A small Denver metro district whose teachers have been on strike since the beginning of April could be consolidated with Denver Public Schools, Colorado’s largest school district, if legislation being drafted by state Democrats passes in the last weeks of the legislative session.
Redrawing district boundaries between Sheridan School District 2 and DPS, a power granted to the legislature by the Colorado Constitution, is at the center of a bill in the works by state Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat.
Bridges said district consolidation is one option on the table at a time he’s grown more alarmed about the direction of the high-poverty district, where about 67% of the district’s 924 students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.
The proposal to deploy the seldomly used legislative tool came as news to Sheridan Superintendent Gionni Thompson, who said Bridges’ plan would “destroy” the community since it revolves around its schools.
The strike, which follows months of clashes between district and union officials after the previous teachers contract expired, adds to a list of longtime concerns Bridges said he has had about Sheridan School District, which he represents in the legislature.
Without many of their teachers in class all month, students “have been made truant by their own administration,” Bridges said, insisting it’s now up to the state to step in and redraw district boundaries.
“This is absurd,” he said, “and at what point does the credibility of an administration simply collapse under its own inability to reach an agreement with the people who are the most important part of every classroom?”
District consolidations in recent Colorado history have been rare. However, the idea of merging districts has remained part of conversations in education circles, particularly because the state funds districts based on the number of kids they serve and student enrollment is dropping in many districts.
A wave of reorganization occurred between 1949 and 1965 following legislative studies on school district structure and resulting laws dictating the process counties must follow to consider consolidation. That’s according to a report from the state education department last updated in 2021, which noted that Colorado had 2,105 school districts in 1935, down to 967 by 1956 and 181 by 1965.
Since then, there have been several other examples of Colorado districts consolidating and others breaking apart, the report states. The most recent consolidations have been mostly in sparsely populated regions of Colorado, including merging Arriba and Flagler School Districts in 1983 as well as Arapahoe School District in Cheyenne County and Cheyenne Wells School District in 1986. That same year, Egnar 18 in Dolores County joined with Dolores County School District while Genoa in Lincoln County consolidated with Hugo.
The current count of Colorado districts totals 178.
Bridges has represented Sheridan in the legislature for a decade and has long thought consolidation was the right answer for the small metro district, where property values are low and do not generate the same level of local revenue for schools as neighboring districts.
“Frankly, for those 10 years, I have believed that those kids, they deserve the resources of a larger district,” he said. “They deserve the efficiencies of a larger district.”
In recent conversations with families from the district, Bridges said he has heard a range of concerns extending beyond the teachers strike, including one family who told him about locks on school doors that don’t work and teachers who don’t have access to communications equipment. Meanwhile, students have struggled to reach grade-level expectations in subjects like reading. The district is in its third year on the state board of education’s accountability clock as students have continued to lag behind and if it doesn’t make progress within two years it could face state intervention, Colorado Public Radio reported.
Bridges’ proposal was met with outrage from Thompson, the district’s superintendent, who said he was “shocked” to learn of Bridges’ push for consolidation and is “100% against.”
Thompson, almost two years into his leadership, said that combining Sheridan School District and DPS would amount to assimilation for his district’s diverse population of students. He worries about students being pulled from their community and having to ride a school bus for hours every day.
“It really is a way to split a community and then begin to gentrify it,” Thompson said.
Thompson said he received a text message from Bridges informing him about the bill he plans to introduce.
“As you know, Sheridan is the district closest to my heart,” Bridges wrote Tuesday night in the text to Thompson, who shared a screenshot of the message with The Colorado Sun. “I’ve believed for years that the students there could benefit from resources and efficiencies of a larger district. The current labor dispute adds one more reason and a time pressure for the change.”
Thompson said the text was the first time he’s heard from Bridges. He said he also spoke with Gov. Jared Polis, who questioned him about the state of negotiations with the Sheridan Education Association and then indicated his support for Bridges’ proposal.
“I sat there and I paused for a moment and I said, ‘I don’t know what to say to that,’” Thompson said, adding that he thought Polis and Bridges instead would have reached out to offer support in trying to unify both sides.
Polis, who is a past member of the State Board of Education, weighed in with concerns over the strike last week, encouraging Thompson, the school board and the local union to restart negotiations so that students could have their regular teachers back in the classroom.
Polis “urges Sheridan School District and the Sheridan Education Association to come to an agreement to get kids back into classrooms as soon as possible so they don’t miss out on more critical instruction time and can finish out the school year,” spokesperson Ally Sullivan wrote on Friday in a text message to The Sun. “This needs to happen right now without further delay and we appreciate that they have returned to the negotiating table.”
Sullivan did not say whether Polis directly supports the potential legislation, noting that he “will review any legislation that reaches his desk.”
“Governor Polis appreciates Senator Bridges’ leadership on this issue and is open to whatever is best for the students of Sheridan to receive better services and more investment,” she wrote in the text message.
Thompson said he questions the legality of legislation that would direct two districts to combine, given local control provisions written into the state constitution. He said the district will first review the bill draft and is also in the process of hiring lawyers to “challenge every single aspect” of the proposed legislation.
Bridges said he is confident that drawing Sheridan into DPS could be done in a way that would “preserve the community nature” of the schools — and without any cost to the state.
“The goal here is to make sure that the students in Sheridan have the resources and leadership they need to succeed,” he said. “There’s a lot of different ways to do that and right now we are in the process of drafting legislation that would redraw district boundaries, but that’s just one way to solve this. That’s certainly not the only way.”
Denver Public Schools spokesperson Scott Pribble wrote on Friday in a text message to The Sun that the district “cannot comment on speculative legislation.”