her choice to speak with me, she is still speaking out.
Despite facing criminal charges for failing in his duty as a mandatory reporter, Burris emerged from the turmoil of 2024 in better shape than Eldredge: employed, pulling down a six-figure salary, and seemingly maintaining the faith of the school board members, the only people who can fire him.
The district he presided over was struggling, though: after the trickery with the contracts in June, MCSD entered the new school year badly understaffed. For weeks, principals and other administrators were pulling double duty, teaching to overcrowded classrooms, until the district was able to bring in foreign teachers on J-1 visas to fill the gaps.
At no point does the school board seem to have held Burris accountable for the staffing issues.
As 2025 dawned, even the criminal charges worked out fine for Burris. In February 2025, the superintendent accepted a diversion agreement from the district attorney. Under the terms of the deal, Burris was required to “create a reporting safety plan for the district, and receive additional training on the mandatory reporting law.” The judge who had been set to preside over Burris’ case called it a “slap on the wrist.” The judge, Ian MacLaren is facing disciplinary proceedings as a result of the comments.
That feeling was shared in the community. “There was a broken trust with our children, and there should have been some sort of punishment for that,” M.B. McAfee told me. “Something more than he ended up getting.”
Regardless, the deal stuck, the charges went away, and Burris carried on as if nothing was amiss. With the criminal detour in his rear view mirror, the board on his side, and Miller in his corner, the superintendent looked set to reign over his fiefdom for the foreseeable future.
Then he resigned, and chaos flared up again.
IV.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote in one of his less-appreciated novels – and the line has rarely made as much sense to me as in the context of the Montezuma-Cortez school district’s current strife, where a series of important, impending decisions about the future of the district are being dominated by the district’s lingering recent past.
There are school board elections around the state this November, and MCSD is no exception. Even before Burris’ resignation, the upcoming election was expected to be a noteworthy affair. Through the machinations of appointments, vacancies, and resignations over the last half-decade, the seven-member board’s electoral calendar is no longer neatly synchronized into a three-seat election cycle and a four-seat election cycle. Next month, the voters of Montezuma County are set to cast ballots for five of the seats on the seven-member board, possibly shifting supermajority control with one vote.
Those races, understandably, have been dominated by the district’s unsatisfying past and present. Instead of casting ambitious visions for the future, the candidates running against MCSD board incumbents have mostly fixed their rhetoric on the more pressing goal of repairing the damage which they, and many members of the community, feel has been done to the district by the current board and administration.
Barbara Mate told the Journal that she wants to bridge “the great disconnect” in the district. “I want people to be able to voice opinions and concerns in a safe space without having to hire defense attorneys.”
“There is a feeling within the community that the board and administration do not operate with the public and student’s best interests as the number one priority,” candidate Zane Kuenzler told the outlet.
When Burris resigned in the middle of this already noteworthy election season, eyebrows were raised. When the board, under the guidance of attorney Brad Miller, announced that they would be moving to replace the superintendent before the election in which five of the seven might lose their seats, alarm bells went off.
The schedule set by the board for the superintendent search leaves no room for error, and little room for reflection. Burris announced his resignation on September 16. The board intends to recruit, vet, interview, and hire a candidate to replace him by October 21 – 35 days for a process which usually takes months.
A community survey sent out in late September captures the mood of district parents and teachers well.
“I voted for most of the members on the board,” one response started. “I am disgusted at how it has been run. I can’t believe they would let a superintendent run the schools the way Burris has.”
“A one-week application window for a new superintendent, especially following Burris’ disastrous tenure, is absolutely unacceptable,” a respondent said. “Most credible searches for superintendents take several months.”
“By rushing the application process, you are making another black eye on the community’s trust in you,” said another.
Another theme which emerged over and over in the community survey: concern about Brad Miller’s ever-growing influence over the district.
“The current school board needs to grow a pair and stop yes-manning every idea that Burris and Brad Miller concoct,” said one response. In response to a question about what values they wanted to see represented in the role of superintendent, one community member replied simply, “Nobody affiliated with the Brad Miller group.”
“Please do not let Brad Miller have anything to do with appointing who our next superintendent should be,” someone wrote in the ‘additional comments’ section.
A post in a community Facebook page, RE-1 Reality Check, whose contributors are anonymous, asked, “Does Cortez want Brad Miller choosing our next superintendent?” The post, made the morning after the September 18 meeting at which the timeline for the superintendent hiring process was laid out, continued, “Last night’s meeting hinted at a back room plan for fast tracking Brad Miller’s pick, a bigger compensation package, and no patience for honest questions.”
When reached for comments on this story, Miller said that he does “not play any role in processes such as a superintendent search. I did not direct or dictate any timelines in this case.”
Whatever his role, it’s clear that Miller wields a great deal of influence in MCSD. Guiding the board in picking a new superintendent could help ensure that he continues wielding that influence – particularly if he is able to enthrone an ally before the board changes hands and, possibly, chooses to seek new legal counsel.
V.
Finalists for the role of superintendent were interviewed and announced at a special meeting of the school board last Tuesday. Unlike the board’s regular monthly meetings, which are recorded and publicly available, the special meetings pertaining to the superintendent hiring process have not been recorded or made publicly accessible. As has been the case with other Miller clients during politically sensitive times, the meeting was irregular, beset by the kind of last-minute agenda adjustments which may expose the district to open meetings lawsuits.
“Apparently [the timeline and agenda] had been decided by just two board members and the rest of the board was not permitted to discuss or weigh in,” Cayce McCain told me. “The legality of that is confusing to me.”
Miller, responding to questions for this piece, contends that the meeting did not violate the state’s open meetings law, because the board was interviewing pre-finalist candidates, and that information regarding applicants who are not officially “finalists” is exempt from disclosure. According to Miller, the finalists were not finalists until a vote at the end of the evening.
Despite only providing a one-week window for applications, the district managed to attract a handful of contenders for the job. The quality of those contenders, however, is unclear. Several sources pointed out that one major problem with the process for selecting a new superintendent, beyond how rushed it has been, is that autumn is the wrong time of year to conduct such a search.
“It means the only people who will apply are the rejects and losers,” one teacher told me, speaking anonymously due to concerns of termination. “The good superintendents are all with districts by this point.” They pointed out that Tom Burris was also a mid-year hire.
McAfee expressed a similar sentiment. “They should have an interim superintendent so they can do their advertising in the right flow of time when superintendents are looking for jobs.”
The three finalists announced last Tuesday were Tom Burris’ current assistant superintendent, Eddie Ramirez; Karen Sanchez-Griego, who retired after serving as superintendent of New Mexico’s Cuba Independent School District; and Michael McFalls, who was unanimously terminated from his role as superintendent of the school system in Grand County, Utah on September 10.
Ramirez is a familiar face in the district, but locals I spoke with feel that he is too closely associated with Burris to represent a new start for the district. As one respondent to last month’s community survey wrote: “We need a new super that isn’t Ramirez…or a Burris lite.” A post in a local Facebook group – Cortez Citizens – For the People, By the People – from February of this year said that “Tom [Burris] the Bully is back in action, and with the full support of his right hand, Eddie Ramirez.”
Michael McFalls, the finalist from across the state line in Utah, raises obvious concerns, having recently been fired from a separate superintendent role. Though the local school board for which he worked voted unanimously to terminate him, their reasons for doing so have not been made public. McFalls told the local Moab Sun that he was “not leaving by choice,” and that he had “done nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical.” Regardless of the details of McFalls’ situation, few of the people I have spoken to in MCSD are eager for another scandal-plagued superintendent.
The third finalist for the top job was Karen Sanchez-Griego, whose tenure in the Cuba Independent School District saw her work closely with the local indigenous student population, a factor which spoke highly of her to those worried about MCSD’s Ute students being left behind. Sanchez-Griego’s time in the New Mexico job also saw the district’s graduation rate rise, and led to a favorable profile in the New York Times in 2022. At the end of the meeting, Sanchez-Griego withdrew herself from consideration.
“Based on some of the questions and other things. . . you need a strong leader,” she told the board.
The spotty caliber of the finalists has not assuaged concerns about how the process is being conducted, or the fact that it’s being conducted prior to the election.
“It feels like the finalists were handpicked in a way that would make it look like a legitimate, competitive pool of candidates to justify it, so they can say, ‘hey, look, see, there are plenty of good candidates out there,” McCain told me. She, like most locals I spoke to, expects that the board will pick Eddie Ramirez for the job. “I think that’s probably who it is – but Eddie should be appointed interim,” she said, while a full search is conducted.
“They should wait,” McAfee told me. “I mean, it’s the common sense thing. An election is coming. You’re going to have different board members.” She again suggested that the board name an interim superintendent, and pursue a more thorough process at the right time of the school year, when qualified superintendents are looking for jobs.
“They need to stop and take a few breaths,” she said.
As for the board members: they seem broadly content with the process they have embarked on. When reached for comment on this story, board member Ed Rice defended the speed of the process.
“I spent almost 30 years in education,” Rice told me. “The biggest complaint I heard from teachers and parents was, ‘Why does everything move so slowly in education?’ The wheels turn really slow. Now we are being asked to slow down?”
“ZipRecruiter and others advertise, ‘post your job today and have a new hire by tomorrow,’” Rice continued. “So I would say according to industry standards we are moving really slow.”
“It feels like this is strictly politics,” school board member Mike Lynch told me in response to questions. “None of the people who I heard or read opinions from have tried to participate meaningfully in the process thus far.”
Lynch and other incumbents also made comments defending the process when it was announced. “It’s our duty to do the job because it came to us before the election,” Lynch said. “It’s the duty of the new board to do the work that comes before that board.”
“I feel we’ll just have to make 60 days work,” incumbent Tiffany Cheney said.
Only Jason Hall, the newest member of the board, appointed last month to fill a vacancy, has spoken out against the process.
“The community will vote in November, and ultimately it is the community’s decision to choose a board and that board chooses a superintendent,” he said at the September 18 meeting where the process was announced. “The fact that we’re going so fast seems like we don’t have enough time to find…as many qualified people.”
Miller, responding to questions for this piece, commented that “the individuals leading the search, Sheri Noyes and Mike Lynch, are beyond reproach and it is disgraceful that any member of the community would seek to besmirch their motives.”
Despite the protestations of community members, the resounding sentiment captured in last month’s community survey, and the objections of Hall, the board shows no indication that it intends to “stop and take a few breaths.” On Tuesday, October 21, they plan to disregard those community members, to ignore the findings of the survey, and pick a new superintendent from one of the now just two finalists who will set the struggling district’s path into the future.
As for the consequences? Those might be somebody else’s problem in the long run: after all, five of the current board members could lose their seats within two weeks of Tuesday’s vote.
VI.
No matter whom the board hires next Tuesday, the bells in schools across Montezuma County will ring on Wednesday morning. Buses will drive their routes. Teachers will make their commutes. Pots of coffee will be brewed, lesson plans will be looked over. Life in the Montezuma-Cortez school district will go on.
What’s up in the air is the quality of that life.
The chaos consuming MCSD is not of the same flavor as the “parents’ rights” movement which spread nationally from northern Virginia schools in 2021. It is not related to the American Birthright curriculum fight in Woodland Park, or the book-banning fights in Elizabeth school district. The upcoming elections are not a showdown between traditionalist conservatives and far-left radicals. The battle for the future of Montezuma-Cortez is not cultural. It’s fundamental. It’s about how the schools are run, who runs them, and whether they are serving the community as intended.
With the fundamentals falling into disrepair in recent years, faith in the district has crumbled as well.
“As a parent, and just as someone who really believes that public education is the cornerstone of a community, it’s been a difficult decision to look for other options outside of the district,” McCain told me, lamenting the vanishing college prep and AP opportunities in the district. “I feel like I’m constantly weighing the pros and cons of that.”
Some of the district’s problems will not immediately be solved by conducting a more thorough superintendent hiring process. An open and transparent process will not fix the district’s budget and resource allocation problems. A more honest and thorough search will not alleviate the district’s staffing crunch. But it would be a step towards repairing the broken trust which has bogged down the district’s business and undermined its relationship with the community. And without repairing that trust, it’s unclear how the other problems will be resolved.
The way community members like M.B. McAfee and Cayce McCain see it, the best thing the board can do right now is postpone its current course of action. By postponing Tuesday’s vote, appointing an interim superintendent, and launching a more thorough and transparent process, the board can show that it is listening, and that it wants to make sure a new superintendent, whenever they may be hired, starts on the right foot.
“If I were a board member and had reservations or concerns about the rushed process, non-transparency, or lack of meaningful community involvement, I would want that on the record,” McCain told me, hoping that enough board members might feel the same way come Tuesday.
Whether the board heeds McCain’s advice or not, change is on its way to the district: in a month’s time, Montezuma-Cortez will be under new leadership. What remains to be seen is whether it will be a new superintendent, a new school board, or both.
