Food fight
Della Curry was kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School until getting the boot in late May. She says she was fired for giving a child free lunch — a claim that the Cherry Creek School District adamantly refutes. The district can’t release further detail about the circumstances of Curry’s termination without her permission, which she continues to withhold. Then the story broke into the national news cycle and the district started taking some serious heat. Now that some district officials have received death threats over the matter, they took the rare move of posting extra security at the elementary school. “We don’t believe anyone is in any danger, we just want to be sure that it stays that way,” CCSD spokesman Tustin Amole told The Aurora Sentinel. Out of the cafeteria, Curry now focuses her energy on lobbying school boards and lawmakers to mandate every child get a complete meal, regardless of whether they can pay.
Trust fall
The Center for Policing Equity based at the University of California in Los Angeles will begin its review of the Colorado Springs Police Department in the next few weeks as part of its national survey of racial bias in law enforcement. CSPD signed up on its own volition. “We understand that there’s a sense of mistrust between the community and policing in general, so we want to do everything we can […] to, I guess, develop a sense of trust and to erase any misgivings that people have in regard to the way we police,” Commander Sean Mandel told The Gazette.
Legal haze
Colorado probation officers and the state judicial branch are still working out the kinks of implementing a new law that allows people on probation to use medical marijuana. The new rules went into effect in May, but Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, told The Durango Herald‘s Peter Marcus there’s been some confusion. “People have been blowing up my phone, both here and at my law office, about the fact that they are card-carrying medical marijuana users, they’re on probation, they started to use their medical marijuana, and probation officers are saying that they are in violation of the law,” he said.
Political science
Linking the extreme weather in Colorado to human-caused climate change has been a tricky business, but a scientist in Boulder published a paper on Monday that does just that. Lead author Kevin Trenberth gets into the nitty gritty with The Daily Camera‘s Charlie Brennan and isn’t afraid to get political: “I think it’s very disappointing when they’ve had all these floods in Texas and Oklahoma, that you see the reports on what’s happening, there’s not only no mention of El Niño, there’s no mention of climate change at all […] And yet Texas is a state which has a governor who is running for president, who says climate change is a hoax. So I think it’s very important for scientists to get that message clear.”
Water under the bridge
A piece of good news to cheer the rainy day blues in southeastern Colorado: The region is officially no longer in a drought. Via The Denver Post.
Sighting
There was a moose on the loose in Boulder Monday. Via CBS Denver.
Photo by Bill Selak, Creative Commons, via Flickr.
