Colorado Springs teachers speak out against textbook censorship and anti-LGBTQ+ policies

Oct 17, 2025

A District 11 teacher holds a copy of a supplemental textbook that the superintendent's office censroed by removing pages about sexual orientation and gender identity. Photo: Chelsea Casabona, Rocky Mountain PBS

NEWS

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Hundreds of District 11 teachers participated in a one-day strike October 8 in response to the school board’s decision to strip the teacher’s union of its collective bargaining power. Many of the teachers and their supporters also spoke out against the wave of anti-LGBTQ+ policies approved by the school board.

“They're [District 11 school board] not willing to take our input on the working conditions and the learning conditions in District 11,” said Paul Blakesley, a social studies teacher at Palmer High School and a regional director for Colorado Springs Education Association, the teacher’s union.

“I don't feel like they care about all students,” Blakesley said.

More than 2,000 people, including teachers, school faculty and community members, participated in this month’s protest, which came in the wake of several anti-LGBTQ+ policies in District 11, the largest district in Colorado Springs. Earlier this year, the school board banned Pride flags from classrooms and required students to receive permission from their parents to be called by a different name.

The new rules are part of a wave of policies in Colorado Springs focused on LGBTQ+ students. District 49, one of the largest in the state, recently implemented a new bathroom policy and a ban on transgender student athletes participating in sports that align with their gender identity.

Hundreds of Colorado Springs teachers protested October 8 after being stripped of their collective bargaining power. Photo: Chelsea Casabona, Rocky Mountain PBS

In an effort to censor information on sexual orientation and gender identity, the District 11 curriculum team removed seven pages from a “supplemental” health textbook — an additional resource that provides more context to the main textbook — in every high school in the district. In the table of contents, the section is titled “Concerns About Sexuality.”

“As a social studies teacher, I'm really concerned,” Blakesley said. “If they're willing to cut out the approved textbook… if they don't like us teaching about, you know, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or, you know, like anything that would make them uncomfortable… they are allowed to do whatever they want to cut out.”

Several teachers and CSEA representatives at the strike said they were not told who made the decision to censor the textbooks. In a canvas of Palmer High School teachers at the strike, 10 teachers said they had physically seen the ripped out pages. Rocky Mountain PBS viewed a physical copy of the censored text book. Several pages were removed.

Jessica Wise, a spokesperson for District 11 Superintendent Michael Gaal’s office, confirmed that the district’s curriculum department removed the textbook pages. District administration made the decision in accordance with what aligns with board-approved curricular materials, Wise said.

Wise said that because this book is a “supplemental health resource,” it was not technically part of the board-approved curriculum. Last spring, the superintendent’s office identified a section of the textbook that wasn’t aligned with the district’s approved materials and asked the vendor to remove it, she said. Wise refused to detail that section's contents and why they were not aligned with the curriculum to Rocky Mountain PBS.

“When the books arrived in August, they contained the earlier version instead. Rather than delay instruction, we removed those few pages to ensure the materials used in classrooms matched the approved curriculum and current standards,” Wise said in a follow-up email to Rocky Mountain PBS.

A teacher holds the supplemental textbook whose pages were removed to censor information on gender identity. Photo: Chelsea Casabona, Rocky Mountain PBS

Gaal declined an interview with RMPBS.

“That team [the curriculum department] deemed it not aligned with our curricular standards,” Wise said. “This was a supplemental material and so it was approved [in the spring], but then we got an outdated version of it that had a portion that wasn't aligned. And so that part was removed to go, to meet requirements with what the board had approved in the spring.”

District 11 board members Julie Ott and Thomas Carey said they were unaware of the decision to cut out these pages. Carey, who opposed the teacher’s strike, said the board did not approve removing the pages, and that the board directed Gaal for a written update on the situation at the school board meeting the week of September 29.

“I don't know very much about what actually happened here,” Carey said.

Wise added that she does not believe the textbook was the main reason for striking because the teachers announced their strike last spring after the school board voted to let the union’s 56-year-old master agreement expire. At a rally in Acacia Park the afternoon of the teacher’s strike, numerous CSEA representatives and teachers who spoke on stage mentioned the school board’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies.

Type of story: News
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