Colorado districts want voters to OK billions in school bond measures

Inside Colorado’s aging school buildings, black mold forces educators to teach students outside during warm months. Sewer problems prevent toilets from being flushed and render water fountains and sinks unusable. Classrooms don’t have air conditioning, meaning temperatures can reach into the low 90s indoors.

And then there’s the growing paradox metro Denver school districts find themselves in: K-12 enrollment is declining statewide, but new housing developments are reshaping where children live, creating a need for new schools despite buildings closing elsewhere.

But all of this takes money to fix and build, which is why the leaders of Colorado school districts are hoping voters next month will greenlight billions of dollars in new spending.

“Our buildings are reaching the end of their useful life,” said Scott Smith, chief financial and operating officer for the Cherry Creek School District.

Statewide, at least 32 school districts are seeking nearly $7 billion via bonds, mill levies and other funding mechanisms so that they can repair their buildings, construct new schools, make safety upgrades and expand learning services. If the ballot measures are approved, more than half of Colorado’s 881,464 preschool-to-12th-grade students would benefit, according to the Colorado School Finance Project.

Three of the state’s largest districts — Denver Public Schools, Aurora Public Schools and Cherry Creek — are asking to borrow more money than they have ever done before, with each system placing bond proposals that approach or reach $1 billion on the Nov. 5 ballot.

The 2024 election is the first time any school district in the state has proposed a billion-dollar bond — at least in recent decades, according to data compiled by the Colorado Department of Education, which tracks bond elections going back to 1981. 

But while Coloradans historically like to give schools money, districts are facing unique challenges this election when it comes to passing their ballot measures.

Since the pandemic, mistrust in schools has grown among families and residents across the U.S., including at DPS and the Douglas County School District — both of which have faced heightened scrutiny from parents and community members in recent years and have bond proposals on this year’s ballot.

Coloradans are also increasingly worried about whether they can afford to live here, which, in turn, could potentially make tax measures on the ballot less appealing to voters this year. This is especially so in Denver, where there are other ballot measures that, if approved, would increase the city’s sales tax, said pollster Floyd Ciruli.

Furthermore, property values saw “unprecedented” increases in recent years, which, along with the 2020 repeal of the Gallagher Amendment, led to steep hikes in property tax bills for many Coloradans. The state legislature held two special sessions in the last year in an effort to curb rising property taxes.

“All government has suffered from a trust crisis,” Ciruli said. “Schools, I think, have the same problem.”

Why school districts are asking voters for money

Officials at school districts across metro Denver said they must turn to ballot measures, such as bond sales, to pay for capital and maintenance needs because the state doesn’t give them much money for facilities.

They said the amount of money they need to improve their facilities and build new schools is too large to come out of their general budgets, and doing so would reduce the amount of money that goes into the classroom and to pay teachers and other employees.

“If I were to cover our capital needs from the general fund, I would have to cut about 38% (of) student programming,” Douglas County Superintendent Erin Kane said of her district’s $490 million bond proposal. “There’s just no way. The numbers are too massive.”

If approved, the district’s bond would be used to build and expand schools in neighborhoods where enrollment is growing, as well as for building maintenance, replacing school buses, security improvements and expanding career and technical education programming.

The Douglas County School District used $20 million from its reserves to pay for emergency capital needs last school year, but that is not a long-term solution when the district’s needs will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Kane wrote in a letter to parents earlier this year.

Gov. Jared Polis and state lawmakers celebrated what they called the “fully funded era” for schools after the 2024 legislative session, during which they eliminated a maneuver that for years diverted billions of dollars from education to other priorities. But district officials say Colorado is still on the bottom rung nationally when it comes to education funding and that the funds allocated to public schools are nowhere near sufficient.

Despite the legislation passed by Colorado leaders earlier this year, district officials said Colorado funds public education at 1989 levels when considering inflation. And yet the expenses and expectations for schools are much different than they were 35 years ago, given changes in technology and safety concerns, Cherry Creek’s Smith said.

“We are forced by this legislature and our school finance act to go to our voters,” he said, adding that districts will be dependent on their communities to fund capital and maintenance needs until legislators and the governor “put their money where their mouth is.”

“Higher general distrust of public institutions”

But school districts’ attempt to raise money this election cycle comes as there is growing mistrust in educational institutions. Nationally, school districts and their boards have been at the center of culture wars, including how to teach about racism in schools, LGBTQ student rights, COVID-19 policies and book bans.

Two districts in metro Denver — DPS and Douglas County — have garnered headlines in recent years because of infighting among school board members and for violating the state’s open meetings law.

“There is higher general distrust of public institutions than in the past,” DPS spokesman Bill Good said.

In Douglas County, heated school board meetings drew national headlines during the pandemic. The board’s conservative majority fired former Superintendent Corey Wise in 2022 without cause, two years before his contract was set to expire. His ouster led to protests by district employees, a $830,000 settlement to Wise, and a judge to rule that the school board violated the Colorado Open Meetings Law.

When the district proposed a $450 million bond and $60 million mill levy override to voters later that year, both failed. Both measures were on the ballot again in 2023, and voters passed the $66 million mill levy override, but the bond failed again.

November marks the third time in three years the Douglas County School District will ask voters to approve its bond proposal.

“I did not have sufficient time to be able to educate enough of our community on how our funding works,” said Kane, who became superintendent in 2022. “We needed everything to settle down.”

Kane said her administration and the school board “have done so much work to build trust here in Douglas County,” adding that the district has engaged with the community and met with people who didn’t support the bond in the past.

“I actually think that in Douglas County our voters trust our district more than they have in a very long time,” she said.

Ciruli noted the changes in Douglas County. While the conservative electorate could make it difficult for a bond measure to pass, he said, “there is a lot of unity in terms of the board and the superintendent in favor of this and it certainly helps.”

“The student experience will suffer”

More recently, DPS has drawn its own criticism from city leaders, parents and others in the community.

The district’s school board has become known for infighting among members. But parents and community members have also criticized DPS administrators for their response to the 2023 shooting inside East High School and what they say are too-lenient discipline policies.

While three new members — John Youngquist, Kimberlee Sia and Marlene De La Rosa — were elected to the DPS board last year, critics don’t believe there’s been enough change in district leadership, including in the role of superintendent, Ciruli said.

Superintendent Alex Marrero acknowledged there’s mistrust in the district, but said it was a “vocal minority.”

“It would be catastrophic,” he said, if voters don’t pass DPS’s bond measure. “The student experience will suffer.”

DPS, the state’s largest district, is asking voters to approve a $975 million bond, which would fund maintenance, safety measures and other projects. The district plans to spend $240 million of that money to install air conditioning in 29 schools, which would complete a years-long effort to make sure the city’s public school buildings have cooling.

DPS parent Steve Katsaros said he plans to vote “no” on the district’s bond measure.

“I just don’t trust the administrators or the board,” said Katsaros, co-founder of the Parents Safety Advocacy Group, known as P-SAG.

“It’s a big chunk of money for people who have just been… shady,” he said.

But other groups, including Educate Denver, a coalition of former school board members and politicians that has criticized the district in the past for how it handled school closures, have endorsed the bond proposal, saying it will improve the educational experience for children.

If the bond passes, there will be an oversight committee tasked with reviewing the status of the district’s capital and maintenance projects. The committee, which will be made up of community members, will make sure DPS is spending money as district officials said they would, Good said.

“If you have distrust of DPS, you can trust this bond process,” he said.

Additional challenges facing districts’ ballot measures

Another potential challenge that DPS will face in getting voters to approve its bond proposal is that there are two other measures on the ballot, one to financially help Denver Health and the other to fund affordable housing, that would increase the city’s sales tax rate if approved, Ciruli said.

This has created an unusual amount of talk in Denver about how “taxes are getting high,” he said. “It creates an affordability problem.”

District officials in Denver, Aurora and Douglas County all stressed that their bond measures won’t increase residents’ taxes. That’s because those bond measures, if approved, would extend an existing property tax increase. (On the flip side, those taxes will decrease if the new bonds aren’t approved by voters.)

Kane compared it to having a mortgage payment for a house: After a decade or more, a homeowner might refinance their mortgage to get a lower payment. But at the same time, the homeowner needs to invest in their house, so they take out a home equity line of credit, which is used to update a kitchen or to install a new roof. So, in the end, the homeowner is left with the same mortgage payment they had before, but must pay it back over a longer period.

“We’re sunsetting old debt and replacing it with new debt,” Kane said.

Districts’ argument that their bond proposals won’t increase property taxes works in their favor, but they are still facing voters who are concerned generally about the economy and inflation — and this means the economic environment is not as “generous” as in previous years, Ciruli said.

Smith, the finance officer for the Cherry Creek School District, argued that inflation is exactly the reason why voters should approve the district’s $950 million bond now. Waiting will only increase maintenance and other costs, he said.

The Cherry Creek School District is proposing a mill levy increase along with its bond measure, which together the district said would result in a tax increase of less than $3 a month for each $100,000 of property value.

The bond, if approved, would go toward multiple projects, including playground and building maintenance, expanding the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus and rebuilding Laredo Middle School. The district would also replace the West Building at Cherry Creek High School, which Smith said has black mold and sewage problems.

“These buildings we are talking about have to be replaced and that doesn’t change if this doesn’t pass,” Smith said.

In fact, what the Douglas County School District can afford if its bond measure passes has decreased since the district first put a proposal on the ballot two years ago, Kane said.

Originally, the district planned to build three elementary schools with the more than $400 million bond measure, but now it will only construct two if the bond passes, Kane said.