Tag Archives: Mike Kopp

A week ago I told you what a big school choice week it was going to be at the Colorado State Capitol. And it was. Ed News Colorado has a short video recap of Thursday’s charter school rally. It was left to one of my friends at the Education Policy Center – namely Marya DeGrow – to cover Friday’s Homeschool Day at the Capitol. Several legislators showed up to show their support and appreciation. Marya handed out hundreds of flyers about her new, exciting paper Colorado’s Homeschool Law Turns Twenty (PDF). And she let me be an honorary homeschooler for a day! Maybe you don’t have time to sit down and read the whole paper, or maybe you need to be persuaded why the paper is so important.

Nancy Mitchell of the Rocky Mountain News has reported that Denver Public Schools (DPS) plans to cut the budget by 2 percent. To its credit, DPS already has made some moves toward financial transparency, but not to the degree that Senate Bill 57 (PDF) would have DPS and every other Colorado school district and charter school do. At least the original version of SB 57. I told you last week how many citizens came to testify in favor of school districts adopting the relatively simple and cost-effective approach of posting expenditures online in a user-friendly, searchable format. But a majority of legislators on the Senate Education Committee hijacked the bill and made it merely a suggestion – a worthless way of pretending to support transparency. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, February 3) SB 57 will be debated before the entire state senate, and we’ll get to see whether our legislators support real transparency or the phony-baloney kind. Over at YourHub, Lakewood citizen and transparency supporter Natalie Menten says the debate provides an opportunity to send a strong message to state lawmakers: