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HUGO — While kids meander among the stacks at the Hugo Public Library, 5-year-old Letty Nuffer sits cross-legged at a table concentrating on her language skills using a borrowed laptop computer that displays a fun video to show her how to pronounce consonant blends.

Thanks to a pilot project in telehealth, Letty can access therapy for her speech delay without a four-hour round trip to Denver for an in-person appointment. By checking out an equipment kit designed to facilitate a wide range of health care consultations, Letty’s mom, Kali Nuffer, can connect directly with her therapist as well as to specially designed video lessons.

The library, already an almost daily destination for Nuffer’s family, now has become the conduit for virtual doctor’s appointments for all four of her kids — just one more service that the facility offers beyond the traditional resources for residents on the Eastern Plains. Kristin Allen, the library’s director, says this year’s addition of telehealth has started to become, well, contagious.

“I’ve had several people recently call and say, ‘How can I do this? How can I get one of those kits?’” she says. “Just come down and get a library card. That’s all you need.” 

For many Coloradans, today’s library card unlocks a lot more than books or even an ever-expanding array of digital material available from 113 public library jurisdictions across the state — and that’s particularly significant for relatively far-flung rural communities whose smaller systems account for nearly 75% of the total.

The way libraries serve the public has evolved significantly over the last several years — a trend that only accelerated during the COVID pandemic, says State Librarian Nicolle Davies. She notes that libraries “leaned into technology” for the entire range of patrons, whether that involved teaching grandparents how to use video chat apps, preparing job seekers for a 21st-century workforce or helping kids advance their digital literacy.

“For years, we were really freaked out that everybody identifies us as just books, but we’re so much more,” Davies says. “And the reality is we’ve been in the (digital) space long enough now that we’re comfortable saying, ‘Yeah, we are still about books and we’re about all these other things as well.’ So it’s very surprising when people visit libraries today and find out what we’re doing and what we have, because the perception still can be outdated and antiquated.”

The pandemic necessitated a number of innovations that worked around COVID restrictions, and many of those remain. Davies, who lives in Douglas County, recalls checking out a meat-smoking kit from her local library that came complete with recipes and seasonings. She also checked out an outdoor version of the block-stacking game Jenga for the family to play.

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“There were just so many ways that the library got really creative on how to provide services to people during the pandemic,” she says.

The pandemic also elevated the role of libraries when it came to digital resources like ebooks, audiobooks, streaming movies and music, notes Sherri Baca, executive director of the Pueblo City-County Library District. She said her district reallocated its 2020 budget to pump up funding to digital vendors, embracing the “library at home” concept that meant buying fewer hard-copy books in order to meet the needs of homebound patrons with digital offerings.

“Readers are reading, but the formats are a little different, which is great,” Baca says. “I think that that’s what libraries are supposed to do, move with the times and be very relevant to our users, and get them what they need when they need it.”

That credo has provided scaffolding for public libraries’ ongoing evolution, a transformation forged in times of a devastating virus and deafening political noise — both challenging factors as library workers face burnout on one hand and, on the other, an invigorating reimagining of their role. Pushing back against the headwinds of censorship, libraries have sought to serve as patches in the social safety net, channels closing the distance between patrons and health care, and myriad other functions — while still navigating the shifting demands for information and entertainment in all its digital and analog forms.

Digital content use was escalating even before the pandemic, and COVID ratcheted the demand even higher. But for the Denver Public Library, there’s still high interest not only in bound books, but also older media formats such as CDs and DVDs, which remain popular among those who may not have access to the latest streaming technology.

“We think that’s an equity issue,” says Michelle Jeske, the city librarian and executive director of the Denver Public Library. “A lot of people still don’t have high-speed internet access or may not have great devices for downloading ebooks or streaming videos. Some people might still have a VCR or a Blu-ray player, so we’re still seeing use of those formats. And that’s why we’re continuing to buy or support that part of our collection.”

The specter of censorship

In any format, library collections nationwide have become the target of challenges — some from individuals, others orchestrated by politically motivated groups that have brought issues surrounding intellectual freedom prominently into the public discourse.

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Colorado isn’t without its conflicts, but has been far less affected than many other states. Still, lawmakers in the last legislative session passed a measure designed to reinforce the policies and procedures Colorado’s public libraries employ not only to acquire and use materials, but to deal with challenges to their content. 

James LaRue, executive director of the Garfield County Public Library District, has dealt with more than a thousand such challenges over a career in library management that includes stints as director of the Douglas County libraries as well as with the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. His book “On Censorship” explores the motives behind the challenges, which have come from across the political spectrum, and the dangers of book banning.

“It has gone from the one or two people that get upset by running across something in a library to being more centrally coordinated,” he says, noting that nationally many of the recent objections stemmed from both isolation during the pandemic that pulled some down conspiracy rabbit holes and political strategy aimed at motivating conservatives for the 2022 midterm elections — most often by objecting to books with LGBTQ content. 

Poll after poll says this is a deeply unpopular view, that 70% of either party is opposed to censorship. But why do they keep at it? Because it seems to work. It gets people riled up, and as always in America we are both obsessed with and repelled by sex.

— James LaRue, executive director of the Garfield County Public Library District

“Poll after poll says this is a deeply unpopular view, that 70% of either party is opposed to censorship,” LaRue says. “But why do they keep at it? Because it seems to work. It gets people riled up, and as always in America we are both obsessed with and repelled by sex.”

Although he notes that other states have experienced more frequent challenges, and have seen legislative efforts aimed at even criminalizing anyone who provides access to certain materials, about five states have passed what he calls “anti-censorship legislation.”

“Colorado,” he adds, “is a much happier environment.”

In particular, he notes the new state law’s emphasis on the “request for reconsideration” that challenges must go through that effectively slows the process and prevents knee-jerk reactions. The new law requires that library boards establish a written policy for reconsideration, and lists specific standards that, among several other things, require they consider the perspectives of marginalized groups.

Davies, the state librarian, says that the rancor that spills over from book challenges now appears to have gotten personal. For years, she recalls, surveys on the most trusted professions in America found librarians ranked near the top, along with firefighters. But in the last few years she has been troubled to hear the integrity of her peers disparaged, even if the spitefulness seems less prevalent in Colorado.

“We’re all librarians at the end of the day,” she says, “and so when institutions like the American Library Association are getting challenged, and everybody’s lumping our profession into having this agenda of grooming children and being pedophiles, it’s just been something I never thought I would have seen in this work.” 

The Pueblo district has had a request for reconsideration policy in effect for more than 10 years, and the passage of the new law required them to simply tweak the timeline for how often an item could be reconsidered, Baca says — from once in a 12-month period to once every two years, the most frequent allowed by the law.

Although she welcomes the attention to the issue of censorship, she estimates that in the nine years she’s been with the library system it has received only one or two requests per year for material to be reconsidered.

In Denver, Jeske estimates she sees “zero to one challenge a year — knock on wood.” Even before the new state law, DPL changed its policy to only allow Denver residents to challenge materials to block organized national challenges.

Providing a social safety net

The pandemic proved challenging in many ways, and its aftermath revealed all sorts of societal issues that had always been present but suddenly were exacerbated. Think homelessness, mental health issues and substance abuse, among others. And libraries, particularly in population centers, found themselves nudged to become more engaged when it comes to connecting those in need with social services.

“That’s nothing new, especially for the Denver Public Library being in this urban setting,” Jeske says. “I think the pandemic demonstrated to us and the community how vital we are as a public space and a place of access — for learning, for knowledge, for technology and connection to the world.”

Not to mention for clean water and a restroom.

Since 2015, the Denver Public Library has had at least one social worker on staff to serve that population. That lone hire nine years ago “seemed like a win,” Jeske says, but soon it became clear that one wouldn’t be enough. Now there’s a Community Resources team of at least 10 people, some of them “peer navigators,” people whose experience mirrors those they’re serving.

The team’s training has spilled over to the entire frontline staff so they’re better equipped to handle issues like security, de-escalation, mental health and first aid.

“We’re one of the pioneers in that space,” Jeske says.

Increasing concern over drug abuse at libraries surfaced early last year with a string of suburban Denver library closures over possible contamination from methamphetamine fumes. (There were no reports of patrons affected by exposure.) Contamination became an issue at one branch in the Pueblo district that required action to remediate exposure to the public, Baca says — though fortuitously, the branch was already scheduled to close for renovations. 

But just as libraries have adapted to community needs, they’ve also had to adopt safety measures. In Pueblo, that means installing environmental sensors in the restrooms that monitor the air in real time to detect potential hazards and immediately notify staff.

“A lot of preventative kinds of stuff,” Baca says, “and just being really active in making sure people understand what the library rules are.”

Pueblo’s library system saw another vehicle for meeting the community’s needs. Although most of the district’s facilities are clustered in the city, Baca launched the telehealth pilot in 2,000-population Colorado City, about a half-hour south of the city limits. Kits similar to the ones used in Hugo and elsewhere are available, with the added feature of a hot spot that can provide patrons mobile internet access in an area where service can be lacking — thanks in part to grant money from the Federal Communications Commission during the pandemic.

Pueblo recently received a $250,000 Mellon Foundation grant for a project aimed at collecting digital archives to preserve the local culture and history of areas that may not have the wherewithal to host the material themselves. As the regional hub for this effort, the Pueblo library will be reaching out to communities across southern Colorado to solicit audio, video or photo files that can be uploaded to help maintain the historical record.

She holds out both projects as evidence of the evolving state of public libraries as they match resources with pressing local concerns.

“So it goes back to the social supports,” Baca says. “Where are the gaps? Can the library be relevant?”

Digital literacy, broadband and health

Kieran Hixon suspected something was up when he took part in Gov. Jared Polis’ broadband initiative and learned that rural areas use telehealth at far lower rates than urban centers. The trend seemed counterintuitive, given the scarcity of medical services in rural areas.

A subsequent partnership with the state Office of eHealth Innovation explored melding telehealth services with libraries that, especially in small towns, are considered anchor institutions when it comes to broadband. And it turns out that one of the hurdles to implementing telehealth in those communities is digital literacy. 

Hixon, the rural and small library consultant within the state department of education, saw the gaps and immediately knew libraries could be relevant by combining their core mission — namely literacy, including the digital kind — and their unique ability to provide access to broadband in far-flung locations. He started calling around to small libraries to ask what they thought and found that while some were already hearing about patrons’ health concerns, they didn’t have the resources to assist them. 

“I called this one librarian and she says, ‘People are coming in, and I just don’t know how to help them. And I could sure use help to do it better,’” Hixon says. “I was like, OK, we’re onto something.”  

In partnership with Ashley Heathfield, a telehealth project manager at the Office of eHealth Innovation, Hixon combed data to find the counties with the worst health outcomes that were farthest from medical services. Then they targeted libraries in those counties and sent out an email to see who was interested.

Eventually 17 library jurisdictions, encompassing 24 buildings, signed on to the pilot project, which has been running for less than a year. Early findings include greater use of the in-library spaces than the kits. 

But in Hugo, director Allen began a “soft launch” last spring, and then started spreading the word. Two portable kits have been the most popular, with Allen scanning a barcode just as she would a book to check them out. Patrons normally have 24 to 48 hours to use the kits, though Allen remains flexible. She also fitted a mobile desk that patrons can roll into the library’s board room to use for in-library telehealth appointments with privacy.

Each kit contains a laptop computer with features like headphones with individual volume controls for the hard of hearing and large-print keyboards for the vision impaired, and an ergonomic mouse. It also includes a ring light, scale, blood pressure monitor (including cuff sizes from child to extra large adult), pulse oximeter and forehead thermometer. The kit includes a wireless hot spot to provide an internet connection to a health care provider.

Getting people to realize that libraries are available for more than just books is changing a thought process.

— Kristin Allen, Hugo Public Library director

Allen estimates that the portable kits get checked out five or six times a month, a gradual increase as the area’s “very traditional” population becomes familiar with telehealth as an option and gets used to the idea that their library can be a resource to pursue it.

“Getting people to realize that libraries are available for more than just books is changing a thought process,” Allen says. “They still get surprised when you say, ‘Oh, yeah, you can come in and make copies.’ And then you throw in being able to check out a telehealth kit, and they’re like, ‘A what?’ It’s just a whole new thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.”

Librarians going … and coming 

As libraries have undergone mind-bending changes, there’s been some evidence of burnout among librarians even as another generation has embraced the job for new reasons.

Davies, the state librarian, says she’s seen signs of burnout particularly among those frontline staff who deal directly with the public. She also notes what appears to be a mass retirement among those in library leadership roles, though it’s unclear whether that’s a response to librarians coming under attack over issues of content, the overarching lack of civility from the public or just demographics naturally thinning the ranks.

“Regardless of why it’s happening,” she says, “it is happening.” 

But she adds that a lot of younger people have been attracted to librarianship, prompting a spike within some programs as students seek advanced degrees in library and information science, because the shifting role of libraries has in some ways recast the profession as social justice work.

“It’s an equalizer in a community,” Davies says. “It serves everybody.” 

Allen, 44, first worked as an auto insurance claims adjuster in California, but about 14 years ago migrated to Colorado when her company moved its call center to Colorado Springs. She eventually moved to Limon after her husband took a job at the correctional facility outside of town.

With a degree in early childhood education, Allen did day care in her home. She often took her own kids to the Limon Memorial Library for story time with library director Lucille Reimer.

Describing herself as “one of those odd introverts that likes people,” Allen soon found that at the library she was completely in her element, and that comfort zone fed an innate desire to help people. It wasn’t long before Reimer, who needed some extra help, offered her a part-time job. So a few days each week, Allen learned that being a librarian involved a lot more than checking out books.

“It’s a service that you’re providing a community,” she says. “And it just spoke to my heart.”

After about a year, the position overseeing the Hugo library opened up. Reimer urged her understudy to apply. Allen hesitated — she didn’t have that much experience. But Reimer convinced her to take a shot, and she got the job.

It’s part-time, like many library jobs in rural areas, but that meant Allen could continue helping Reimer on a morning schedule in Limon before heading over to run the Hugo library in the afternoon. Now, Reimer is retiring and passing the reins in Limon to Katie Zipperer, who has been directing the library’s bookmobile, another crucial tool for serving the 2,500 square miles of Lincoln County.

“We try to do everything we can together,” says Allen, who’s in her third year directing the Hugo library. “So when we make flyers, when we do programs, it’s always the three of us working together. So it’s been great to share resources.”

When she attended CALCON, the annual gathering of library staffers from all over the state, Allen saw the world opening up. She knew she wanted even her tiny facility to be about much more than books, and suddenly she learned that bigger (and better funded) libraries were doing all sorts of things to serve their populations.

“It just opened my eyes,” she says. “When I saw what other, bigger city libraries were doing, I thought, ‘We can do that.’ I was like a blank sheet when I got here.”

While Hugo’s size and budget might be limiting, Allen’s imagination was not. She noticed the array of “tool kits” that other libraries offered — materials for crafts, sewing machines, yoga, even memory resources for Alzheimer’s patients. She went to her board and told them that Hugo wasn’t keeping up. The library could do more.

So she started small, packaging various school materials in backpacks that students could check out. After those started gaining popularity, Allen moved to providing copying services and printing services that could produce brochures, flyers and posters. Word started filtering through town that the library could offer some extras like binding and laminating, printing and faxing — Allen even started providing a notary service.

With the Lincoln County Courthouse nearby, services like those proved particularly popular.

“We’re trying to do small things,” Allen says. “We don’t have tons of room but we can add on services to make things easier for people.”

When it comes to the future, Davies figures that Colorado is “just scratching the surface” in terms of creative ways that libraries can serve their patrons.  

“Ten years ago, we didn’t have a library of things where you can check out tools and you can check out cake pans, and you can check out VR headsets or GoPro cameras,” Davies says. “Whether you’re checking out gardening tools because you live in an apartment, but you have a gardening box, you don’t need to own these things. But how cool is it that you can check it out from the library?”

The promise of a three-day weekend every week has become a popular tool Colorado school districts are using to lure teachers to their schools and try to keep them there. In the face of strapped budgets and limits on educator salaries, most of the state’s districts have switched to a four-day school week — taking on longer hours each of those four days to make up for cutting out one full day.

But one less day in school each week has taken a toll on learning and has proven lackluster in retaining teachers, according to a report released Tuesday by the Keystone Policy Center.

“There’s an irony that the reason for why you go from five to four (days), at least the reason most people say, is so you can recruit and retain better teachers, which you would think would have an impact on student achievement,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director for the Keystone Policy Center. “But it doesn’t seem to be resulting in higher student achievement, and when you look at the recruitment and retention data, it doesn’t have an impact on the retention either. I’m not sure what the compelling reason is.”

The report has some Colorado superintendents pushing back against claims that shorter weeks are bad for kids. During the 2016-17 school year, Colorado tallied 82 four-day districts, charter schools and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (groups of school districts that share resources). Six years later, 119 of 185 districts, charter schools and BOCES had adopted four-day weeks, according to the report.

At 27J Schools in Brighton, former superintendent Chris Fiedler said a switch to a Tuesday-Friday schedule in 2018 has reduced the burden on instructors even as student graduation rates have continued to inch upward.  

“This myth that we’re going to school less time is just wrong,” said Fiedler, who retired earlier this year after 12 years as the district’s superintendent. “So it’s a longer school day. We’re attending the same number of hours we did before. Teachers actually have more planning time.”

The 21-page Keystone report, titled “Doing Less with Less,” points out ways students in districts with four-day weeks are trailing their peers in districts on traditional five-day weeks. It also acknowledges the difficult reality of staffing classrooms, which often pits the priority of educating students in the ways that help them most against what it takes to draw educators to districts that rank low in compensation.

The move toward four-day weeks has largely come from a sense of desperation as many districts have been unable to meet the competitive salaries of neighboring districts and had to find other incentives to attract teachers.

The four-day week option — which emerged in the 1980s when a new state law gave public schools more flexibility over their calendars — is most widely used among small rural districts. While the majority of Colorado districts operate on a four-day week schedule, those districts only account for about 14% of the state’s public school kids since most of them are small and in rural areas.

In recent years, the four-day week has gained more traction among larger districts in more populated parts of the state, including Pueblo and Brighton.

No district approaches the move to a four-day week lightly, said Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova, who was previously superintendent of Denver Public Schools, the largest district in the state.

“Everybody really cares about their kids,” Córdova said, “and I think they’re really feeling like they’re borrowing from Peter to pay Paul in how they’re coming up with solutions.”

“We’re all in this state complicit”

Among more remote districts on four-day weeks is Mancos School District RE-6 east of Cortez in southwestern Colorado. The rural district — which last year educated 521 students in preschool through 12th grade — transitioned to a four-day week in 2016 under the weight of financial pressures. The district’s teacher compensation is about 20% below a bigger district 20 miles to the east and a New Mexico district 20 miles south, Superintendent Todd Cordrey said.

He says student performance depends on more than just the number of days class is in session per week.

“The issue of whether a school system is a four-day system or a five-day system is really not a key factor to the academic performance of the system or the culture of the system,” said Cordrey, who has been superintendent since 2021 and previously led schools that were active five days. “There are many more important factors that contribute to student success as well as the culture of a school district.”

Those include class size, economic factors, special needs of students, screen time and instructional practices, he said.

Other school districts like Eagle County School District have continued on with a five-day school week even as four nearby districts have shifted to a four-day schedule. Superintendent Philip Qualman, who is quoted in the Keystone Policy Center report, said the district has remained competitive with salaries — a starting teacher in his district earns about $50,500 a year — and his community has not pushed for a four-day school week.

He also wants kids “to reach their peak potential” — an aspiration that Qualman said is already challenged by Colorado requiring a minimum of 160 school days for districts, compared to a minimum of 180 days in other states. Colorado districts are falling behind in how much class time they can provide students, he said.

“Compound that over a 13-year public education experience, that’s a lot of disadvantage that our kids are experiencing,” Qualman told The Colorado Sun. “So districts that are doing four-day, I understand that they’re meeting the hour requirement just like five-day districts are, but I think that there’s only so much content that you can expect students to learn in a day and to try to jam it all into fewer days, I think practically it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

But he doesn’t fault any superintendents or school boards for pivoting to a four-day week. Rather, Qualman puts the onus on state education funding — which lags behind other states — and on the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, which is a constitutional amendment that limits how much the government can collect in tax revenues.

“It is suffocating public services, and K-12 is one of the most vital of those services,” he said. “As long as we allow that strangulation to occur, we’re all in this state complicit in the state of our education to the extent that we are short-changing our kids in the amount of time that they get to learn content and to be competitive in a global economy.”

How much does time in school matter vs. how that time is spent?

Córdova said she wishes students in all districts — both those on four-day and five-day routines — could access more learning, particularly as students continue trying to overcome learning deficits from the pandemic and as rates of chronic absenteeism have remained high.

“No matter how many days the school year is,” Córdova said, “really making sure we get kids to be in school each and every day is super important.”

So is quality time learning outside school hours, she added.

Many four-day Colorado districts offer programming on the days they don’t hold classes through their own schools or with help from community partners, but student participation across those activities is mixed, the report notes.

What is clear is that districts that hold classes five days a week outperform those that stick to four-day weeks, according to state data cited in the report.

For instance, a greater percentage of districts on five-day schedules were rated highly on what is known as Colorado’s District Performance Framework — a tool used to grade how well districts are performing. Additionally, a higher percentage of students in five-day districts demonstrated proficiency in math and English language arts on state standardized tests called Colorado Measures of Academic Success.

And when analyzing growth — the amount of academic progress students make over time — the report stated that evidence shows kids in five-day districts are making greater gains toward state academic standards than kids in four-day districts, though they still have a lot of work to do to master those standards.

A national study released last year by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University found that four-day weeks “significantly decrease students’ math and reading gains,” particularly in districts in more populated areas.

But debates continue to swirl about whether other components of a child’s education — such as how instructional time is used — are more important than how much time students spend in school.

Cordrey, of Mancos School District, said the four-day week has allowed his district to introduce 21 professional development days for teachers, carving out more time for them to prepare lessons and improve instructional practices.

The four-day week, he told The Sun, “has zero negative consequences” for students, staff and his community.

“The lightbulb moment for students is something that happens in an instant,” Cordrey said. “It doesn’t happen over sustained time being in a seat. So it’s more about the practice than it is about the time. The more we can learn about brain development for children and adolescents, the more we’ll be able to increase student learning and that is really the focus for school district to improve academics, is to continue to learn more about how we can spark students’ learning through our instructional practices and through their environments.”

Schoales, of the Keystone Policy Center, wonders how students can advance in subjects like math and reading if they’re not in school.

Research and experiences from pandemic learning indicate that “kids being in school matters,” Schoales said. “Even with technology, it still matters quite a bit. All things being equal, the research tells us that the more you’re in school, the more you learn.”

The report also found that districts running four-day weeks have generally still struggled with teacher turnover. The average teacher turnover rate of four-day districts hovered above the average teacher turnover rate of five-day districts from 2018-19 through 2022-23. During the 2022-23 school year, for instance, five-day districts experienced a teacher turnover rate of about 20% while four-day districts saw a slightly higher percentage of turnover. 

Brighton’s 27J Schools, however, saw minimal teacher churn between 2018 and 2023 with a 14.6% turnover rate, even as the district held the lowest median teacher salary in the metro area.

The metro district, which last year educated more than 23,100 students in preschool through high school, made national headlines in 2018 when it became the country’s largest school district to convert to a four-day instruction week.

The district converted to a four-day week after failing six times to get a mill levy override approved by voters. The property tax increase would have given the district the ability to increase teacher salaries, the report states.

Fiedler, the former Brighton superintendent, said the district took the leap to attract top-tier teachers. The greatest impact on both student achievement and teacher success boils down to the simple idea of believing in one another, he said.

Teachers must believe in the impact they can make and believe in their students, he said, while students must also believe in their teachers.

“The teachers believe they can really make a difference in improving student outcomes, and if they believe that they move mountains and they have great results from kids,” Fiedler told The Sun.

The report recommends the state education department convene a panel of experts and people who are part of districts that have four-day instruction and ask them to inform state officials and policymakers on ways to make sure students have the support they need to stay on track.

Cordrey, of Mancos School District, counters that decisions around school calendars are best left to individual districts and don’t need input from the state.

“Let’s let local educators make local decisions about the educational process,” he said. “The closer you are to the issue, the more effective solution you’re going to come up with.”

BERTHOUD — Parents everywhere hear the call of the wild, especially in the summer months, and one of the most common refrains is, “Can we go to the park?”

For many parents it might be a relief, a chance to shoo them out of the house like a miller moth. Yes! Go to the park! But for Lauren Bowling, that refrain is anything but a chance to unwind. It means work. It means nearly two hours in the car. It means a whole afternoon. 

Lauren and her husband, Richard, have twin boys they call walking miracles. Miles and Mack had twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome and were week-to-week starting about 12 weeks into her pregnancy, Lauren said, until they were delivered by emergency cesarean section at 28 weeks. The babies scrapped and survived, and the boys are now age 7. Mack is as able-bodied as they come and Miles has no cognitive problems, which gives the Bowlings oodles of gratitude. It really could have been much worse.

But Miles has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around. This means not every park will work, including all the available playgrounds in Berthoud, where he lives with his parents, Mack and an older brother, Braxton.

This will change by next spring and possibly a lot sooner, thanks to the Berthoud Adaptive Park Project. The park will be Berthoud’s first inclusive playground of any kind, but this one will be one of the most inclusive in northern Colorado, with a surface he can roll on and swings, monkey bars and a merry-go-round, all adapted so Miles can have fun, too. Berthoud broke ground on the park on May 29. 

“The monkey bars are built so kids in wheelchairs can pull themselves through,” Lauren said. “Miles will be able to play on monkey bars with other boys.”

Berthoud launched the park thanks to the Bowlings, who raised money for it with a ridiculously successful lemonade stand (this year’s annual event raised more than $13,000, for a total of $53,000 over four years) and the help of Can’d Aid, a Longmont nonprofit launched in 2013 by craft-brew-in-a-can pioneer Dale Katechis. It also took some haranguing, the kind parents of disabled children learn to do as their offspring grow up enough to explore the outside world and realize some things aren’t the same for them.

Haranguing, even a few years ago, was how inclusive parks were built. Now parks departments realize that an adaptive park doesn’t mean building a ramp so kids can sit in their wheelchair while other kids run by them. Denver, in fact, tries to be inclusive with every new park. 

“Now people are realizing that accessible is not inclusive,” said Juliet Dawkins, who started LuBird’s Light Foundation with Jason, her husband, for their daughter, Lucia, after her nickname. “Even if you have a smooth surface, a wheel-able surface, if you don’t have a piece of equipment for them to play on, what’s the point?”

Most of Colorado’s larger cities have at least one inclusive park, and the movement is trickling down to towns such as Berthoud, with a population of 12,000. 

Yet parents still need to show up, speak up and make sure they are heard, Bowling said, despite emphasizing in her speech at the groundbreaking that she couldn’t have done it without the help of many others. She had to help push community fundraising for the park toward its $1.6 million goal, after all. 

“There were times I got intimidated by our grand goal, and anytime that happened, someone in the community reached out and would reinvigorate me,” Bowling said. “But I don’t think it would have happened without me pushing. It feels gross to say that, because so many helped lift me, but no, I don’t.” 

Where you belong (really)

This year’s theme of the National Recreation and Park Association is “Where You Belong.” That’s intentional, said Kara Kish, director of parks and recreation for the city of Loveland.

“A lot don’t feel they do belong,” Kish said. “But in the last five years, universal access has been the new standard. The primary drive is the commitment to be in service to everyone.” 

Cities across the country, including Loveland, Denver and many others, have revamped their recreation departments to not only offer programs specifically for those in disabled communities but adjust any class or sport to make it accessible if someone requests it. 

Parks are a harder commitment, but they are working on it. Loveland’s spent the past decade, Kish said, to make all its parks compliant with the American for Disabilities Act.

ADA standards, however, aren’t always fun, and that’s why parks departments are looking beyond them. Loveland broke ground April 22 on the 160-acre Willow Bend Natural Area and Universal Access Playground, which will feature the city’s first universally accessible playground — 12 acres. Loveland hopes it will be ready by spring. 

“Universal access goes beyond physical limitations,” said Bryan Harding, Loveland’s parks and recreation planning manager. “It runs the whole gamut. We won’t have everything for everybody but we will have something for everyone.” 

The park will feature play equipment designed to be used with other people, with a concrete slide, for instance, that’s extra wide and doesn’t cause static that can knock out pacemakers and bother those with hearing difficulties, as well as bathrooms with oversized stalls and adult changing tables. There will be tools for sensory play as well, which can be soothing for those with autism and other similar issues. There’s even charging stations for mobility devices such as electric wheelchairs. 

Concrete slides are a new concept, but it’s likely able-bodied kids will like them better as well, Harding said, since they don’t get nearly as hot as metal or plastic slides. Inclusive swings and merry-go-rounds are still loved and used regularly by everyone as well. 

“Inherently when you improve upon something,” Harding said, “it serves everyone better.” 

“We want people to be together”

Denver Parks and Recreation now considers whether a park is universally accessible and inclusive instead of buying a piece of equipment and calling it good. 

“It’s a conversation we are going to have every time a park is in the planning stage,” said Owen Wells, the district park planning supervisor for Denver Parks and Recreation. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with families and advocacy groups. They’ve helped us understand what makes parks inclusive. We’ve been learning over time.” 

Sometimes parks departments were the opposite of inclusive even when they meant well. Buying a single piece of adaptive equipment can be anything but inclusive.

“The idea is we want people to be together,” Wells said. “It doesn’t meet that goal if a kid is playing on a piece of equipment in a section of the park by himself.”

Parks and recreation departments and the equipment providers that serve them nationwide are doing their best to learn, Wells said. Denver’s focused on inclusive playgrounds for a bit now — Wells said it’s been a focus since he started working for Denver four years ago, and it was before he got there — and it’s now so commonplace that even towns such as Berthoud do their best. 

“I think we are in a moment where the industry is evolving a little bit,” Wells said. 

There are also limitations, Wells said. Some of Denver’s 175 parks were built during World War I and aren’t easy to retrofit, as accessible equipment can be much larger. Cost can also be an issue, although that may depend on the cities, as some said the equipment they found was a lot more expensive. Wells agreed that adaptive equipment costs more but also said fitting the equipment in older parks was a bigger constraint. 

“Is it backbreaking? No,” Wells said of the cost.

The fight continues

Yet with all the thinking on a citywide level about inclusive parks, there are still people fighting for more of them. Sarah Spiller, a physical therapist for Academy School District No. 20 in Colorado Springs, has a hard time recommending a park for her families in Colorado Springs. 

“Our closest one that’s accessible in our area is 30 minutes away,” Spiller said. 

There are three inclusive parks in Colorado Springs, she said, including Panorama Park, which she calls “wonderful.” But from the school district where she works, it’s 35 minutes away. 

Colorado Springs wants to work with her, she said, but said it is hamstrung by tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance on its parks. Many parks were built in the early 1990s, she said. But the city told her that if she could raise money for it, the city would match her contribution. 

She’s also spoken with an HOA that might be willing to donate money for a neighborhood park if they could use the grounds for free for events like Easter egg hunts. Maybe parks companies would donate a piece of adaptive equipment. 

“I need to create an organization and meet again with parks and rec,” Spiller said. “We will see.”

Spiller’s push is the kind of initiative that LuBird oundation wants to see, even if Dawkins does agree that parks and recreation departments are taking a lot more initiative on inclusive parks. 

“Whenever there’s a new park, generally cities will present plans to the public, and there are questions like, ‘Do you want a regular swing or a support swing?’,” Dawkins said. “Parents should advocate for that.”

There are certain pieces that LuBird pushes for nearly every time a new park gets built, such as surface merry-go-rounds and supportive swings, things that Dawkins calls “a slam dunk.” 

“It’ll be awhile before every park is inclusive every time,” Dawkins said. “But at the minimum, you can have those pieces and add more from there.” 

The park in Berthoud won’t be ready for kids until late fall, and it’s possible the rubber surface won’t be ready until the spring. They are planning a grand opening for Memorial Day. 

Bowling sees the park less as a way for her to avoid driving long distances as a real chance for Miles to be a typical boy whenever he wants. He can ask his mother if he can go to the park, and Bowling, finally, will be able to shoo him out the door. 

“He’ll be able to roll out the garage door and go down the block and play safely with his friends,” Bowling said. “That’s something I wish for every child.”

The moment Jordan Alvillar learned about two years into their marriage that her wife no longer wanted to have kids, her life and the future she had long imagined came to a screeching halt.

“It was like you were driving a car full speed toward what you think is going to be your final destination,” Alvillar, 37, said. “All of a sudden someone who’s not you just slams on the brakes. I felt very devastated and it took me a long time to process those feelings.”

Over the next year, as the pair dissected their differences in weekly therapy sessions, that devastation slowly disintegrated. In its place, Alvillar — who discovered she also wanted to live childfree — found a sense of relief.

Freedom, even.

The Denver couple’s decision to pass on having children is one story feeding into a trend of declining birth rates in metro Denver — where the impacts of slowing births have already trickled into classrooms, with smaller numbers of kids showing up to elementary schools. 

Denver County experienced the second-largest decline in births among the 100 most populous counties in the country from 2021 to 2022 — the most recent year of county-by-county data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of babies born dropped 6.3%, to 8,649 from 9,232.

Meanwhile, Colorado’s total fertility rate is down, with fewer babies born per woman over her lifetime. Data shows an average of 1.5 births among Colorado women and an average of 1.6 births among women nationally. To fully replace Colorado’s population, the average total fertility rate would have to jump to 2.1, according to Colorado State Demographer Elizabeth Garner.

The freefall in births marks a generational shift and follows birth trajectories of both the U.S. and other developed nations as more millennials choose to have fewer — or no — kids. 

Last year, the country’s total fertility rate dropped to 1,616.5 births per 1,000 women, The New York Times reported last week, calling it “a historic low” that is well below the rate needed to maintain the U.S. population. The New York Times also reported in July on the rising number of U.S. adults who say they expect to remain childfree, citing a Pew Research Center study from 2023. Among the results, 47% of adults younger than 50 without kids indicated “they were unlikely ever to have children,” up 10 percentage points since 2018.

Climate anxiety, finances, ratchet anxiety about parenting

Why are adults at a ripe reproduction age opting for childfree households or fewer children than previous generations?

Their answers differ, often driven by deeply personal reasons.

In some cases, distress outside the home alters decisions made inside it. That was especially true during the housing crisis of the Great Recession and the pandemic’s health and economic challenges. Both moments of history spawned a decline in birth rates.

“That instability, that lack of certainty made people feel that they wanted to have fewer children,” Jennifer Reich, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, told The Colorado Sun.

The kinds of social support people have access to, including parental leave policies and health insurance, also affect whether they see kids in their future, Reich said, noting that as governments scale back social safety nets, birth rates tend to go down.

At the same time, pressure on parents has been mounting, with parents feeling greater anxiety about their children’s success and an overwhelming sense of responsibility to enroll in high-quality day care, pick the right school and sign up for traveling sports teams.

“Our cultural expectations of what it means to be a good parent keep ratcheting up,” Reich said. The expectation that parents, particularly mothers, invest more in each child “can make parenting feel like more work.”

Other adults want to focus on their education and careers or find meaning in ways besides having kids. Some feel strapped by student debt, stressed about the worsening effects of climate change or worried about what the country’s future looks like amid sharp political divides, Reich said.

“They’re personal choices,” she said, “but they’re drawing on cultural and social information that help them shape their priorities for their family.”

Much of the overall drop in births has been driven by significant declines in babies born to women under 35, particularly under the age of 25, largely thanks to better access to effective contraceptives, according to Sara Yeatman, a professor of health and behavioral sciences at CU Denver.

Young adults on average still want to have two kids, but that desire often starts to wane in their 30s, Yeatman said, in part because of the escalating price of child care and housing. 

“It’s really, really expensive,” said Yeatman, who also runs the CU Population Center. “And so even if people might have one, they then revise their desires down to not have that second child because of how expensive it is.”

“The threat of regret”

Alvillar, who changed her mind about kids after years of anticipating having a family, has found happiness in her own rhythm with her wife, which includes room for their shared love of travel along with more ease to plot out how they want to spend their time and ever-growing bonds with their nieces, nephews and friends’ kids.

Alvillar said that while growing up she never had a role model who chose to be childfree. That meant that having kids seemed “inevitable,” she said.

“It just felt like a societal expectation that was ingrained in me and it was portrayed both in real life and in movies as a crucial life milestone that I was advised not to overlook,” Alvillar said. “I like to call it ‘the threat of regret.’ People saying, ‘you’re never going to know a love like this and if you don’t (have kids), one day you’re going to be on your deathbed wishing you did.’ That can really get people, and I think that for a long time, it really convinced me that it was just an experience I shouldn’t miss out on, and therefore I was just chasing a feeling.”

Through regular therapy with her wife, Alvillar came to realize that her long-held reasons for wanting kids were the wrong ones.

Other forces have also factored into her decision to plow forward without children, including her mental health — she has struggled with anxiety and depression since childhood — along with the uncertainty of the world.

“I think that even just looking at the state of the world, whether it be world wars that are happening, whether it be climate change, there’s no guarantee of how our world is going to look in the next 20 years and that children and families are going to be thriving,” Alvillar said. “They’re not necessarily thriving now, so it feels like an ultimate gamble to just put all this faith into the powers that be in our country or in the world that the world is going to be in a pristine state to where any child we would have would just have the greatest opportunities possible when that currently doesn’t exist.”

Reich, of the University of Colorado Denver, noted that public judgment often rears up in conversations about childbearing — deeming people who don’t want to have children as selfish or condemning parents who have more children than they can afford.

The better question, she said, is “how can we set up better opportunities where people who are parenting have the resources they need to be successful?”

Susan Ahmad, who lives in Commerce City, felt a pull to have kids in her early 20s as someone who has been close with her family and grew up devoted to family traditions and expectations, even helping raise her younger siblings.

By the time she turned 30, she began branching out in her own direction.

“I started living my life for myself and not for others and the expectations of what was thought to be for me,” said Ahmad, now 38.

Ahmad climbed up in her career and leaned into traveling, aiming to visit one new destination a year.

In 2022, however, she unexpectedly stepped into the role of parent after adopting her nephew when her older sister died. He still considers her his aunt, but she has taken on all the responsibilities of a mother, sorting out issues at school and cuddling with him at night during his first year of living with her.

She said adopting her nephew only reinforced her decision to not have her own children. Her family has battled challenges with addiction and mental health. Ahmad has faced struggles with mental health and has feared passing them down to kids of her own. She knows guilt would follow.

She also has seen firsthand how many children in foster care need a home while navigating the adoption process for her nephew. If she had her own kids, she said she might not have had the finances or bandwidth to bring her nephew, now 11, under her roof.

“Where would he be?” she wonders.

With dwindling birth rates eventually comes the prospect of school closures

Colorado’s population demographics make it one of the youngest states in the country with its long history of luring 20- to 40-year-olds seeking good jobs and access to the outdoors, said Garner, the state demographer.

“If we didn’t migrate people to the state, we would age really fast,” Garner said.

Her office is forecasting the birth rate to taper and hold steady, though she anticipates that the state’s share of women of childbearing age will grow, meaning the state could see a modest increase in the number of babies born until sometime around 2040. That increase will likely result in birth numbers that are slightly higher than birth figures in 2007.

However, those births will play out differently county by county. For example, Adams County is a younger county than its neighbors and will therefore likely see a greater uptick in births. Jefferson County is on the opposite end of the spectrum, with older residents, Garner said. 

Among the most immediate consequences of declining births and birth rates: Fewer kids showing up to elementary schools in recent school years.

Metro area school districts have had to wrestle with hard decisions in recent years while seeing smaller cohorts of students. Other district leaders in the metro area know that tough decisions loom ahead.

Closing 21 schools over the past three years — largely because of dwindling enrollment — has been among the most difficult work Jeffco Public Schools has faced, Superintendent Tracy Dorland told The Sun.

The district educated 76,172 students in preschool through high school last year after steady enrollment declines since the 2015-16 school year, when 86,708 students attended the district, state data shows.

Meanwhile, Jefferson County’s birth rate has also fallen — from 61 babies born per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2007 to 50 babies born per 1,000 women in that age range in 2022. The number of babies born dropped from 6,194 in 2007 to 5,521 in 2022.

The arduous process of closing schools has revised the way the district is planning for its future. Dorland said the district worked with an outside expert to complete a boundary study, which “confirmed that just changing school boundaries and shifting students around will not change the challenge of declining enrollment.”

If the expected trends from the boundary study hold, Jeffco Public Schools will likely have to consider more school consolidations in the 2028-29 school year, Dorland said.

With the study as a road map, the district is also redesigning the way it assembles plans for buildings, analyzing enrollment trends and projections as well as locations when figuring out infrastructure needs.

“It’s really important to me that given our recent history,” Dorland said, “significant financial investments are made in facilities that we are confident will serve our students far into the future.”

In Denver Public Schools, Colorado’s largest school district, leaders continue to plan for student population declines, according to Deputy Superintendent Tony Smith.

Last year, DPS educated 88,235 students in preschool through high school, state data shows. Enrollment has fluctuated throughout the past few years — partly due to migrants arriving in Denver — but overall remains down. The district saw its highest enrollment in the past decade during the 2019-20 school year, when 92,112 kids attended its schools.

Denver County’s birth rate has also continued to dip. In 2007, 75 babies were born per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, compared with 44 per 1,000 women in that age group in 2022. The number of births decreased to 8,140 in 2022 from 10,084 in 2007.

District and board leaders have hemmed and hawed over school consolidations in recent years because of enrollment being down. The board, however, did approve closure of two elementary schools and one middle school in 2023.

More are likely on the way after the board in June adopted a policy that directs Superintendent Alex Marrero on how to go about proposing school closures.

Smith told The Sun that the district is contemplating new consolidation conversations and said leaders must develop a possible timeline and better understand how potential closures would affect communities.

“No one wants to shut down a school,” Smith said. “We are faced with the reality of declining enrollment that may present us with the choices that will include consolidation and closure of schools.”

Douglas County School District is also eyeing potential school consolidations, likely beginning in 2026 in Highlands Ranch. Like some of its peer districts, Douglas County School District is hammered by both declining births and an aging population, Superintendent Erin Kane said.

District enrollment has wobbled up and down in the past few years but was significantly down last year to 61,964 students in preschool through high school from its decade high of 67,597 students during the 2017-18 school year, according to state data.

Douglas County’s birth rate has also plunged from 72 babies born per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2007 to 54 babies born per 1,000 women in that age bracket in 2022. The number of births fell to 3,849 in 2022 from 4,205 in 2007.

And yet pockets of the district are experiencing growth, including Sterling Ranch west of Highlands Ranch. The community doesn’t have its own elementary school, even as it will encompass about 18,000 homes, Kane said.

Douglas County School District’s board later this month plans to vote on running a bond election in November, in part to fund a few new community schools where they’re needed.

“We want to make sure we’re investing in all of our schools, including in our schools where we do need to do consolidations,” Kane said. “Investing in those schools and opportunities for kids is important everywhere.”

A proposed ballot measure pushed by conservative political nonprofit Advance Colorado Action aims to protect the right to school choice in Colorado’s constitution, cementing parents’ ability to send their children to any public school, charter school, private school or homeschooling program they want. 

But some education advocates and policy experts see a hidden motive, saying Initiative 138 could lead to a statewide voucher program that uses public dollars to send children to private schools, including those with a religious affiliation.

“I think it’s a steppingstone,” Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center and a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, told The Colorado Sun. “If the initiative passed, it could be a central part of a larger campaign, political and legal, that could ultimately result in a voucher program in the state. But I think that strategy looks to a five- to 10-year window or even longer and would have to have a lot of dominoes fall.”

Proponents say the measure simply strengthens school choice protections already found in state law — and they deny that the proposal is a school voucher play in disguise.

The proposed ballot measure is the latest salvo in a long political fight over what role school choice should play in Colorado’s education system and the degree of accountability and transparency charter schools in particular must uphold. Charter schools have been a regular subject of contention at the state Capitol, where lawmakers have repeatedly jousted over how tightly the state should regulate them, with charter school advocates calling state regulations an obstacle to innovation in the classroom.

Critics of charter schools say they take too much funding from traditional public schools, without being required to meet the same level of quality. 

Last year, a bill introduced by a group of liberal Colorado Democrats sought to impose sweeping reforms on charter schools in the interest of making them more transparent and accountable. That legislation, which charter school advocates called “a blatant attack on charter schools and charter school families,” failed.

Previous attempts to launch a voucher program in Colorado have likewise failed. The few school voucher programs that did manage to move forward were legally challenged and ultimately dissolved, including a school voucher law rejected by a Denver judge in 2003 on the grounds that it violated local control provisions in the state Constitution.

Debates over funneling public dollars to religious schools — both private and charter schools — have also swirled in other states in recent years. The Oklahoma Supreme Court in June struck down a school poised to become the country’s first publicly funded religious charter school. Another effort to benefit private religious schools with public funding through a tuition assistance program in Maine prevailed in 2022. 

Proponents say Initiative 138 is needed to protect school choice from repeated attacks

Initiative 138 in Colorado would add another layer of protection beyond state law by reinforcing in the state Constitution the right for parents to choose whether to enroll their child in a public school, charter school, private school; homeschool them; or send them to another district through open enrollment. The measure has not made it onto the November ballot yet. Sponsors submitted about 201,000 signatures in support of the initiative to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office last week.

State elections officials have until Aug. 22 to review signatures. The ballot measure would need 55% of voters to approve it in order to pass.

Michael Fields, president of Advance Colorado Action, said the proposed ballot measure is necessary because Colorado school choice laws are statutory, meaning “they could change at any point.”

“We’ve had broad bipartisan support of school choice for decades here, but I feel like that might not be the case in the future,” he said. “We’ve seen legislation this year going after charter schools. I think that will continue in the future from some legislators.”

Fields, who previously taught at a charter school and whose children attend district neighborhood schools in Douglas County, said Initiative 138 is not paving the way for a voucher program in Colorado, particularly since there is no cost associated with the measure.

“This is strictly locking in what we already have in place,” said Fields, who describes himself as a proponent of Education Savings Account programs, which give families government subsidies to fund tuition at private schools as well as pursue private tutoring, online classes and extracurricular activities.

“I just think that parents should be in charge of education,” he said. “I think it’s easier when they have resources to send their kid to the school that they want to. I believe that there’s good fits for kids in all different types of education. I just think that the options should be available for everybody.”

Fields said his organization’s lawyer submitted multiple possible measures to the Title Board to see which ones the Title Board would accept, which ones would abide by the mandate to address a single subject in a ballot measure and what the formal language of different versions would look like.

One submitted measure included text reflecting a voucher program: “Parents and guardians have the right to direct per-pupil funding for their child to the schooling of their choice.”

That language is not part of Initiative 138.

House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, a Colorado Springs Republican, wrote in an email that preserving the right to school choice in the state Constitution “would provide essential protection against ongoing attacks on this fundamental principle.”

The measure “is a vital step in securing the ability of parents to make the best educational decisions for their children, regardless of future political pressures,” Pugliese wrote.The Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, opposes the potential ballot measure, according to President Kevin Vick.

Vick labeled the proposal “extremely troubling” with concerns that it would take a lot of taxpayer funding needed by Colorado students “and put it in the hands of a small number of private school people who could already afford to pay tuition themselves.”

He doesn’t see a need for the measure because Colorado already has “a pretty robust” school choice system.

Fighting “one battle at a time”

The possible ballot measure could open up “new policy ground” in establishing “a legal right to access private schools” in the state Constitution, said Van Schoales, a former teacher and school leader who is also senior policy director of the Keystone Policy Center. 

Schoales did not speak on behalf of the Keystone Policy Center. The nonprofit does not take a stance on political issues.

A new legal right to access private schools could then enable legislation or a court case pursuing the start of a voucher program, Schoales said.

Welner, of the National Education Policy Center, said many more political puzzle pieces would have to fall into place to actually introduce a voucher program in the state. If Republicans win federal elections, gaining control of the presidency and Congress, and then open up federal funding or incentives for states to adopt voucher policies, that could create more momentum for voucher programs. If Republicans also gained more power in Colorado and voters elected a conservative governor, that could usher the state close to adopting its own voucher program, Welner said.

Those circumstances could set the stage for a voucher policy, Welner said. But right now, Colorado parents’ appetite for public schools presents another hurdle to a voucher program, he added.

“Colorado families overwhelmingly like their public schools so voucher supporters face a steep uphill battle,” Welner said. “They have to fight one battle at a time, and this is one battle or one steppingstone.”

Welner said it would be hard to persuade voters or politicians that Colorado should join the ranks of states that provide taxpayer subsidies for private schools or homeschooling.

Other education advocates and organizations are waiting to take a position on Initiative 138 until it becomes an official ballot measure, including the Colorado League of Charter Schools. President Dan Schaller said if it becomes an official ballot measure, the nonprofit organization will conduct a deeper legal analysis of its potential impacts to present to its board.

Beyond the political battle over voucher programs is the question of whether they lead to better academic outcomes for students. Schoales said there is no strong evidence to suggest that kids in voucher programs perform significantly better or worse than other students. 

Giving public funding to private schools, including religious schools, “is not a strategy to improve outcomes,” Schoales said. “It’s just a different way of delivering education.”

The Colorado Department of Early Childhood has redesigned the way it places preschoolers with disabilities into classrooms that can meet their needs in response to increased scrutiny and a lawsuit filed last year by school districts and education advocacy organizations.

The change to the state’s expanded preschool program — known as universal preschool — follows school districts’ struggles to ensure students with special needs landed in preschool settings that could accommodate the kinds of extra support owed to them under state and federal law. 

School districts say they experienced major hiccups in the program’s inaugural year, when the state’s student enrollment system, called BridgeCare, failed to match all students with disabilities with programs that could give them the targeted instruction and additional help they required.

That made districts vulnerable to violating state and federal rules that guarantee special education services to children with disabilities, district administrators said, and was one of the major reasons they brought state education officials and Gov. Jared Polis to court. Their lawsuit, however, was dismissed earlier this month after a Denver district court judge ruled the plaintiffs did not have legal grounds to sue, Chalkbeat Colorado first reported.

But their concerns have stayed with the Department of Early Childhood, which revised the way it pairs kids with disabilities and preschool programs so that the enrollment process is “as seamless as possible for both families and districts,” Universal Preschool Director Dawn Odean told The Colorado Sun.

The new preschool program offers up to 15 hours of free preschool per week for kids in the year before they enter kindergarten and additional subsidized hours for students with disabilities who come from low-income households. 

In the first year of the program, all families enrolled in universal preschool the same way, through BridgeCare. A family with a student with a disability would apply in the system and note that their child had an individualized education program plan, or IEP, which outlines the services, resources and specialized instruction their student needs. 

Oftentimes, families and school districts had already decided which preschool program was best for their student. But the application process prompted them to select a preschool location, which “created some unknowns and was disruptive,” Odean said.

The department’s inability to directly match preschoolers with IEPs to appropriate programs was a symptom of a new enrollment system that was created within “a very compressed timeline,” Odean said.

That enrollment program also wasn’t accessible to school districts and providers to jump in and manually change where a student was placed for preschool, which became a point of frustration for districts and providers.

Odean said the Department of Early Childhood limited how much control it granted districts and providers in BridgeCare because of uncertainty about “what could occur if they had access to different parts of the system and what the ripple effects might be.”

“It’s part of, I think, the growing pains of a new program and our unknown enrollment processes starting from scratch and then also building a new system at the same time and being thoughtful about what is actually doable,” she said.

Now, the Department of Early Childhood has developed a separate enrollment process for preschoolers with disabilities in BridgeCare so that a student is directly assigned to a program that aligns with their IEP. When a family of a student with special needs fills out the application, they indicate that their child has an IEP. The application is then transferred to the district that advised the family on the IEP so the district can verify the placement.

So far, 3,188 students with an IEP are set to participate in universal preschool this school year, according to figures provided by the Department of Early Childhood.

The new process is “a step in the right direction,” but has not solved every problem, said Mat Aubuchon, executive director of learning services at Westminster Public Schools.

His district has received a spreadsheet from the state department outlining kids with IEPs who need to be placed at specific preschool sites, according to information from BridgeCare. District staff are now working to verify each student on that list with their own class rosters. 

Questions have emerged throughout that process, particularly around families who have left the district and are enrolling their student in a different preschool program. That leaves Aubuchon’s team wondering where students of those families are.

Districts encountered that kind of challenge even before the state introduced universal preschool, Aubuchon said, but now they have another state agency they must communicate with, which adds to their work.

Will the new enrollment process put all kids with IEPs in the right classrooms? It’s a waiting game.

In 27J Schools in Brighton, preschool staff have found more ease in connecting students with IEPs with the proper programs.

“This new process has given districts the ability to edit a student’s profile and put them in the correct school on the backend rather than having to go through the state to try to get that done,” said Bethany Ager, the district’s early childhood education director.

There’s one caveat: Districts can only make changes to students’ applications while they’re still in the process of enrolling in universal preschool. Once a family accepts a match for a spot at a specific preschool and is officially enrolled, a district can no longer adjust their application.

Still, Ager is optimistic that the new approach to enrolling preschoolers with disabilities will “cut the errors down drastically.”

“We have some power in a limited capacity with a small group of kids,” she said. “There’s been great strides in the right direction.”

Aubuchon said he sees the state department actively trying to improve the enrollment system. But he also sees the need for a more efficient system — one that does not require so much back-and-forth communication among parents, districts and providers, and the state to secure the right placement for students.

“We’ve been enrolling kids in preschool for 30 years,” he said. “We know how to do it. I know (the Department of Early Childhood) is an added wrinkle, but we still should be able to do the majority of enrollment at the local level.”

The new enrollment process will create an extra workload for districts and providers, Odean acknowledged, but she anticipates the process will ease the administrative burden in the long run.

“It’s still change, and so with any change we certainly recognize that that equals work,” Odean said. “I definitely don’t want to diminish that there is work with any new change, and this is a big one. This is a big change for the whole state. And so I want to be very respectful that people are putting more thinking and more effort into it, but I think we’re all aligned (with) the end in mind for it being easier over time.”

Whether the new enrollment system will prevent all preschoolers with disabilities from stepping into classrooms that can’t accommodate them remains to be seen until the first week of school.

“On paper, it’s looking like we’re going to get most of them,” Aubuchon said, “but I want to see them when they actually land in the door.”

A group of five Colorado school districts has turned to the courts to fight a new policy that would allow substitute teachers they hire through outside staffing agencies to benefit from the state’s retirement system.

The policy, school districts say, could cost them millions of dollars worth of retirement contributions for substitutes and make the already difficult task of finding enough subs to cover classrooms even harder.

The school districts joined two staffing agencies, Kelly Services and ESS West, LLC, in filing a lawsuit against the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association on June 27 in Denver District Court.

The lawsuit raises questions about the way that subs should be classified as employees and the kind of retirement benefits they are eligible to receive. Some Colorado school districts, including plaintiff Aurora Public Schools, have started working with outside staffing agencies in recent years to create a reliable pool of subs at a time it has become increasingly difficult for many districts to hire and retain a stable group of subs. The state has recognized those subs as employees of the staffing agencies that contract with districts, meaning the subs and agencies pay into social security. 

PERA, however, wants all school employees who are critical to schools to be PERA members, including subs who come from outside staffing agencies. The retirement system is pushing to classify those subs as employees of school districts rather than as employees of outside staffing agencies. The new policy would force school districts to make retirement contributions to PERA for those subs.

“The Districts have not budgeted for such contributions, nor do they have the resources to effectively fill substitute positions without staffing agencies,” the lawsuit states.

Other district plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Adams County School District 14, Englewood Schools, Harrison School District 2 and Littleton Public Schools.

PERA spokesperson Patrick von Keyserling declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.

PERA on June 30, 2023, made all school districts aware that it would begin regarding subs as PERA members and that districts would have to begin making retirement contributions to PERA for subs starting July 1, 2024, according to the lawsuit.

Last fall, a number of school district officials complained about the policy change to the state legislature’s Pension Review Subcommittee. Committee members, however, declined to authorize a bill draft reversing the policy, saying they were worried it would lead to school districts turning to contract labor to avoid paying the benefits owed to public employees.

The lawsuit noted that the retirement association originally agreed to respect Aurora Public Schools’ decision to name subs as employees of Kelly Services after the district shifted from hiring its own subs to contracting with the staffing agency for the 2016-17 school year.

“However, PERA reserves the right to challenge APS’ classification of the substitute employees in the future,” the lawsuit states, citing a 2016 letter written to the district from Gregory Smith, PERA’s executive director at the time.

With help from Kelly Services, Aurora Public Schools now relies on about 700 subs per year to step into classrooms temporarily or to fill long-term vacancies, according to the lawsuit.

Working with an outside company has helped the district dramatically boost its success placing subs in classrooms, which can be particularly tough given how much school districts compete with each other and with other industries for hourly workers, Brett Johnson, chief financial officer for Aurora Public Schools, told The Colorado Sun.

The temporary and “transient” nature of subs further complicates districts’ ability to staff classrooms, Johnson said, as some subs want to work only a couple days a week or every other week while others fill in every day.

Should the new policy be adopted, Aurora Public Schools would likely have to return to directly hiring subs and appoint a full-time staff member for that job, which would set in motion a series of financial and operational hardships, he said.

“A concern on our end is that in the likely event that our fill rates plummet again, that puts a lot of strain on school operations and ultimately kids,” said Johnson, who previously served on PERA’s board. “We may have to just decide to scrap third-party providers altogether and be upfront with our community and our teachers and our kids that teachers are going to have to do more and kids are going to have to expect disruptions in their learning.”

That might mean schools must combine classrooms for a day or ask teachers to skip their planning periods in order to cover a class, adding more demands to their already full workloads, Johnson said.

He estimates that making retirement contributions to PERA for subs could cost Aurora Public Schools between $3 million and $5 million in a single school year.

“We prefer to have a balanced budget obviously, so if there’s all of a sudden kind of a new price tag of several million dollars, we would have to find a reduction of several million dollars somewhere else,” Johnson said. 

The district of about 5,500 full-time employees has tried to insulate classrooms from feeling the effects of cuts, he said. Last year, for instance, Aurora Public Schools slashed administration by $6.5 million.

“But at some point, cuts are deep enough they will eventually affect school operations,” Johnson said.

Questions around PERA’s authority and lack of transparency

Districts suing PERA are also raising concerns over what they see as a lack of transparency from the state retirement system in rolling out its new policy that categorizes subs as district employees and PERA members. 

PERA notified school districts of its new policy in a June 30, 2023, letter.

According to the lawsuit, a letter sent to Aurora Public Schools stated that, “It is PERA’s position that regardless of whether APS pays its substitute employees directly, or utilizes a third party to place and/or pay substitute employees, these substitute employees are required to be PERA members.”

The retirement system emailed school districts in early October to double down on its stance that by the 2024-25 school year, all subs would be considered PERA members even if they were hired by a third-party company, the lawsuit states.

School districts wonder why PERA suddenly announced the change in a letter without giving notice or allowing public comment on the new rule.

The plaintiffs say PERA’s policy is “an egregious overreach” of the power the state gives the retirement system to designate members. They argue PERA has the authority to decide whether certain public employees are PERA members, but cannot decide that private employees are members.

“PERA is overstepping,” Harrison School District 2 Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun. “These substitutes are not employees of the school district. They are privately employed by a staffing agency and should not be paying into PERA.”

The Colorado Springs school district contracts with ESS West, LLC, to put between 120 and 150 subs in front of students in a school year, Birhanzel said.

Like Aurora Public Schools, Harrison School District 2 has seen significant improvement in deploying subs to classes using a third-party company. The new policy would also force Harrison School District 2 to once again handle the hiring process of subs, which Birhanzel worries would leave the district scrambling to cover all classrooms. 

Johnson, of Aurora Public Schools, also questions why PERA is fixated on converting subs hired through outside companies to PERA members when other government agencies work with employees hired by private vendors, such as trash collectors and construction workers.

“The idea that PERA would suggest that we need to think first about PERA membership, second about our kids and our operations of our schools just felt a little odd,” he said. “It felt like we were being oddly singled out.”

During a hearing this month, the court ruled districts have 45 days from July 1 until they must begin making PERA contributions for subs employed through third-party companies. Within that time, they can also explore potential solutions without involving the legal system.

Johnson anticipates that this legal battle could be the start of a broader fight over how other school district employees hired through vendors are classified, such as staff helping students with special needs who have an individualized education program to accommodate their learning needs. He said that PERA has been trying to understand the breadth of positions school districts fill using outside staffing agencies, including through a survey issued last fall.

“If we can’t have the ability to place positions that no one applies for through a third-party basis, we are breaking federal law or not honoring IEP contracts with kids,” Johnson said, “and so we’re highly concerned about the direction that this might go.”

Colorado Sun staff writer Brian Eason contributed to this report. 

COLORADO SPRINGS — The packed gym is nearly silent as dozens of conversations erupt around tables decorated in the school colors of red and black. 

Former students, their graduation years spanning decades, have returned to the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind, sipping coffee and catching up in sign language as they await the welcoming speeches. 

The program is running behind on the first day of this alumni weekend, and of course there are well-worn jokes about “deaf standard time.” But then Tera Spangler takes the stage, and the side conversations stop. 

In the 150-year history of the school, which opened with just seven students in 1874 when Colorado was still a territory, Spangler is the first superintendent who is deaf. 

Spangler, who grew up in a small Iowa farming community and didn’t learn sign language until college, began working at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind in 2006 as a teacher and later became a principal. She became superintendent this year. 

In her hometown of about 400 people, Spangler was the only deaf child in her school in the 1980s and 1990s. She wore hearing aids and a clunky device around her neck that was connected to the teacher’s microphone. A fellow student shared her notes, and Spangler learned to read lips. She studied her textbooks in advance so she could try to keep up in class, though she nearly always felt behind.

“I feel fortunate because it was a small school in a small town, and everyone knew my story,” Spangler said in an interview with The Colorado Sun, using an American Sign Language interpreter. “They really tried to help and support me, and it was nice, but at the same time, I felt like I could really never just be fully independent on my own.”

The deaf school in Iowa was two hours away, and, back then, Spangler wouldn’t consider leaving home. 

Now, Spangler is the leader of the kind of school community she never had growing up, a place where students connect and communicate, where they don’t feel like they are different from their peers and don’t struggle to keep up.

“It’s hard to explain that feeling,” she said. “I’m proud. I’m honored.” 

“Give those folks who are deaf and blind a chance”

Alumni had an easier time putting into words how much Spangler’s rise to superintendent means to the community.

“If you look at the history of the deaf community, and deaf schools, hearing people would make decisions on behalf of blind/deaf students,” Austin Balaich, who graduated in 2006, said through an interpreter. “It’s positions of power, positions of control, and not really willing to let that go and give those folks who are blind and deaf a chance. That lingers and has been a part of our history for a very long time.

“Now with times changing, it’s really nice to see Tera in this role. She’s not exactly the same as me in terms of background, but she’s an ASL user, and she’s deaf like I am, so in terms of a role model to look up to, she sets that example for all of the students on this campus to see, ‘I can be like her.’” 

Balaich, who is creative director at the caption phone service company Sorenson Communications, grew up in Colorado Springs, where his father was stationed in the U.S. Air Force. The deaf school, he said, was where he felt most at home, even though his parents learned sign language to communicate with him. 

“This place felt like a place where I could become truly myself,” he said. “I didn’t have to work extra hard to understand things. I didn’t have to try to figure out what people were saying. My parents sure did try. At home, I had natural, strong connections. But this place, where everything was natural and just fell into place, it just felt good.”

Balaich, who was among those touring a new history museum on campus and swapping stories during the recent alumni event, said his favorite memory from his high school days was eating ice cream with his buddies after they won a 2004 national academic bowl. After returning to Colorado Springs, the group went to Josh and John’s Ice Cream, where the scoops were dumped right into the trophy. 

Tim Elstad, class of 1978 and an alumni with legendary status because he was the quarterback of the only football team in school history to win a state championship, said a deaf superintendent has been a long time coming. Historically, careers for the deaf were limited, with many deaf people working as teachers in deaf schools or as newspaper printers, a trade taught at deaf schools beginning in the 1800s. 

“There was sort of a pervasive attitude that a deaf person wasn’t ready for that kind of a position,” Elstad said. “Time passes. Deaf people become successful in careers and midlevel management. Now the time is right and that’s why there is a deaf superintendent.”

From now on, the Colorado School for the Deaf should select superintendents who are deaf, he said. “We hope it will continue,” Elstad said, also through an interpreter. “That precedent will be set and there will be other deaf superintendents that follow. I would like for the public to see how a deaf person can run a school. With the aid of interpreters, it can be done.”

Elstad came from a deaf family, though two of his brothers were not deaf. They attended regular public school, while he was sent from home in Denver to attend the deaf school every Sunday through Friday. At first, he couldn’t stand it. “Then I started connecting with friends and classmates,” who eventually became like brothers and sisters. He learned sign language, lived in the dorms and went home only on weekends. In 1977, Elstad led the football team to the state championship. The red banner still waves in the school gym.

The school meant so much to Elstad that he worked there as an adult, starting as a dorm supervisor and retiring in 2014 as dean of students. Now, he volunteers in the museum, where there is a photo of the championship football team along with decades of other memorabilia, including a 1960s teletypewriter that sent typed messages over telephone lines.

School started by a father of three deaf children in 1874

The public school is a six-block campus of stone buildings on a grassy hill in a residential area near downtown Colorado Springs. The school is free for deaf and blind students from across Colorado, and also enrolls students from Wyoming, which has no deaf school. 

Most of the students are home for the summer, but a few enrolled in a summer program. On a recent hot day, a handful of elementary students who are blind carried canes to an outdoor playground, where some crawled around on the equipment and two boys wrestled on a bench. 

In a classroom, a handful of deaf students practiced multiplication, using bingo cards that they marked off with colorful plastic bears. 

The school has separate classes for students who are deaf and students who are blind. A handful of children are both and use tactile sign language, which involves placing hands next to each other so one person can feel what the other person is signing.

About 40% of students live locally, including many whose parents moved to Colorado Springs just to live near the deaf school, while 60% are from other parts of the state and stay on campus in dorms. The on-campus children, from kindergarten through 12th grade, eat breakfast each morning together in the dining hall, then head off to their classrooms. After classes, the campus is busy with sports practices and club meetings.

About 180 students are on campus each day, but the school serves more than 700 students statewide through its programs that include sign language instruction, orientation and mobility classes for children who are blind, and a reading program that sends an instructor who is deaf to homes of preschool and elementary students. 

The school, originally called The Colorado Institute for the Education of Mutes, was established in 1874 with $5,000 from the state legislature. Three of the first seven students were the children of Jonathan Kennedy, the school’s founder. Kennedy had worked in a deaf school in Olathe, Kansas, before moving to Colorado and persuading the territorial governor and legislature to fund a school for deaf children on 10 acres of donated land. 

Today, the school’s annual budget is more than $17 million.

Visual language “is the foundation”

As a teacher and now the superintendent, Spangler said she is often struck by how different the deaf school is from how she grew up. 

She lost her hearing at age 10, after she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Doctors speculated the hearing loss was due to the high fevers or possibly the chemotherapy and other treatment that helped her survive. Within about two years, just as Spangler was starting middle school, she was profoundly deaf. 

Though she was surrounded by people who wanted to help, she still sometimes felt lost. 

Spangler could understand more if she used the FM system around her neck, but she tried not to wear it. “I hated it because it made me different,” she said. “It was this box thing that I had to wear around my neck and it had wires up to my ears. And I was in middle school. Middle school is hard enough without having to stand out like that.”

Looking back, she wishes she had attended the deaf school in Iowa. 

“I had good friendships, but at the same time, I didn’t necessarily realize how much information that I wasn’t able to catch, or was happening around me or that I didn’t understand,” Spangler said. “I did a lot of trying to fill in those gaps. Maybe I caught three or four words out of many sentences in a conversation. I felt like my brain was always operating overtime trying to figure out what I was missing.”

Spangler, 47, attended a small university in Iowa called Morningside, starting out as an education major. But in her junior year, she began struggling to keep up as a student teacher in a bustling classroom filled with hearing children. So she transferred to the University of Nebraska, which has a deaf education program. Spangler finally learned sign language. And after graduating, she moved to Colorado and worked with deaf students who were mainstreamed in traditional schools. 

She began working at the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind 17 years ago, and while being immersed in deaf culture, she said she has become “a totally different person.”

“I’ve had the ability to have access to language and interactions, and the exposure to visual language that I didn’t always have,” she said. “The importance of language, and having access to a visual language, it’s so huge and really critical. Kids need to be able to have that strong foundation of language, and the only way to develop that language is to interact with people who are the same as you, and who use the same language. That also leads to developing deaf identity, interacting with peers, having adult role models, all of those things.” 

Technology for deaf children has far surpassed the conspicuous box Spangler had to wear around her neck in a mainstream classroom. Now, kids have cochlear implants and hearing aids that are connected via bluetooth to their phones. 

Deaf students who are mainstreamed in traditional classrooms today typically have support from a teacher of the deaf from 30 minutes to two hours per week, Spangler said. “There may or may not be other deaf students in the program,” she said. “Sometimes they may have interpreters in the classrooms. It just depends.” 

But in a deaf school, students have instruction all day with teachers for the deaf and are taught in American Sign Language. “They have peers all around them who are the same,” Spangler said. “They have adults, some of whom are deaf, so they have role models to look up to that are the same as them. They’re able to socialize and interact with their peers and teachers, without needing interpreters, without trying to figure out what’s missing and what has fallen through the gaps.” 

Most importantly, Spangler said, students at the deaf school develop a sense of community and belonging within the deaf culture. 

“They develop their deaf identities at a place like this,” she said. “They don’t necessarily feel different than their peers. They feel a similarity, and a bonding that happens.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

Students who live in a household that makes $90,000 or less a year are now eligible for a Colorado tax credit that will help pay for the first two years of college.

State leaders say accessing that credit for the first time should be an easy process for students attending school this year. Colleges or universities will track which students are eligible and then notify them. But students will still have to file their own tax return to get the money.

The new credit works as a rebate and was approved during this year’s legislative session. The program received wide support from lawmakers, in part because it will cost the state less than paying for tuition and fees upfront.

Many Colorado public universities and colleges have their own programs to pay upfront costs for students, often called Promise programs. Each school’s program has its own eligibility rules. There is no statewide program.

Leaders say the new tax credit will help even more students than the existing school-specific Promise programs. This is especially important, as in-state students face some of the highest tuition rates and fees in the country.

“Just under 50% of our high school graduates are going to postsecondary in Colorado,” said Angie Paccione, Colorado Department of Higher Education executive director. “We want to change that, and we’re hoping that this creates an incentive and some motivation for students to say, ‘It is truly affordable. I could actually do this.’”

Read more at chalkbeat.org.

When Laura Wally learned that her paycheck would not be landing in her bank account in mid-June as scheduled, she considered selling plasma and applying for government assistance for food. Since then, she has depleted her emergency fund, borrowed money from family members and picked up a side gig delivering groceries through Instacart.

All while teaching chemistry at Front Range Community College’s Larimer Campus in Fort Collins this summer.

Wally is one of 105 instructors at the community college whose paychecks have shown up late this summer, stretching their already tight budgets. She has since received the amount she was owed, plus a $500 stipend, and Wally’s colleagues had all received their missing checks by Friday, college administrators say. Some instructors experienced similar paycheck delays during the fall and spring semesters.

“It really makes me honestly wonder if I want to keep working for Front Range,” said Wally, who has taught at the college since 2015. “I love my students and chemistry is a hard subject and I want to be able to help them with that, but how long do you struggle as a professional teacher with a graduate degree?”

The payroll lag falls as many adjunct instructors across Colorado campuses have in recent years called more attention to their wages — citing chronic struggles of barely scraping by — and urged lawmakers to grant them the right to unionize and negotiate for wages, benefits and working conditions. During the 2022 legislative session, a highly controversial bill that became law, Senate Bill 230, cleared the way for collective bargaining among county employees but did not extend the same organizing powers to higher education employees.

John Kinsey, faculty senate president at Front Range Community College’s Westminster campus, describes the pattern of payroll delays as a string of crises that have frustrated instructors, who he said have “the least stability and the least support.”

“It seems like we’ve picked up speed every time we’ve hit this roadblock, but then the question is, why do we keep hitting this roadblock?” said Kinsey, who has taught philosophy at the Westminster campus but is not currently teaching. “I’d say that the college is in a state of instability, and the fact that we keep hitting this roadblock is the strongest evidence of that instability.”

Front Range Community College administrators say the pay delay stems from a combination of factors, including staff turnover, human error and the race to train new employees on processes such as payroll.

The college — which has campuses in Longmont, Westminster and Fort Collins along with an online program — typically begins the process for paying instructors several weeks before the beginning of each semester, according to Rebecca Woulfe, provost and vice president of academic affairs of the community college.

The electronic system that is the hub for faculty and instructor contracts had a default date set up marking when instructors would be paid. The default pay date for the summer semester, which started May 28, was June 28. The college aimed to pay its instructors sooner, however, and the only way to do that was to manually change the pay date, Woulfe said.

The institution did not update the default pay date for every instructor, which is what led to later paychecks.

Staff turnover — which Woulfe said has recently been at about 15% — has contributed to the challenge to get checks ready for staff, particularly as new employees have had to undergo training.

“It’s difficult to take time to get in depth as much as you’d like to (with training) and practice as much as you’d like to before folks go live,” said Matthew Jamison, the college’s associate vice president for academic success.

The school previously stumbled with paying two instructors on time during the spring semester and 12 in the fall. Part of the spring hiccup stemmed from a major restructuring to consolidate the three campuses instead of each continuing to operate independently, according to Woulfe.

The college doled out $500 stipends to all instructors waiting for their paychecks this summer in hopes of restoring faith in the institution and offered financial assistance through its nonprofit foundation, Woulfe said. The college is also updating its training materials, holding meetings with staff and re-evaluating its processes for contracts to prevent another payment slowdown for instructors.

“We recognize that we couldn’t run this institution without them,” she said. “They are critical to the success of this institution, to our student success, to the work that we do.”

The Front Range Community College Chapter of American Association of University Professors released a statement last week criticizing the college for continuing to fail to pay instructors on time.

“Delaying instructors’ paychecks places an undue burden on employees who are already struggling to make ends meet,” the statement noted, calling the institution’s errors “unacceptable when employees live on an economic razor’s edge.”

Weighing whether to stay for the students or leave for more money

Kinsey, the faculty senate president, said he is confident that the delay is not malicious but is caused by “overlapping bureaucratic miscommunication.” No matter the cause, he added, the delays are further straining instructors and threatening their financial security.

“From an instructor’s perspective, I would feel that my value wasn’t highly prioritized if I had to constantly struggle to even get the poverty wages that I was getting offered,” Kinsey said.

Wally, the chemistry professor, said she has missed payments to creditors and made late payments this summer because of the additional time it took to be fully compensated. Her pay has fluctuated throughout her time at Front Range Community College due to extra jobs she has picked up tutoring and working in the college’s writing center. This summer, she has been earning just over $600 a week while teaching fewer hours than she anticipated.

Wally decided to apply for unemployment benefits at the start of the summer because she was receiving less compensation since she was teaching fewer hours, but she has not received any unemployment funds. Meanwhile, she and her partner took on a roommate in their Longmont home in September after her partner lost his job. 

“If you aren’t making a living wage in northern Colorado, there’s no way you can save any money,” Wally said. “And so you’re living paycheck to paycheck. And if your paychecks, any amount is late, then you’re not buying groceries, you’re not paying rent or making a mortgage payment. You’re in trouble.”

Her students have kept her teaching at the community college year after year and, as she contemplates making a career change, she worries about whether they’ll receive the support they need if they have a revolving door of teachers. Throughout her time in the classroom, she has written letters of recommendation for students — including one for a recent student who secured $25,000 per year to attend a four-year university.

“If we’re truly a transient population of instructors,” Wally said, “that (support) doesn’t exist for those students and then (Front Range) students are disadvantaged.”