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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