Superintendent takes responsibility after online student kept out of dance
Interim Superintendent Drew Pearson says online students were meant to be included in school activities, and that he never passed that on to the middle school principal who made the call. The district will clarify the rules and contact affected families.
Montezuma-Cortez School District’s interim superintendent says students in the middle school’s online program were meant to be included in activities like last week’s Halloween dance, and he’s taking responsibility after one was turned away at the door.
“I take responsibility for failing to communicate this expectation clearly,” Drew Pearson wrote Monday in response to questions from the Cortez Current.
Pearson said he understands that one student was turned away from Montezuma-Cortez Middle School’s dance on October 29. The student’s parent warned other families in a public Facebook post that evening, and many commenters sharply criticized the school.
When the district set up this year’s learning models, Pearson said, it meant for students in the online model to take part in local extracurricular activities, and it told school leaders so. He was the middle school’s principal then and was part of those conversations. Principal Amy Kynor, who took over the school when he became interim superintendent in August, was not, and she didn’t have that context when the decision about the dance was made that evening, he said.
“I failed to communicate this to Mrs. Kynor in my transition, and I don’t believe it was made with any ill intent,” Pearson wrote. “It was a judgment call made without all of the information.”
The district will clarify expectations with school leaders, “including how the attendance standard applies to online students,” and will contact affected families “so this doesn’t happen again,” he said. The middle school has 35 students in its online model.
Pearson said a dance counts as an extracurricular event, which the school’s Learning Models outline says online students may take part in, and the district has no districtwide written rule keeping online students out of school events. Nothing the school sent families said online students couldn’t come, he said. Citing student privacy laws, the district won’t discuss any individual student or family, including whether a particular student qualified.
Pearson answered for the district. Principal Kynor and Assistant Principal and Activities Director Steve Silknitter, to whom the Cortez Current also sent questions, did not respond separately.
An attendance reward
The dance was a reward for attendance. The school’s flyer, emailed to families October 25 through its Alma notification system, called it the “Attendance Halloween Dance” and said students “qualify to go with 90% attendance from the beginning of the year.” Pearson confirmed it was an attendance-incentive dance with a 90% standard. Neither the flyer nor the email mentions online students. The parent posted both in the Facebook thread.
The middle school’s 2026-27 student handbook says “student attendance will determine whether individuals attend each dance.” That section doesn’t mention the online program.
State law says students in online programs “may participate on an equal basis in any extracurricular or interscholastic activity offered by a public school,” unless they were expelled.
What the parent said
In her post in the Cortez What’s Up Facebook group, the parent told other families not to bother driving online students to the dance “unless you want them embarrassed in front of their peers.” Nothing in the invitation said they weren’t included, she wrote.
Students in the online model are at the school every day for elective classes and take only their core subjects online, she wrote in the thread. She put the reason she was given in quotation marks, “because it’s attendance based,” and disputed it. Online students “still have deadlines and requirements just the same and in person classes have attendance,” she wrote. She said she even showed the school the invitation email it had sent.
Another parent in the thread said she got the same flyer October 25 and then, on October 28, a second email telling her that her child had qualified.
By Monday the post had drawn 34 comments and replies, many of them sharply critical of the school. “Excluding children is not a good look CMS. Do better,” one commenter wrote. Another wrote: “Shame on CMS for turning this kid away at the door!” Others called it “disenchanting and cruel” and “super poor form.” One commenter called attendance incentives like this one “ableist,” arguing that “tactics like these hurt the most vulnerable students,” such as children who are often sick.
One commenter urged parents to take it to the school board: “Parents are the real voice of change.” The RE-1 board holds a work session at 6 p.m. Tuesday, November 3, and its next regular meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday, November 17, both at the district office, 400 N. Elm St.
This story draws on written answers from Interim Superintendent Drew Pearson; a public post and comments in The Original What’s Up? Dolores, Mancos, Cortez! Facebook group from October 29 to November 1, including the school email and flyer the parent posted there; and the school’s 2026-27 student handbook. The Cortez Current is not naming the parent, her child or the commenters.