“Regardless of party”: Colorado’s teacher unions say one thing. A decade of records shows another.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Colorado teachers are Republicans. They are Democrats. They are unaffiliated. They work in every county in the state, in every kind of classroom, for every kind of family. Their union says its political spending reflects that same range.

The money says something else.

RMV examined contributions from 13 Colorado teachers union entities across 22 data files between 2016 and 2026. Every identifiable contribution to a school board or state legislative candidate went to a Democrat. Not most. Not nearly all. Every one. Zero went to a Republican.

The Colorado Education Association Victory Fund — the independent expenditure committee for the state’s largest teachers union — filed its political mission with the Colorado Secretary of State: “To elect candidates, regardless of political affiliation, who strongly support public education in Colorado.”

A decade of financial records shows a different picture entirely.

The playbook

In 2015, the National Education Association published Schools in Transition — a guide instructing educators to treat student gender transitions as confidential medical information and to assess whether a child’s parents were safe before informing them what was happening with their own child at school. 

The guide did not implement itself. It needed boards willing to adopt its policies and a political environment that protected the educators who applied them. School board seats in Colorado are nonpartisan by design. The candidates do not run on party labels. But the unions back candidates aligned with their policy positions, and those positions align with one party. That is where the money comes in.

The CEA is the NEA’s Colorado state affiliate. The Jefferson County Education Association is a CEA local. When a Jeffco teacher joins JCEA, they join CEA and NEA simultaneously. Their dues move up through the affiliate chain automatically. So does the political money flowing back down.

Not every teacher joins. In Jefferson County, a letter to the school board during contract negotiations noted that 65 to 70 percent of district employees had consciously opted out of union membership. It does not matter. 

The union still negotiates the contract that covers every teacher in districts with collective bargaining agreements. The school board signs that contract. The board also sets the policies every teacher is required to follow on curriculum, student privacy and gender support plans. 

The union funds the candidates who sit on that board. A teacher who disagrees with those policies, a parent who objects to them, a student caught between them and their family — all of them answer to a board the union helped elect.

Federal Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act filings show the NEA sent the CEA $20,583,232 between 2016 and 2025. 

The amounts track Colorado’s political calendar. In 2024, while Colorado parents were circulating parental notification ballot initiatives, the NEA sent political activities payments including one labeled “ballot init support grant” and another “political research and polling.” 

Then on June 17, 2024, the NEA Advocacy Fund wired $116,808 directly into the Colorado Education Association Victory Fund.

It spent that money on four candidates. All four were Democrats.

Where it lands

The Victory Fund passed money to Students Deserve Better and Colorado Labor Action — committees that share a Denver address, a registered agent, and contributions from union affiliates across the state.

Students Deserve Better states its purpose: “To support candidates for school board seats, regardless of party affiliation, throughout the state who support students, educators and public education, and oppose candidates, regardless of party affiliation, in elections who oppose public education.” 

The network pooled nearly $2.3 million into it between 2019 and 2025. It spent that money backing union-endorsed school board candidates across Colorado — more than $800,000 across six districts in 2025 alone.

Colorado Labor Action’s stated purpose: “To elect candidates regardless of political affiliation who are supportive of organized labor.” 

Backed by the CEA, the Colorado AFL-CIO, SEIU International, the American Federation of Teachers, and others, it backed union-endorsed candidates in school board races across the state, including Douglas County in 2025.

What it buys

School boards set policy. They approve the curriculum. They hire superintendents and ratify the training staff receives. When the union network elects a board majority, it elects the body that decides what happens in every classroom in that district — for every student, regardless of their family’s politics.

In November 2022, the Colorado State Board of Education voted on new social studies standards. Four Democrats approved. Three Republicans opposed. No one crossed. 

The standard instructs teachers that preschool students should “show interest in interacting with and developing relationships with others, including those who are… LGBTQ.” The LGBTQ Pride Flag was listed alongside the American and Colorado flags as a civic symbol preschoolers should recognize. Republican board member Steve Durham called the vote “anti-parent.”

The four Democrats who voted yes were supported by the union network. 

Teachers in Colorado preschool classrooms — whatever their own views — are now required to follow those standards. Parents who object have no mechanism to opt out. 

Two years later the CEA Victory Fund spent $41,212 in independent expenditures supporting Democrat Kathy Gebhardt for the open District 2 seat on that same board. The seat had been held by Democrat Angelika Schroeder — one of the four who voted for the preschool standards. Gebhardt won. The union replaced one vote with another.

In Jefferson County the same pattern has played out in every board cycle since 2017. 

The Public Education Committee — registered at CEA’s 1500 Grant Street address — backed union-endorsed candidates in 2017, 2021, and 2023. 

In 2021 it backed Danielle Varda, Paula Reed, and Mary Parker — the Jeffco Kids Slate, endorsed by JCEA. All three won, maintaining the board’s union-backed majority. That majority is funded by a committee whose affiliate, JCEA, has also contributed to the Jefferson County Democratic Party every cycle since 2019.

In 2023 it gave $3,750 each to union-endorsed candidates Erin Kenworthy and Michelle Applegate in August, then $20,000 to each on November 1 — six days before the election. The JCEA Small Donor Committee delivered additional contributions in August, September, and October. Combined, the two committees sent $48,750 each to Kenworthy and Applegate. Chalkbeat Colorado reported both candidates raised more than $58,000 each. The union network was approximately 84 percent of it.

Kenworthy sits on that board today. In a Facebook post shared on X by parent advocate Lindsay Datko, she wrote: “The children we raise today will soon be adults. We do not own them. They belong to themselves, which is why the ‘parental rights’ movement is so baffling to me. Are parents really that deeply scared of their impending loss of perceived control and ownership of their kid’s identities that they feel compelled to claim ‘parental rights’?”

That board governs a district where four families are in federal court over its policy of housing students by gender identity rather than biological sex on overnight field trips — a policy aligned with the framework the NEA’s 2015 guide established. The case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. 

The Office for Civil Rights found Jefferson County Public Schools in violation of Title IX on March 13, 2026, with $47,600,000 in federal funding at risk.

The Colorado Springs Education Association, a CEA affiliate, contributed $20,000 to Students Deserve Better in October 2023 — more than a year before the D11 board majority voted in December 2024 to end its 56-year collective bargaining agreement. After the agreement expired in June 2025, CSEA sent another $30,000 to the CEA Victory Fund. The money followed the politics.

Regardless of party

Three committees filed public missions with the Colorado Secretary of State describing a nonpartisan network. Each took in money from a union structure funded by teacher dues. Each spent that money electing Democrats to govern Colorado’s public schools.

One educator whose dues flow into that structure put it this way in the CEA’s own 2023 State of Education Report: “The professional roles of educators have been politicized without our consent.”

The consequences reach further than any single election. A teacher who opposes the framework the union supports still negotiates her contract through the union and still answers to the board the union helped seat. 

A parent who believes they have the right to know what is happening with their child at school navigates a district whose governing majority was built, in significant part, with money from an organization whose decade-long financial record runs entirely in one direction. The parents of a preschooler whose teacher introduces the LGBTQ Pride Flag as a civic symbol may not have known, when they voted, who funded the candidates on their ballot.

School board seats are nonpartisan by design in Colorado. The network that funds them is not. 

These committees told the state they operate regardless of political affiliation. A decade of financial records says otherwise. That gap — between what they claim and what they do — shapes the education of every child in every Colorado public school, regardless of how their family votes.