The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, April 27, on Colorado’s charter schools:
Colorado’s increasingly popular charter schools have come a long way in a relatively short time. Since their bipartisan authorization by a Republican legislature and Democratic governor in 1993, these autonomous and innovative public schools have grown explosively along the Front Range and elsewhere. More than 225 charter schools serve over 108,000 students statewide, including thousands in the Pikes Peak region. They have become a key component of our state’s overall education portfolio.
Along the way, charters have established a record of academic excellence. While some of the programs struggle and sometimes fail, charters are perennially recognized among Colorado’s top-performing public schools.
Three charter high schools in our community - Cheyenne Mountain School District’s Vanguard School, Academy School District’s The Classical Academy and Harrison School District’s James Irwin Charter Academy High School - ranked sixth, 10th and 11th, respectively in our state on U.S. News & World Report’s latest list the nation’s top public high schools. All of which amounts to an even more impressive feat when one considers that many charter schools and their students make do with considerably fewer resources than their counterparts at traditional public schools.
In fact, charters are getting flat-out shortchanged by their own school districts. That’s right; many districts share little or nothing of their voter-approved mill-levy overrides - property-tax increases that raise some $860 million a year statewide for things like operating expenses, transportation, facilities and technology costs.
The Colorado League of Charter Schools estimates charter students are shorted $24 million a year. Locally, that translates to approximately $1.4 million withheld annually from nearly 4,000 charter-school students in the Academy School District and another $1.4 million that District 11’s 2,200 charter students are doing without. The bottom line: average Colorado charter-schoolers make do with only 80 percent of the funding that is spent on students at traditional attendance centers.
The skewed system undermines a signature innovation that has helped make Colorado a national leader in education reform. Much-needed legislation pending in the Legislature seeks to fix this flaw and warrants support of our elected leaders. Senate Bills 187 and 188 - each approved with bipartisan support last week in the Senate Education Committee - would address the override issue and other inequities that undercut charters.
Districts would be required to share override revenue equally among neighborhood and charter schools. The bills also would level the playing field in other areas, such as giving charter schools better access to school construction funds awarded by the state, as well as to public buildings that could be repurposed as charter facilities.
The bills have sponsors in both parties and strong support on both sides of the aisle. We hope they do not face procedural obstacles by House leadership, which is under pressure from a powerful special interest that opposes each bill.
Opposition to these reforms originates in the public-education bureaucracy itself, which complains the proposals would constrain school-district budgets and usurp traditional authority. Just remember, public education is not about sustaining a bureaucracy and the way we’ve always done things. It is about educating kids and achieving the best outcomes possible.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/26SqHJl
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The Denver Post, May 3, on sending ballots to unaffiliated voters for a presidential primary:
Critics of the Colorado ballot process often complain that citizen groups put too many laws in the state constitution, where the details are almost impossible to change.
And the critics are right. It’s better when voters pass statutes that can be adjusted if circumstances change.
Now, however, the legislature is poised to give citizen groups the best reason they’ve ever had to put measures in the constitution that don’t belong there. When the state House gave preliminary approval this week to a bill to create a presidential primary for 2020 - a move we wholeheartedly support - it added an amendment seeking to control the terms of a ballot initiative on presidential primaries that voters might face this fall.
Might face, mind you. Proponents haven’t even begun gathering signatures.
This is a blatant example of legislative meddling in the initiative process and the Senate should strip the bill of the offending language before sending it to the House.
Lawmakers don’t like the fact the initiative would mandate that unaffiliated voters automatically receive a ballot and could vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary. But if they don’t like the idea, they should campaign against it. They shouldn’t legislate against it before it has passed with an amendment that explicitly contemplates overriding the will of the people.
House Bill 1454, as introduced last month, allowed unaffiliated voters the right to temporarily affiliate with a party and vote in a presidential primary, although they’d have to ask for a mail ballot as opposed to having one automatically sent to them. But even this modest concession to the largest voting bloc in Colorado was apparently too much for key senators, who signaled to bill sponsors that they were not on board. As a result, the recent amendment not only meddles in the right of Coloradans to determine what sort of presidential primary they want, it also eliminates any role for unaffiliated voters if the ballot measure fails to pass.
The amendment has to qualify as one of most devious legislative ploys in recent memory.
Would the courts even stand for such shenanigans?
As we’ve noted before, unaffiliated voters outnumber both Republicans and Democrats in Colorado - and the gap is growing as younger voters increasingly choose independent status. It would be best if lawmakers created a way for unaffiliated voters to participate in nominating presidential candidates - and did so without making them jump through extra hoops.
That’s apparently not going to happen this year. But it doesn’t mean voters can’t make it happen at the polls.
Lawmakers have no business trying to sabotage such an effort by citizens.
Editorial: https://dpo.st/26SpW2Q
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The Durango Herald, May 2, on proposed changes to marijuana sales laws:
Two industry groups have come up with a proposal to change how Colorado regulates marijuana sales. Titled “Concerning Marijuana,” the draft legislation would enact sweeping changes.
This is too much and too soon. It is unclear what problems this proposal is intended to fix or why the changes it would enact are desirable, let alone necessary. The current regulatory structure has been in place barely three years and should be given more time before lawmakers decide it should be revamped.
Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana by way of Amendment 64 in 2012. The regulations governing its sale and use were enacted, as the ballot measure envisioned, by the Legislature the next year. Medical marijuana was similarly legalized by the voters in 2000.
There are still issues with the legal merchandising of marijuana, particularly around banking and federal law, but this proposal cannot address those. It would create a five-member commission whose members would be appointed by the governor to regulate the marijuana trade. The commission would have sole authority to issue licenses and enact regulations controlling marijuana sales. Such regulations are now put forward by the Marijuana Enforcement Division of the Department of Revenue, but the new commission would need no Department of Revenue approval.
The proposed legislation would also specify how pesticides can be used. That would include allowing remediation of pot contaminated by pesticides rather than destroying it.
And it would allow for marijuana special events where marijuana stores could sell their products to buyers 21 or older.
Gov. John Hickenlooper has rightly expressed reservations about some of those provisions. Even its sponsor, state Sen. Randy Baumgardner, R-Hot Sulpher Springs, says he expects it to change greatly, saying, “There is no bill; there is a draft.”
But why is there a draft? The commission would fix nothing. “Remediation” of poisoned pot sounds scary. Special events - public pot parties? - are exactly what critics of Amendment 64 feared. Even the marijuana industry is divided concerning this draft bill.
This proposal deserves to go nowhere. And given that the end of the legislative session is fast approaching, that outcome seems likely.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/1TtwDPh
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The (Loveland) Reporter-Herald, May 2, on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision on fracking:
On Monday, the Colorado Supreme Court declared that “an operational conflict exists between Longmont’s fracking bans and applicable state law.” Thus, justices invalidated a voter-approved ban on hydraulic fracturing not only in Longmont, but apparently in Fort Collins and any other community in the state in which voters might want to have a say in the matter.
Loveland voters chose not to be a party to the conflict by defeating a moratorium on fracking in June 2012.
A similar lawsuit from 1992 regarding a Greeley ban on drilling had produced a similar result, but proponents of the Front Range bans had argued that changes in technology since the ruling two decades ago merited a change in the state’s position, as well as several other lines of argument.
The decisive victory for the oil and gas industry will mean companies will be able to work through the state and its agencies for uniform rules across the many municipal jurisdictions on the northern Front Range, where most of the state’s oil and gas production - through hydraulic fracturing - occurs.
So where do communities go to address some of the valid concerns of fracking opponents regarding the noise and odors that the industrial process can produce?
The answer, it seems, comes from the same Supreme Court opinion that denies cities the opportunity to ban fracking outright.
In writing for the court, Justice Richard Gabriel acknowledges that cities can have a role in energy production through the application of zoning and land-use rules that are in place in all home-rule cities in the state.
What that will mean in the long term is that oil and gas operators and city planning departments will have to work together to find the best placement for oil and gas operations in the cities. While those who want zero oil and gas development within a city’s borders will be disappointed, it means that operators will not be able to roll into town, merely put an X on the map and drill with abandon.
It’s not hard to imagine there will be more lawsuits in the future to see exactly where the line exists between oil and gas operators on one side and local planning and zoning ordinances on the other, but Monday’s ruling means conversations likely will have to take place where none had been occurring before.
Editorial: https://bit.ly/1Y7zYaG
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