SAN LUIS — Tucked in a canyon deep in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, Kimba Rael’s home doesn’t always get cell service or a stable connection to the internet. “It’s a ‘dead zone,’” said Rael, principal of Centennial School District R-1 in San Luis near Colorado’s southern border. One of the few live spots where […]
rural education
Posted inColoradans, Education, News
A rural Colorado high school’s aerospace class is paving the runway for a new generation of pilots
Mya Diaz Soto’s phone buzzed Saturday morning with a text message from her frantic mother, who demanded to know why her 17-year-old daughter was cruising 134 mph. Mya’s mother, who was visiting family with her father hundreds of miles away in Texas that morning, uses a smartphone app to track her daughter’s location, shows how […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Education, News
Coronavirus set back Colorado schools already battling to improve student performance
The pandemic froze some Colorado schools in a bad place, in state regulators’ eyes. Peakview School in southern Colorado was doing the hard work to emerge from the state performance watch list when the pandemic pinned it in time: Students were shut out of taking the tests that could prove their progress and get the […]
Posted inColoradans, Education, Growth, Opinion, Opinion Columns, Politics and Government
Opinion: Former Agriculture Commissioner Peter Decker fought for equity for rural Colorado
“Morgan, Roy wants me to be Commissioner of Agriculture. What do I do?” Peter Decker asked. It was 1987 and Gov. Roy Romer was about to announce this appointment. “Get out to rural Colorado,” I answered, having served as commissioner several years earlier. “Go to those Farm Bureau and Farmers Union dinners. Show rural Colorado […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Education, News
Rural Colorado communities vow to keep their schools open, even as coronavirus cases rise
ALAMOSA — Many of Sanford School District 6J’s 355 students have boomeranged between classes at school and home this fall, shuffled out of classrooms like their peers across the state because of a sudden need to quarantine. But the district is taking a stand as it rides out the last few weeks of the first […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Education, Technology
In rural Crowley County, a safe return to in-person school is really the only option
What is distancing learning like without a laptop? Without internet? Without parents at home? Without a home at all? This spring, remote education brought on by the coronavirus pandemic raised difficult questions about equity and introduced unprecedented challenges for school districts across Colorado. These challenges hit Crowley County — a small, rural community in the […]
Posted inColoradans, Education, News, Politics and Government
Thousands of teachers applied to Colorado’s new educator loan forgiveness program. But only 100 spots are available.
Cañon City Schools social worker Shantell Lynch considers herself lucky that 15 years after she earned her master’s degree, she has only $35,000 in student loans left to pay off. Some of her colleagues are carrying as much as $100,000 in education debt. Still, it’s a heavy weight for Lynch, 51, who became an educator […]
Posted inNews
Colorado now has more school districts on four-day weeks than any place in the nation — with little research on the benefits
LA JARA — Down here, where kids ride the bus for an hour through miles of potato and alfalfa fields to get to school, teachers use the term “null curriculum.” It means any part of a class that’s considered fluff. And it’s not allowed. Since the North Conejos School District switched to a four-day week […]