The Board is expected to make its final decision at a meeting on Thursday, August 19. The school district has been facing a financial crisis for the past three years and has made serious cuts to administration, technology, operations and a number of school support areas. Now, the district is faced with making reductions that directly impact classrooms, such as raising class sizes in first through third grades by hiring 40 fewer teachers. They will also shorten the work year by one day next year, meaning teachers won't teach, staff won't work or get paid, and students will not come to school....
The school budget picture gets no brighter in future years. The fiscal crisis is primarily a cause of the economic conditions many other school districts and businesses continue to face. Colorado school districts have been continually under-funded. Colorado has been ranked by the National Center for Educational Statistics as one of the 25 worst states in the nation for educational funding. Jeffco Public Schools has one of the lowest per pupil funding levels in the Denver metropolitan area.
August 19th also fell on a Thursday in 2004, when the nation was still recovering from the recession that accompanied the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the 9/11 attack. I'm betting it was 2004 - nearly 4 years after we had passed Amendment 23 to finance the schools by requiring that spending for them increase above inflation for 10 years and at least by inflation every year thereafter and right before we passed Referendum C to give our TABOR refunds back to the state for the next 5 years to address the shortfall in education spending, health care, transportation and fire and police pension shortfalls.
One wonders if they are going to ask for another such measure to address the pension shortfalls within PERA sometime soon...........
