Over the past 14 years, Colorado schools have lost out on a staggering $10 billion they were owed under the state constitution. That’s the equivalent of an entire year of school funding.
The shortfall has left many classrooms understaffed, limited how much educators across Colorado earn and deprived countless students of after-school activities and elective classes that round out their learning.
“We’ve dug ourselves a big hole to climb out of,” said Tracie Rainey, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado School Finance Project.
Lawmakers and Gov. Jared Polis are attempting to take the first step, proposing an education spending plan the governor says will ensure the state is “fully funding our schools for the first time” since 2009. The proposal calls for an additional $141 million to schools next budget year to wipe out what’s left of the budget stabilization factor, the Great Recession-era accounting tool that eased a statewide budget crisis while also short-changing Colorado schools.
Now, lawmakers face a question they haven’t confronted since voters established minimum funding targets in 2000 with the adoption of Amendment 23. Is Colorado’s version of full funding even enough?
School funding advocates say no. Even with the recent infusions of funding, education dollars in Colorado will only go as far as they did in the late 1980s when you account for inflation and enrollment growth, according to Rainey.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” she said, “and it’s important to understand that it has nothing to do with fully funding education. It has to do with meeting the constitutional requirement of Amendment 23. That’s the benchmark.”
“As for it making a huge difference for school districts from an operational side,” Rainey added, “it doesn’t.”
“Short selling K-12 education for years”
By the time the Great Recession hit, Colorado’s school funding crisis was already decades in the making.
In 1982, voters adopted the Gallagher Amendment, which steadily reduced housing assessment rates across the state. A decade later, voters enacted the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which limited government growth. Combined, the constitutional amendments triggered cascading property tax cuts across the state, gutting what used to be Colorado’s primary source of school funding.
In answer, voters passed Amendment 23, a sweeping school funding measure that required the state to increase spending on schools to make up for the drop in local property taxes.
Amendment 23 was designed to return Colorado schools to the inflation-adjusted equivalent of 1989-89 funding levels per student, Rainey said.
It was hardly an ambitious target; Colorado still spent less than the national average in the late ‘80s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But before the state had even managed to do that much, the housing market crashed.
The local tax base collapsed. The state’s obligations soared. And the budget stabilization factor was born.
At its worst in 2013, the funding shortfall topped $1 billion in a single year, the equivalent of a 16% cut to school programming. The local share of school funding bottomed out two years later in 2015, when the state shouldered two-thirds of K-12 spending and school districts contributed just 33%.
If declining property taxes were largely to blame for the funding shortfall, their rebound has been the biggest reason lawmakers are on track to eliminate it. Booming housing market growth since 2016 stopped the decadeslong decline in the local share of school funding. Four years later, voters repealed Gallagher, removing the statewide restraint on property tax growth.
School property tax collections are projected to jump 24%, or $800 million this budget year alone, with 11% more growth expected next year, according to legislative estimates. For the first time since 1990, local districts are expected to spend nearly as much as the state next year, under the latest Joint Budget Committee staff projections.
If lawmakers eliminate the budget stabilization factor next year as planned, Denver Public Schools, Colorado’s largest school district, would net about $14 million — equal to about $174 per student and about 1% of the district’s nearly $1.4 billion budget, said CFO Chuck Carpenter, who described the boost as “substantial” but not transformative.
“I don’t think that the conclusion should be that Colorado has now taken an enormous step forward in how we fund schools,” Carpenter said.
Colorado in 2020 allocated $11,602 in state and local funding per student, ranking it in the bottom half of states in per-pupil spending, according to data the Colorado School Finance Project pulled from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. That was $1,892 below the national average of per-pupil spending that year.
The minimal progress under lawmakers’ proposal illustrates how deeply underfunded Colorado schools have been for more than a decade as schools have simply had to “make do” with budget constraints, said Jeremy Burmeister, superintendent of Platte Valley School District, which educates about 1,190 students in preschool through high school in northern Colorado.
“You look at where we sit in relation to the other states across the country and the cost of living that exists in Colorado,” Burmeister said, “(and you see that) we are short selling K-12 education immensely in the state. We have for years.”
A message to students and teachers: You’re not our priority
It’s hard to compare what public education in the late 1980s looked like with the system Colorado has today, when dollars under the legislature’s education spending proposal would stretch only as far per student as they did back then, said Rainey, of the Colorado School Finance Project.
Schools of that era had a simpler — though still complex — goal of ensuring every student had access to school, far different from the focus now as educators aim to get every student meeting specific academic standards spelled out by the state, Rainey said.
“Expectations are completely different,” she said. “Districts weren’t looking at serving kids free lunches. They weren’t looking at mental health issues as an issue that needed to be addressed. They weren’t looking at safety and security requirements. They weren’t looking at the fact that you were going to make sure that every district was going to be teaching the standards that were incorporated in language arts or math.”
Mark Sass began teaching in 1994 and said approaches to instructing students evolved dramatically throughout his 26 years in the classroom. At the outset of his career, the idea was to get all students to a C-average in his classes. Educators looked at all students as “average,” he said, and used a “blanket curriculum” to teach them.
“Today, I think we are much more aware of the need to differentiate, to take into account different learning styles, to take into account different needs of students,” said Sass, now executive director of Teach Plus Colorado. “And because of that, the shift that I’ve seen is really the support for students.”
With that has come the need for more resources, Sass said, including more support staff members in schools to help teachers best serve kids, including mental health professionals, counselors and special education assistants.
Both Sass and Jennifer Long, an English teacher at Highlands Ranch High School, have felt the effects of inadequate school funding over their decades of teaching.
Long, who is retiring at the end of the school year after 33 years with students, said that because of pinched budgets, she and her colleagues have often had to find their own ways of adding new books and learning materials to their classrooms. For more than 10 years, she has relied on DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that enables people to donate to teachers’ classroom projects, to raise enough money to buy new sets of novels.
“When we want to modernize and we don’t have the funding, either you don’t get to do it or you turn to DonorsChoose to fund it,” she said. “I think things like that have been frustrating and difficult. It’s extra work.”
Belt-tightening among schools has also limited how much Long and other educators can take advantage of outside professional training sessions with administrators having “to be more judicious” in selecting teachers to attend training sessions, she said.
“You can say, well, it doesn’t directly affect students,” Long said. “But of course it does because some trainings are excellent, and they make you better teachers.”
And she’s watched year after year as old school buildings across the state have needed repairs, with some districts scaling back school days at the start of the year with high temperatures creating uncomfortable conditions in buildings that lack air conditioning.
“To me, all those sorts of things send a message to students that they are not our priority,” she said. “And the message gets through to teachers, too. It’s demoralizing.”
Burmeister, of the Platte Valley School District, draws a line between the billions of dollars Colorado has failed to pay to schools and the chronic teacher and staff shortages hammering many Colorado districts like his. Within the last few years, his district has eliminated a grounds position in order to hire a much-needed mental health professional. And finding qualified candidates to teach and fill other jobs has become much more challenging.
“There are certainly positions that we didn’t have over the last five years that if we were better funded that we would be able to bring in,” he said.
With inadequate funding for schools, Rainey said it’s easy to understand why districts broadly struggle with paying teachers a livable wage, recruiting and retaining educators and providing students enough support and resources for mental health and safety and security.
“Our funding system doesn’t match our education system,” she said. “And so when you have a mismatch like that, you are not going to be able to provide the resources that are necessary in order for a district to be able to meet the expectations that they’re held accountable for.”
How much is enough?
Eliminating the funding shortfall alone was never “the goal” says Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, D-Arvada.
“I’ve kind of been warning people about this for a while now,” said Zenzinger, a school teacher and vice chair of the Joint Budget Committee. “I sincerely hope that once we address the budget stabilization factor, we don’t wipe our hands and say we’re done.”
The question is: How much money is actually enough?
It may be difficult to compare modern day school programming to that of the late 1980s, but the comparison remains instructive for at least one other reason. In 1989, schools only contributed 11% of an employee’s salary to the public pension. Today, schools are required to contribute twice that to pay off the system’s $26 billion in unfunded debts to retirees.
“You can’t leave a gaping hole in school districts’ budgets going forward,” says Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, R-Monument. “We need to be closing that hole and we’re not.”
Meanwhile, the state doesn’t contribute as much as it did in 1988 as a share of General Fund spending. The biggest reason has been the rapid growth in Medicaid spending over the last 30 years. But administration after administration has added other state programs in that time, too.
“The school finance riddle is first a policy question: Do we have the will to make funding public education at the K-12 level the priority or not?” Lundeen said. “I would argue the people in charge — Democrats — have not made it a priority.”
Other financial challenges loom on the horizon. Marijuana tax collections are plummeting, cutting a key funding source for school construction needs. There’s also rising political pressure to replace Gallagher with a new way to limit property taxes, which could reduce local funding for schools. Enrollment across many districts has been on the decline, leading to less state funding for those districts. And, in less than a year, districts will no longer have any federal stimulus dollars, which buoyed many of their programs and staff during the uncertainty of the pandemic.
Lawmakers have stockpiled record balances in the State Education Fund that should help. But budget writers say they plan to be cautious in how they spend down a balance of $1.6 billion and growing.
In the event of a downturn, Zenzinger wants a safety net to avoid repeating what happened to schools during the Great Recession.
“We’ve been confronted with this before, and that’s why the budget stabilization factor was created in the first place,” Zenzinger said.
As a result, anything approaching “adequate funding” for K-12 will likely require larger contributions from the state’s General Fund, she says.
While state decision makers weigh how much to spend, school districts will continue to scrape by. In DPS, schools could have used more money over the past 14 years to pay teachers more as well as offer students more mental health support, extracurricular activities and school programs beyond core subjects like reading, writing and math, Carpenter, the district’s CFO, said.
Those opportunities have now passed a generation of students by.
For those students, Carpenter said, “those experiences are lost, and they won’t come back.”