Posted inCOVID, Education

Colorado finally got full-day kindergarten, but parents are wary in the COVID era

By Chandra Thomas Whitfield, Chalkbeat Colorado Mattye Crowley spent most of her summer agonizing over whether to enroll her 5-year-old son in kindergarten at their neighborhood school this fall. The west Denver single mother, who also has an 8-year-old son in the third grade, said she feared for her children’s safety as the number of […]

Posted inCOVID, Education, Health, Politics and Government

Colorado’s coronavirus budget crunch is putting Democratic accomplishments at risk

Anna Layden makes $57,000 a year as an educator in Durango and owes the same amount in student debt after putting herself through college and graduate school. To pay it down, she applied for a $5,000 loan repayment through a new initiative for Colorado teachers. Deana Cairo wanted to see her 19-year-old son with developmental […]

Posted inEducation, Politics and Government

The Democratic agenda came with a big price tag. Now Colorado budget writers worry about paying the bill.

To pass their expansive legislative agenda, the new Democratic majority at the Colorado Capitol spent big this year. Real big. And now even Democratic budget writers are worried about how to make ends meet. “There were a lot of bills passed last (session) that have continued spending … and some of those were very large,” […]

Posted inEducation, Opinion, Opinion Columns

Opinion: Polis’ free all-day kindergarten lets parents re-enter the workforce. How can we help them?

In May, Gov. Jared Polis signed a bipartisan bill into law funding full-day kindergarten for Coloradan kids starting this fall — a transformational investment in our state’s future. When I heard the news, I naturally thought of how I felt when my daughter, Addison, reached kindergarten age. I learned that even though she was going […]

Posted inColoradans, Education, News, Politics and Government

Colorado made kindergarten a priority. But when it comes to four-day school weeks, lawmakers don’t see a problem.

Back when he was a school teacher on the Eastern Plains, Frank Reeves was no fan of four-day school weeks. “I fought it and fought it,” Reeves said. But now that he’s the superintendent of the East Grand School District in Granby, Reeves said, “I just don’t see a difference” academically. There’s no question something […]

Posted inOpinion, Opinion Columns

Carman: Colorado has run out of excuses for its decades-long failure to support education

The kids are heading back to school across Colorado, some with bulletproof backpacks along with their No. 2 pencils and spiral notebooks, and once again we face the challenge of educating children on a shoestring. Colorado has a long history of starving schools. Since voters passed the TABOR amendment in 1992, per-pupil spending for K-12 […]

Posted inEducation, News, Politics and Government

Gov. Polis’ full-day kindergarten program could bust its budget by $40 million in first year, state survey predicts

School administrators anticipate near-universal attendance in free, full-day kindergarten this fall, a state survey found, which would blow a $40 million hole in the budget Colorado lawmakers set for the first year of the new program. In the last school year, 36 of the Colorado’s 178 school districts had students enrolled in half-day kindergarten programs, […]