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PERA Program Designed to Help Rural Schools Has Potential for Abuse
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

PERA Program Designed to Help Rural Schools Has Potential for Abuse

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project A reader messaged me recently about concerns they had in their own local district. The concern centers around who was getting hired (well, re-hired) at their local school district. For a number of reasons, it’s not feasible to go and check out the reader’s district, but I hung on to the story because it felt like a good learning opportunity to share something I learned about, and it might be a concern you share. As best as I can tell (there may have been laws that refined or changed the original program), a 2017 law which I link to first below created a program in PERA, the Public Employees Retirement Association, to help get teachers into rural schools. In order to understand how this works, I have to bac...
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Colorado Case Tests Limits Of Religious Freedom In Publicly Funded Programs
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado Case Tests Limits Of Religious Freedom In Publicly Funded Programs

By Ari Armstrong | Commentary, Complete Colorado The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of a Colorado Catholic preschool that wishes to get state funding but not follow all antidiscrimination laws pertaining to gay and transgender students and possibly staff. I suspect that constitutional law professor Josh Blackman is right to predict the Court’s view, “This will likely be yet another repudiation of Colorado’s hostility to religious liberty.” Yet I wish Blackman and other conservatives would more fully think through the implications of the case for freedom of conscience. Remember who’s paying the bill The basic argument for not excluding the Catholic preschool is that excluding it infringes the school’s religious liberty. Religious prescho...
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Colorado parents packed the hearing room. Democrats didn’t ask a single question.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado parents packed the hearing room. Democrats didn’t ask a single question.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Twenty Coloradans showed up. Zero came to oppose. The resolution died anyway. By the time the House State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee finished Monday night, HCR 26-1004 was postponed indefinitely after a vote of 8 to 3.  Parents waited hours for their three minutes at the microphone. When it was over, the majority moved on to the next bill. The resolution was constitutionally modest.  It proposed inserting explicit language into the Colorado Constitution recognizing parents' right to direct the upbringing, education and care of their children. Sponsors argued throughout the hearing that the amendment would leave existing child abuse and neglect protections intact — the state would s...
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Supreme Court To Weigh Religious Freedom In Colorado Preschool Funding Case
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CNN, Approved, State

Supreme Court To Weigh Religious Freedom In Colorado Preschool Funding Case

By John Fritze | CNN The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a Colorado law that requires preschools receiving taxpayer money to enroll children of same-sex couples — setting up an important First Amendment showdown at the high court that pits religious rights against LGBTQ families. At the same time, the court declined to hear another high-profile case involving a Massachusetts couple who said their school began treating their middle school child as genderqueer against their wishes. After years of allowing religious schools in some settings to receive state funding alongside secular schools, the 6-3 conservative court will now decide what to do when school leaders assert that anti-discrimination laws intended to protect gay and transgender people conflict with their...
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What records show about Poudre School District’s role in student ICE walkouts
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Local, Top Stories

What records show about Poudre School District’s role in student ICE walkouts

By RMV Staff Nearly half of Lesher Middle School’s 766 students walked out of class on Feb. 2 to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of a wave of student demonstrations that Poudre School District says it neither encouraged nor discouraged. PSD is among the 10 largest school systems in Colorado. Emails and internal records reviewed by RMV suggest the situation may not have been as hands-off as described. What happened during the walkouts Over the following week, other district schools followed Lesher Middle School’s (LMS) lead, as nearly 900 6th–8th graders from over half of the district’s neighborhood middle schools and approximately 1,000 high school students walked out of class to protest ICE.  Students left school property, marched along Fort Colli...
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Supreme Court Takes Up Colorado Preschool Case Testing Religious Freedom
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The Denver Gazette, Approved, State

Supreme Court Takes Up Colorado Preschool Case Testing Religious Freedom

By Lindsay Whitehurst | The Denver Gazette WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will hear from Catholic preschools that say Colorado violated their religious rights by excluding them from a state-funded “universal” pre-kindergarten program over their admission policies. The court agreed on Monday to take up the appeal from St. Mary Catholic Parish in its challenge against a state program. That challenge is supported by the Trump administration. Joined by the Archdiocese of Denver, two Catholic institutions, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood, filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado, alleging their preschools cannot participate in the publicly funded program because the church’s religious views on sexual o...
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It’s your child: Why parents must take the lead in education
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

It’s your child: Why parents must take the lead in education

Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project I really liked the video linked at bottom. I think at some point the Independence Institute started a new video series about education, and this is one of their episodes. The thing that made this one catch my eye was the topic. It’s something near and dear to my heart: not just an encouragement to get involved in your child’s education, it’s also a guide. To give you a quick sense of the topics in this discussion, I took a picture of the timestamps from the video description and attached as screenshot 1. I’ll leave it to you to watch the video, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple last thing. One of the most important things you can (and should if you’re not) be doing to make sure...
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Jeffco Schools Challenge Federal Title IX Findings Amid Data Dispute
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CBS Colorado, Approved, Local

Jeffco Schools Challenge Federal Title IX Findings Amid Data Dispute

By Anna Alejo | CBS Colorado Jeffco Public Schools is disputing a U.S. Department of Education conclusion that the school district is violating Title IX, asking federal officials for a meeting and more details on their findings as a 30-day deadline for response arrived on Monday. The department's Office for Civil Rights determined that 61 male students were competing on girls' sports teams in the district — a finding Jeffco says contradicts data it originally submitted to investigators after the OCR began its investigation of Jeffco in June 2025. "During this review, we requested clarification on several findings that appear to contradict the data we originally provided — discrepancies that directly impact two of the OCR's three proposed actions," the district said in ...
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Cutting Social Studies Tests Means Less Accountability For Schools
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Complete Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

Cutting Social Studies Tests Means Less Accountability For Schools

By Ari Armstrong | Commentary, Complete Colorado If “public education is the bedrock of Colorado’s democracy,” as Democratic sponsors declare in the TABOR-busting Senate Bill 26-135, then why do lawmakers want to cut social-studies testing from two grades to one? Someone might conclude that not even the legislators believe the slop they’re slinging on behalf of the teachers’ unions. A look at social-studies testing Given how abysmally most Colorado students perform on the social studies portion of the Colorado Measures of Academic Success, maybe it’s no wonder that some legislators want to sweep the evidence of underperforming public schools under the rug. If you look at CMAS results by year, you’ll find that the last publicly-released data f...
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