The Chaffee County Patriots (CCP) have announced that Buena Vista School Resource Officer (SRO) Megan Mitchell, will be their guest speaker for the next monthly meeting beginning at 6:30 p.m. Friday, February 11.
The meeting will be held in person, at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church – Church Hall, 118 South Gunnison Ave., Buena Vista, CO. Last month’s meeting featured Buena Vista School administrators.
“We are delighted to have Megan join us and answer the following prepared questions as well as any questions from the audience,” said Patriot President Dennis Heap.
Organizers intend to ask the following prepared questions:
- What is the history of the Buena Vista School Resource Officer (SRO) program?
- What do you do on a typical day?
- What classroom instruction do you perform in the elementary, middle, and high school?
- What training is provided to teachers and staff? Does it include lockdown vs. lockout? How many times has this been initiated?
- What is the typical communication between the SRO and the parents?
- What high-risk behaviors do you see in today’s teenagers? (Example: sexting, vaping)
- What is going well in the SRO program and what are the challenges?
- How can the CC Patriots and the overall community support the SRO program?
While the Patriots group says that it was established in mid-2021, Chaffee Patriots as a group was actually around in Aug. 2020, prior to the 2020 election. In 2021 it filed to become a 501(c)(3) non-profit with the IRS, which is still pending. Its press release describes it as “non-partisan and welcome[ing] all like-minded individuals that love, support, and believe in the very ethics and moral principles by which our Country was founded.”
It does not say what those are, but it goes on to say that “CCP was formed to organize and establish in-person meetings for those who are willing to educate, equip and mobilize the community on issues affecting Faith, Family, and our Constitutional freedoms.”
The SRO is a police officer? If that is the case, given what happened in Salida not too long ago, one more question they could ask is how well the SRO is able to communicate simultaneously with both the school and the local police in the case of any emergency.
Several Chaffee County patriotic citizens took part in the Flag Waving during 2020. Most of the Flag Waving was in Buena Vista and some in Salida. Approximately 15 two-hour events took place and rewarded the participants by demonstrating that he vast number of passerby’s Love America and Love the American Flag. It is important to note that during 2020, there was no formal group.
Early 2021 several people got together with the goal of restarting the Flag Waving. The initial group saw a loose-knit group as the way to reignite community interest, but it soon the informal group began adding goals, which led to formation of a formal group, with the priority of defining Who We Are.
Thank you for that information Dennis. It does need to be clarified that there was a “group” in 2020, whether formal or not the Facebook group called itself “Chaffee Patriots”. It grew to be more than 700 people within the space of only a few weeks beginning in August 2020 and it did not appear to be exactly friendly: https://arkvalleyvoice.com/what-exactly-is-the-purpose-of-chaffee-patriots/
As Ark Valley Voice documented in subsequent articles, this “Chaffee Patriot” group activities were more than flag-waving; in fact, it held training meetings to instruct people in such topics as building weapons, and battlefield first-aid and triage, and several of these “informal” members actually harassed a group of students doing a march in Salida: https://arkvalleyvoice.com/first-amendment-rights-who-harasses-kids-and-what-political-agenda-makes-that-ok/
AVV would be quite interested in hearing more about what this is: “a formal group, with the priority of defining Who We Are,” and which outside groups may be funding this.
Just to be fair, there are plenty of other Americans who “Love America nad Love the American flag,” who aren’t out there on that corner.
Since the ‘so-called’ (thank you Justice Gorsuch) patriots are concerned with ‘issues affecting faith’, they are no doubt familiar with the ‘four loves’ as espoused by christian writer C.S. Lewis: familial, friendship, romantic, and spiritual. I guess he didn’t think that ‘love’ applies to things like a country or a piece of cloth. I might have a different belief system, but I’d agree with him that I feel no ‘love’ for my country or its flag. I gladly spoke marriage vows many years ago, but I do not ‘pledge allegiance’ to a flag or a country…especially one that is far from ‘one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’ (which is actually an oxymoron, but that’s a discussion for another day).
I applaud and am very grateful for many of the achievements of leaders going back to our founders – beginning with the formulation of our wonderful constitutional democracy – and support efforts to ensure equal access by all to the mechanisms of democracy. But I am also ashamed of many of the choices and decisions made by some of those leaders…many of which these ‘patriots’ probably don’t want discussed in our schools.
I was impressed by the patriotism shown by our school administrators, who are in there, day in and day out, working on behalf of our young people – the future leaders of our nation – teaching them (I hope) the importance of critical thinking and of learning from past mistakes. Meanwhile, blindly waving a flag that one claims to ‘love’ is just ‘performative patriotism’.
“Who We Are” – grown adults who think it’s ok to harass and intimidate school kids?
That’s what I think of when I think about what the CCP is – just a bunch of self-righteous people who have anointed themselves as “real Americans”, but who are actually so insecure in their beliefs that they feel threatened by kids having an opinion, so they rush out to harass them.
I’ll never forget the sweet little old Patriot lady at one of the BV flag dork events who told me to go eff myself after I asked her about the incident in Salida with the kids. I mean, I can’t blame her – I’d also find it impossible to defend or explain such behavior.
Stay classy, “Patriots”.