Six Colorado news outlets, including Newsline, are suing Denver Public Schools to gain access a recording of the district board’s in which board members discussed school safety plans and emerged with a new policy.

Members of the district’s Board of Education held a special meeting following a shooting last month at Denver’s East High School, which left two administrators injured. The incident was the on or near East High property in as many months, and the 17-year-old suspect was later found dead in Park County of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Board members spent the majority of the lengthy meeting behind closed doors, and upon returning to the public, voted unanimously to without any public discussion.

Under Colorado’s Open Meetings Law, elected bodies such as school boards cannot make decisions on new policies or legislation out of the public eye. There are some exceptions that allow for closed-door executive sessions, including board consultations for legal advice, discussions on personnel matters and on individual students. Topics listed for discussion at the March 23 executive session included “security arrangements or investigations” related to the March 22 shooting, and details about individual students “where public disclosure would adversely affect that person or persons involved.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs include Newsline, The Denver Post, Colorado Politics/The Denver Gazette, KDVR Fox 31, Chalkbeat Colorado and KUSA 9News. Each of the news outlets filed a Colorado Open Records Request for the executive session recording and were all denied.

Rachael Johnson, an attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Steve Zansberg, a First Amendment attorney and president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, are representing the coalition of news outlets. Zansberg said of the Colorado Sunshine Law.

Zansberg said the first issue the complaint addresses is the lack of proper notice regarding what board members would discuss behind closed doors. He said Colorado law says that when a public body fails to adequately announce its topic of discussion, the meeting is considered an “unlawfully closed public meeting,” not an executive session.

“They just went behind closed doors and discussed public business,” Zansberg said.

Even if the board properly announced the topics of discussion for a lawful executive session, Zansberg said the fact that board members left the five-hour discussion with a policy change and no public discussion is a blatant vilation of Colorado’s Open Meetings Law.

If there is probable cause to believe that a publicly elected board made a decision in an executive session, a judge will review the recording of the session and determine if this was the case, Zansberg said. Public bodies in Colorado are prohibited from adopting not just new policies, but any position on an issue behind closed doors.

“It was what the case law says was ‘a rubber stamping’ of a decision that had already been made behind closed doors, and that too violates the Open Meetings Law,” Zansberg said.

A ‘tremendous amount of public interest’

Jeff Roberts, executive director of CFOIC, said there was an expectation that board members would have a public discussion following the private meeting where they discussed a high-profile situation with consequences for the entire district. He said there has been a “tremendous amount of public interest” in school safety plans and changes around school resource officers.

“Both the open meetings law, and there’s a separate statute about school board meetings, both of them say policy decisions are not permitted in executive sessions,” Roberts said. “For executive sessions, there are certain authorized topics that they can discuss behind closed doors, but when they’re talking about changing a policy, which is what they did here, that’s something that needs to be done in a public setting. That’s the intent and the spirit of these laws.”

The only time an executive session is not to be recorded is when an elected body receives specific legal advice from an attorney. DPS’s general counsel, Aaron Thompson, was present in the executive session, but it’s unclear what role he played in the board’s discussion and if there is a recording of the private portion of the meeting.

The minutes from the executive session also on how long board members discussed each topic, another requirement of state law.

The district has the right to release the recording of the meeting at any time, and Zansberg said this would be the best thing the district can do to save taxpayers “the cost of having to defend this indefensible position.” If that happens, there’s no reason left for the plaintiffs in the complaint to continue litigating.

“I would again urge the Board of Education to exercise its discretion and release this recording,” Zansberg said.

Depending on how the district decides to respond to the suit, Zansberg said it can take a few months for the courts to issue a decision.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .

One in 4 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours, according to published Monday. Nearly half of those teens said it would take them less than 10 minutes.

“That’s a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said , a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another . On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was in February while sitting in his car outside the school.

The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.

“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.

The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent’s permission?”

American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.

Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.

The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.

The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.

Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.

Teens particularly vulnerable

Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.

“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said , a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”

While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.

“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said , a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”

Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.

“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said , a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”

If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.

The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.

“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.

This originally appeared at .

(Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on and .