Tag Archives: meeting

What to do if you’re a school district, you have a fast-growing neighborhood, and not enough tax revenue to meet the promises to build schools for the elementary and middle school kids in the area? Well, Denver Public Schools is confronting that problem right now in regards to the Stapleton neighborhood. A meeting with community members “to share a list of options about what to do about overcrowding” is scheduled for next Tuesday. While it’s hard to argue that this situation isn’t a sticky one, my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow nevertheless has written a new piece for Education News Colorado (also re-posted at the Independence Institute website), proposing some suggestions to help the district and citizens think outside the box a bit. Here’s the flavor:

The negotiations surrounding the teachers union contract have broken down. Now the situation appears to be getting quite tense in the Boulder Valley School District. Last week I expressed my hopes that the teachers choose to act like professionals, rather than rehash last spring’s “sick out” or even worse. This Daily Camera report (complete with video) from Tuesday’s Boulder Valley School Board meeting indicates the growing possibility that my hopes may not be met: Union officials said they don’t know what value fact-finding would provide, and they’d rather go through the budget to find the money needed to move toward professional pay. Regardless of how negotiations move forward, King has said schools won’t be interrupted. The teachers’ union has said taking some sort of “job action,” such as a strike, is a possibility but they hope to avoid it. [emphases added] Four items to consider:

Guess what? It’s that time again — time to highlight some of the exciting new educational options opening up for Colorado students and parents this fall. Last year we were able to give readers a glimpse at 10 new schools. My goal is to do at least that many for 2009. First on the list, we start at the far end of the state in Durango for the opening of a new public charter school for 9th graders. Authorized by the Charter School Institute, Animas High School. Animas, which is intentionally modeled after San Diego’s innovative High Tech High, is slated to add grades each year so the first class will graduate in 2013.

That didn’t take long. The Rocky Mountain News is no more, but education reporter extraordinaire Nancy Mitchell is back. Hopefully the first of many, she has posted a lengthy piece on the proposed merger of the Denver Public Schools (DPS) and state PERA retirement systems. DPS officials are pushing the discussion forward, saying that the current set-up costs them funding that could be used in the classrooms: “We pay $685 more per pupil per year in pension and retiree costs than any of the other 177 school districts in Colorado,” [superintendent Tom] Boasberg said, “which comes out to $47 million more per year … “Translate that into teachers, that’s 700 or 800 teachers, that’s a reduction in our class size of 15 to 20 percent. Every class that has 30 students would be a class of 25 students.” Unfortunately, this article didn’t delve into the costly problem that University of Colorado at Denver professor Michael Mannino highlighted in his recent Independence Institute report Deferred Retirement Compensation for Career K-12 Employees: Understanding the Need for Reform (PDF). The average retired DPS career employee can expect to earn $627,570 more in benefits than his or her estimated retirement account balance. It’s a […]