Join Priscilla Rahn as she discusses the future of education in America on its 250th anniversary. In this episode, we explore the ambitions behind launching Excalibur Classical Academy with the goal to nurture future leaders who value freedom and heritage. With Representative Scott Bottoms as a guest, we dive into the importance of protecting our youth, his staking a claim for a constitutional focus in governance, and his passionate vision for parental rights.
00:00:03 Introduction to Restoring Education in America
00:00:22 Introduction of Excalibur Classical Academy
00:02:11 Guest Introduction: Representative Scott Bottoms
00:06:12 Discussing Military Service and State Assembly
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn, and I’m so excited that you’ve decided to join the conversation today. I am loving this year, 2026. It’s America’s 250th birthday, and I can’t think of anything more exciting than opening my private classical Christian school in It’s called Excalibur Classical Academy. We’re opening in the Centennial, Colorado area. And our mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. So if you have a child that’s starting kindergarten through third grade this fall, Please go to our website, ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org to learn more. And something that’s really amazing is that we have a very generous benefactor who is providing 100% scholarships for all of our inaugural students. So please reach out to us right away to secure your spot. So we are living in a day and age right now where parents are more concerned, and rightfully so, about the education of their children. What’s going on in our public schools? And you know that I have been a public school educator and administrator for 32 years, but You really do need to pay attention to what’s going on in our schools and in our state, and I’m really thrilled to bring my next guest to the stage who knows all about the importance of protecting children in Colorado. Welcome to my special guest, Representative Scott Bottoms. Hello, Scott.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hello. It is awesome to hear about your school, and thanks for having me.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, thank you so much. And before we get into our conversation, I’m going to share a little bit of your bio with our listeners. Dr. Scott Bottoms is a Colorado State Representative, Navy veteran, pastor, and businessman serving House District 15 in El Paso County. A conservative leader in the Colorado State Assembly, he has built his platform around defending constitutional principles and strengthening families, and advocating for parental rights in education. Bottoms is also a gubernatorial candidate known for his outspoken positions on public safety, government accountability, and school policy. Bottoms is lead pastor of church at Briargate in Colorado Springs. But his most important job is husband to Linda of 34 years, dad to three and grandpa to three. And I know you just had time with your grandchildren. And so one of my most favorite questions to ask grandparents is what’s your grandpa name?
SPEAKER 03 :
Papa. Well, it’s actually Papa Squat. But my daughter-in-laws don’t like that. So they call me Papa Scott.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay. That makes a lot of sense. I love that because it just shows a little bit of the family character in how grandpas and grandmas get their names. And that just is really special. And it’s such an important role. And I love to honor dads in my show because fathers are the foundation of the family. It’s so important. So um scott take us all the way back to first what was your calling into the ministry like and and then and talk about how that led you more into the public square
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, my that’s a long story, but my original calling, I really felt like as an eight year old kid that I was going to be a pastor. I didn’t know what that meant. I had no clue. I just that was just strong in my heart. And so my parents were not really in tune with that. So I told my grandmother, who was a minister. And I told her and she bought me a Bible and wrote a little secret message in there and all that. But I really got away from God a lot later in life as a teenager. And then I went into the Navy and a few years later got saved. Then kind of revisited that call to ministry thing and jumped into ministry very, very young. I got saved again at 18. I went into the Navy at 17. And then by 20 years old, Linda and I were married and I was a youth pastor of a church. Now, how that leads into representative stuff. I’ve always kind of been politically charged. I talk about stuff from the pulpit. I’ve never bought into the idea that somehow your tax exempt status is in jeopardy. That didn’t happen. Nobody was worried about that until LBJ came along and did something called the Johnson Amendment, which had no teeth to it. And all the church got scared and crawled under a rock and was scared to death to anything. I never was that. I always talked about stuff. And so it kind of, I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t process that over the years, but I could see now looking back how God was developing me into the right arena to have the right mindset, but also just kind of the bigger picture. I think pastors have a much bigger picture of society around them sometimes than people give them credit because they’re dealing with, all elements of society, the dark side of society, homeless, kind of the underbelly, and at the same time dealing with very good, upstanding people. And so I became a representative, and now I’m running for governor. It’s all part of the same trail.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, thank you so much for your service. I’m an Army brat, and in the Army, they call their jobs MOS. It’s different in the Navy, right, what your job was?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, in the Navy, it’s called rate and it’s actually a little more tied to their rank than in the Army is. They’re a little more inseparable. You can get promoted in the Army regardless of your MOS. In the Navy, you get promoted in your rank.
SPEAKER 01 :
Congratulations. You’re coming off a big weekend at State Assembly. You earned top line. So talk about that emotional moment. I’m sure you went in there with really great hopes, but you don’t want to hear the results. What was that like for you?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, we knew going in what our percentages were. And actually, I was down a few percentages of what I thought I would be. But we were very, very close within a couple points of what we thought. And so we knew we were going to get that. But there’s something about that moment. And it’s really surreal in a lot of ways. I mentioned this at my church Sunday. There’s something… it’s odd to me it’s it’s strange it’s outside my scope when you see hundreds of people walking around with your t-shirt with your name on it you know and i look at others and it says scott bottoms on their t-shirt and then they’re holding signs that say my name it’s kind of weird i i did tell my church i’ve never i’ve never been cheered at church like that nobody nobody wears nobody wears my my name on their shirt at church and i just kind of wonder why maybe i’m not as maybe i’m not as effective as i thought but it’s uh it’s it’s very surreal and there’s something about when they when they announced that number and uh and we knew at that point we were we were much higher than the next person whoever that was going to be because at that time we didn’t know who the next person was But we knew that with our numbers so high, there’s no way that somebody was going to be in the same arena as us. It was statistically impossible. So it was just amazing. The building, the electric feeling in that building, just a powerful, powerful moment that I’ll never forget. I can’t describe it because I can’t. I can’t verbalize the emotion that’s involved. I can’t verbalize. It’s just a cool place. It’s just a cool moment when you know you’re the guy. And then you know that this is, and we know right now we’re trajectory, our trajectory is really going up. We’re gaining. momentum all over the state. It’s very exciting. And to know that one of the other candidates is kind of just staying in the same level and then one of them is kind of crashing right now. And so we think we’re on the trajectory toward the general election. So it’s pretty exciting.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it was such a long day for all of us. And I think we were all glad to get a bite to eat. I joked about going to Dairy Queen, but it was one of those days where it’s like we made it through. And to be, like you said, to be in a room full of other really activated people who want to see. Colorado improve and change. And you’ve been at the forefront of this at the Capitol. And so you have quite an ambitious day one action plan. One of which is declare Colorado governed by the constitution, which I like because this is America’s 250th birthday. And it’s, it’s sad that you have to say that you have to be articulate about that because when we see some of the bills coming through the Democrats and It’s like, did you read the Constitution? So why was that important for you to codify that as like this is action day one is to declare us a constitutional state?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that’s that’s like the one of the biggest things that that we’ve got pushing because it affects so many other things. So in the Capitol, I often go down and I will I will go down to the. What we call the well, the podium, and I will go down there, read the Constitution because of a specific bill. And I’ll say, you can’t pass this bill because it’s on constitutional and this is why and I’ll read the Constitution and the Democrats have the audacity. They used to try to hide stuff and manipulate and play games behind scenes. And get their stuff passed, but now they just come right down into the well and say, we will pass the laws you Sue us. They know they’re not constitutional. I just read the constitutional specific on a 2 a stuff on table stuff on parental authority. They know they’re not constitutional, but they don’t care. But this is benefiting me in a great way. I even say this to Democrats, and they just kind of brush it off, that the more they keep pushing very, very far leftist Marxist agendas, There is a major fight going on in the Democrat Party in the House right now because you’ve got a major group of people that are registered. This is not something I’m saying like like conspiracy. They are registered socialists, Democrat Socialists of America, DSA. They are registered. Their websites say they brag about it in the House. Well, they’re fighting with just the crazy liberals. You got crazy liberals and then you got these liberals. these ultra ultra socialist leftist crazies and they don’t even hide it anymore and so that’s why we we came came out and said this is what we’re going to do we’re going to go back to the constitution i know that sounds weird and when people out in the state hear that they’re like well of course we’re we’re not going by the constitution in so many different ways we’re not going by the constitution i could spend an hour or two just going bill over bill of a bill where they’ve passed up that’s not constitutional. And so what we’re gonna do is when they say we’ll pass the bills and then you sue us, we’re gonna go back to the constitution and anything that is not constitutional, first I’ll veto it, but also anything that has been passed in the past that’s not constitutional, we’re gonna go after it. And and then they’re going to have to sue us and guess what they’re going to lose that now, maybe not with the Supreme Court of Colorado. Because our Supreme Court of Colorado is so very broken. It’s got so much corruption investigation. In fact, I’m going to be introducing something here in the house within the next few days. Maybe in the beginning of next week that is going to try to unpack some of that corruption. But once we get to SCOTUS, once it leaves the state of Colorado and gets to SCOTUS, we’re going to win all the 2A laws. We’re going to win all of the parental laws. We’re going to win all the Tabor laws because it’s in, Tabor’s in the Constitution. And so, yeah, I’m pretty excited about getting to that moment. I can’t wait to sign that executive order to say what? We’re going back to the Constitution. It’s kind of crazy.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I love that. Let’s repeal some of these bad laws that are like we don’t need another 500 to 700 new bills being passed. We need new legislation that’s going to repeal some of these really bad laws. You have introduced and sponsored several really important children’s bills around protecting minors. We’ve been talking all about this for years in Colorado. Finally, we’ve got three bills this fall by Citizens Initiatives. On day one, you want to launch a governor’s hotline for students to report grooming or coercion. This is really key. Talk a little bit about this idea that you have.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. So I’m very much about education. Both my parents were educators. This is not the same country or the same state that when my parents were educated. And so we’re seeing so much grooming right now. So we know I’ve been saying this since right after it happened, but Children’s Hospital has been under investigation by the DOJ for all the grooming stuff. You know, transgender therapies, all that kind of stuff. And this is on minors and this is on minors without parental knowledge. And so I’ve run a bunch of bills having to do with to do any medical procedure on a minor in this state. You have to have parental consent. Our state does has no parental consent laws and we have no parental. There is no mandate to. make sure the parents know what’s going on. And so you have teachers, counselors, things like that, therapists that are taking these students to hospitals to get hormonal therapies and talking about surgeries and all kinds of things. And then you have doctors and nurses that are complicit in this. And they know that the parents don’t know about this because they tell them that we have probably in one of the bills I ran, we had probably 70, 75 people that came to testify that said that as a parent, they didn’t know this was happening. And so then that’s where Protect Kids Colorado comes in. They are running these three ballot initiatives. All three are on the ballot, they’re approved. And so I ran all three of those as a bill also. And part of the reason is we wanted to make sure that we had these Democrats that say they’re pro-child, that they’re pro-safety of children, all that stuff, and they’re liars. They are not. They vote against laws to put pedophiles in jails. They do this over and over and over. And so I ran all three of those initiatives as bills. The Democrats voted unanimously against everyone, boys and girls, no boys and girls sports, no transgender surgeries for minors, and pedophiles need to be in jail for life. They voted against those. Completely unanimously. So now we have on record and we also have some statements that some of them made about this. Why? Because the state of Colorado is not OK with this. I’m not saying the Republican Party is not OK. I’m saying the state Democrats are not OK. Unaffiliated independents are not OK. Libertarians are not OK. Republicans are not OK. And they are going to vote against their own party now. For me, they’re going to vote for me to be governor because they’re tired of this and they will not let this continue to happen in this state. And I can tell you bill after bill right now, pedophiles get off on probation 90 percent of the time. Almost 90% of the time. And I asked the sheriffs and the police that were testifying, please give us mandatory sentences. Four years is all that Bill, three years in a row, was asking for. And I asked every one of these sheriffs and police, or about a dozen of them, I said, what’s the youngest that you personally have caught? Not your department or whatever, but you personally have walked in, caught these adult males raping these little children. And they’re raping boys and girls. And every one of them said the exact same age, two years old. That’s the Colorado we live in right now. This is the Colorado that brought it up to, to legalize prostitution. We are in a very bad place in the state of Colorado. And it’s incessant within the school systems. And so the first thing with the hotline that you’re talking about is I’m going to, I’m going to first make DEI, CRT, SEL and grooming language against the rules for any state employee any state department and then we’re opening the hotline for any student of course parents can too but any student in the state of colorado to call and say hey this teacher is grooming me this teacher has inappropriate behavior this counselor has inappropriate behavior because we know that’s who’s taking these kids to the hospital to get these therapies and so i want the teachers most the teachers are good most counselors are good most administrators are good But there’s some really bad actors. They’re very intentional. They’re very evil. They’re very bad actors. And I want them to be scared of Governor Bottoms because we will not only fire them, we will also press charges and put them in jail for pedophilia. This grooming, this transgender pushed grooming will stop when I’m governor.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, Scott, I can attest as a public school teacher in Denver Public Schools, our flagship district, that this does happen. I have emails telling me, don’t tell the parents that this little girl wants to go by a boy’s name or a boy’s pronouns. You have the teachers union that grooms teachers. I mean, how do you change a whole system, a whole generation? I mean, you have to… get to the teachers because the teachers are the ones that are in front of these children every single day so if you can indoctrinate teachers then you can indoctrinate a whole generation of children so for anybody who says this isn’t happening i know for a fact there are teachers who have given young girls bandages for their breasts without letting the guardians know like this stuff does happen on a regular basis so thank you for taking the stand to protect children and to support parents is the first educators of their children. Now, there is a new bill making its way through the state legislature. It’s been kicked down the road, but now it’s slated for April 23rd in the Education Committee. So we know President Trump passed this big, beautiful bill. There is a tax credit, education tax credit of $1,700. So for my listeners who don’t know, If you donate $1,700 to an SGO, which is a scholarship granting organization like a scholarships, you can get a $1,700 federal tax return. This bill, 26-1292, House Sponsor Goldstein, Senate Sponsor Kipp and Marchman are writing a bill to attack this. This is a federal piece of legislation. The cliff notes is they’re saying if you are a school accepting scholarship money from like ACE and you don’t comply with the state’s non-discrimination laws, you can be blocked from receiving that scholarship money for your children. Okay. So like, I don’t care when it says, you know, we’re not going to discriminate against race and gender that that’s low hanging fruit, but it’s the stuff we’re talking about. So if we say, Oh, Only girls in girls’ bathrooms, boys in boys’ bathrooms, no boys playing in girls’ sports. That’s considered discrimination in the state of Colorado. And therefore, my private school wouldn’t be able to access private donor dollars. It has nothing to do with the state. I’m really, really bothered by this. I’m likely going to show up to the Capitol to speak against this. But Like, my question is, how does the state, is it under the jurisdiction of the state to take a federal bill like this and say we’re going to put more restrictions than what the federal government puts on it and say we’re going to restrict you from accessing private scholarship dollars if you don’t comply with what we think you should comply with?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, this is what we’re seeing, and let me kind of trim all the fat off of this. So we know exactly the description of the bill you’re talking about. This is a, this is not about discrimination. This is about transgenderism. That’s all it’s about 100%. It has nothing to do with ethnicity. It has nothing to do with anything except transgenderism. And so this is an ideology that they’re pushing, pushing, pushing. You realize we are giving hundreds of millions of dollars into transgender issues while taking away. And we just debated this all this last week while taking major chunks of money from the severely disabled. We’re giving money to illegal immigrants and transgender while we’re taking money away from seniors and all this. So this is ideology. And our budget is so messed up. We are so much in debt. But instead of actually trimming where we could trim, like stop giving. We had one bill alone over $100 million to illegal immigrant abortions. So instead of doing that and putting it where it needs to be, we just keep bloating this. Well, this bill is just to attack because of transgenderism. The way you ask the question, can you do this against federal stuff? So the state of Colorado is proving they’re going to do what they want, when they want, and how they want. It is not constitutional. It is not legal. It’s not statutorily okay. But… Our attorney general is suing the federal government because they want to. Our state is breaking federal laws and then suing the government when they say, hey, that’s not OK. This is just another part of the same thing. They know this is not constitutional, but they’re still going to run the bill because they have more of them than us. But here’s a little secret. The Democrat leadership came to us last year. They were mad about something else. But they said to a handful of us standing there, we know we’re going to lose a lot of seats in 26, so we’re going to be coming after you guys. Well, guess what? We’re in 26, and they are coming after us with everything they can. But here’s the dirty little secret nobody’s focusing on. They know they’re going to lose major seats in November. We’re flipping this state in November because of these nut jobs that think that this transgender thing is the mountain to die on. And you can take a room full of people, it doesn’t matter, 100 people, 10,000 people. And when some guy stands up, wears a dress and says, I’m a woman, nobody in that room believes it. Now, there will be many that will act like they believe it and they will fight for it and they will do this same thing we’re seeing in the House. They know this is craziness. They know this is there’s there’s two sexes, no genders. That’s how simple it is. But they will spend time, energy and literally tens and tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to push their agenda. It is unconstitutional. When I’m governor, we’re going to we’re going to shred this stuff. You talk about low-hanging fruit. The moment I’m governor, when we start to sign these executive orders, we’re tearing down their house of cards. And I said this a few weeks ago in the House on two different transgender bills, is that the fad is over. The fad is over. It’s no longer cool to be transgender in these settings. The entire United States has started to wake up and say, no, we’re done with this. Europe did a few years ago. And they’re saying, nope, we’re done with this. Major corporations, we’re done with this. No DEI, no more of this stuff. But the House of Representatives and the Senate in the state of Colorado cannot let this go. This is their ideological mountain and they are destroying, trying to destroy education in the process. But the good thing is for you, people will be flooding into your school just because of this. You are winning the battle and you haven’t even turned the key in the door yet because of this craziness.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, this is the motivation. And I think as we see parents pulling their children out of public education and even some charter schools, because we know charters are public and they’re having to comply with a lot of these really bad laws, that parents are homeschooling or looking for private classical Christian education options for their children. And so once again, Excalibur Classical Academy, I’ll give the plug. But Representative Bottoms, share your website where people can learn more about you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. My website is my name, scottbottoms.com. And there’s all kinds of stuff on there and including some of our education plan. Let me do let me throw this out with education because you did mention that charters are public schools and they are. But but here’s here’s something that is happening. People are flooding out of public schools and going into private schools and going into homeschooling at high numbers. You’ve got to be careful. And I do have a full education plan. I can explain it all. But you’ve got to be careful when you say let the money follow the child. Because the state constitution says that wherever the state money goes, the state is in control. And nobody in the homeschooling arena wants the state to be in control of any of that. And so I do have an education plan that fixes it for everybody, including homeschoolers. And we’ve put out some videos about it. I may put out kind of the whole plan here in the next few days. But be careful with the money follows the kid. I understand the idea. I’m behind the big picture of that, but I have a different plan of how to make that happen.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I think that’s a really critical discussion, especially when we’re talking about the homeschool enrichment, which that was a big conversation in the Budget Committee as well, whether or not to keep that funding at $5,500 per student or to drop it. I’m hearing that as of right now, that’s probably not going to be touched this legislative session. I hope not. So that’s really encouraging to a lot of homeschool parents to have that enrichment program as a possibility. But I really appreciate that you took the time to come on today and to talk about your vision for education. There’s so much more we could talk about, but we’re out of time. We have to move on. And I know you’ve got family time coming. So thank you so much for all that you’re doing. It’s not easy to run for public office, much less the top position in the state. And so thank you again, Representative Pastor Dr. Scott Bottoms for your time. And people can go to your website and follow you on all the social media platforms and ask you questions because I know you’ve been very responsive. So thank you.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I did want to say one thing. I know that assembly was crazy. I know. And there was some really bad leadership going on, a lot of bad stuff. But Priscilla, you ran your part of it stellarly. You did amazing. And I have not heard one person say anything negative about you on this. You did awesome while everything else was crashing and burning around you. So thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, thank you so much. And I appreciate my team for helping. And we prayed a lot of prayers that day. So, well, we will see you on the campaign trail. Thank you so much. And to my listeners, thanks for tuning in. Catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
