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As school opens, in many districts there are too few teachers, drivers and declining enrollments
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CBS Colorado, State

As school opens, in many districts there are too few teachers, drivers and declining enrollments

By Alan Gionet | CBS Colorado The 2024-25 school year is starting with districts seeking help. Across Colorado, many districts are again short of teachers, staff, and bus drivers.  In Jefferson County Schools, which resumes for most students on Thursday, the district is still looking to hire 11 teachers, 35 paraprofessionals, and 27 special education teachers, despite decades of declining enrollments due to a drop in birth rates and rising housing costs. In the Boulder Valley School District, officials are seeking to hire a dozen teachers as the district opens. They are offering a $3,500 signing bonus to bus drivers. "What we're trying to do is be proactive and engage the community," said Superintendent Dr. Rob Anderson. "We've been talking about this for several years." ...
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Westminster Schools ‘reimagining’ learning with new Ranum Reimagined Campus
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CBS Colorado, Local

Westminster Schools ‘reimagining’ learning with new Ranum Reimagined Campus

By Gabriela Vidal | CBS Colorado It is inside the walls of a former high school and recently former middle school where leaders with Westminster Public Schools sparked a new idea: to create a campus where high school students can learn the skills needed to be ready for the workforce. "There is nothing worse than somebody who graduates and just feels lost," said Lottie Wilson. Wilson is the Career Tech Education Administrator for Westminster Public Schools and one of the leaders behind the Ranum Reimagined Campus. "I've seen a lot of our graduates that are turning 30 years old, 32 years old and they're still just trying to find their place in the professional world," she said. READ THE FULL STORY AT CBS COLORADO
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Report: Four-day week doesn’t increase student performance, staff retention
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Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Report: Four-day week doesn’t increase student performance, staff retention

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado Colorado school districts with four-day weeks have slightly lower student achievement on average than those with five-day weeks and see little improvement in teacher turnover after shifting from five to four days. That’s according to a new report from the Keystone Policy Center that argues for stricter guardrails on four-day school weeks and the creation of an expert panel to study the issue. The report, “Doing Less With Less,” comes at a time when nearly two-thirds of Colorado’s 185 districts — enrolling about 14% of the state’s students — operate on four-day-a-week schedules. In the last five years, about two dozen districts across the state, most small and rural, made the switch. This year, the 1,200-student Strasburg district, about 30 miles...
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Students on Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council come with ideas for state lawmakers
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Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Students on Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council come with ideas for state lawmakers

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado Help schools install solar panels to cut fossil fuel use. Reduce cafeteria food waste by creating “share” tables and composting programs. Stock opioid overdose remedies in school AED cabinets. These are a few of ideas that Colorado teens proposed to state lawmakers on Thursday as part of a program that seeks to include young people in the legislative process. It’s possible some of the ideas could eventually become law. Most of the eight proposals presented Thursday by students on the Colorado Youth Advisory Council touched on environmental or health issues. Others addressed the shortage of school bus transportation and the difficulty that students with disabilities face in navigating school buildings. The advisory council consists of 40 students...
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A year after exchange student hit and killed near school, Colorado Springs adding speed zones, crosswalks
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CBS 11 KKTV, Local

A year after exchange student hit and killed near school, Colorado Springs adding speed zones, crosswalks

By Cameron Dean | CBS 11 News Before the start of the next school year, five more schools will have crosswalks installed to increase the safety of students and pedestrians. Coronado, Pine Creek, and Sand Creek High Schools as well as Holmes and Sand Creek Middle School will all have a crosswalk and slow speed zone before students have their first day of school. City officials said they had specific parameters for choosing the next schools to add crosswalks to. READ THE FULL STORY AT CBS 11 NEWS
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Hundreds of teaching positions unfilled statewide despite $10k state stipend
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DENVER7, State

Hundreds of teaching positions unfilled statewide despite $10k state stipend

By Brandon Richard | Denver 7 News With a new school year on the horizon, school districts across Colorado are looking to fill hundreds of open teaching positions. But some positions will likely remain unfilled due to Colorado’s ongoing teacher shortage. As a longtime teacher herself, Brooke Williams knows the struggles Colorado teachers face. “The job becomes more increasingly more and more challenging every year,” Williams said. “We're asking teachers to do the impossible.” READ THE FULL STORY AT DENVER 7 NEWS
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Tony May faces Garfield School Board recall; accused of bullying, other claims
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Local, Post Independent

Tony May faces Garfield School Board recall; accused of bullying, other claims

By Taylor Cramer  | The Post-Independent Former Garfield Re-2 School Board President Tony May is facing a recall election on Aug. 27. Last year, May led efforts to implement American Birthright Standards, which ultimately failed to gain approval from the board after facing significant resistance from community members and district personnel​. Organizers of the recall petition that followed accused May of bullying community members and Re-2 staff members, misusing his position and more. His opponent is Sott Bolitho, endorsed by the Coalition for Responsible Education in Re-2, who was profiled in the Post Independent and Citizen Telegram last week. May resigned as board president in December, aiming to reduce political tensions. READ THE FULL STORY AT THE POST-INDEPENDE...
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Clear Creek hires Superintendent Tom Meyer from Bellevue, Iowa
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Clear Creek Courant, Local

Clear Creek hires Superintendent Tom Meyer from Bellevue, Iowa

By Chris Koeberl | Clear Creek Courant Clear Creek Schools Superintendent Tom Meyer officially started in his position July 1, but he’s been preparing for the role for more than 25 years in education. Meyer assumes the role of permanent superintendent succeeding Karen Quanbeck and interim Superintendent Mike Gass for the district. The previous pair guided schools to an expeditionary learning experience for students, which Gass often commented utilized the “gift of place” in the county. READ THE FULL STORY AT THE CLEAR CREEK COURANT
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COVID set back 8th graders an entire school year compared with pre-pandemic peers, study finds
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Chalkbeat Colorado, National

COVID set back 8th graders an entire school year compared with pre-pandemic peers, study finds

By Erica Meltzer | Chalkbeat Colorado COVID disruptions continue to cast a long shadow over student learning, with middle school students in particular suffering the cumulative effects of years of missed lessons, new research shows. The analysis from the testing group NWEA released Tuesday estimates that eighth graders would need an additional nine months of schooling — an entire school year, essentially — to do as well as their counterparts before the pandemic. Third graders, meanwhile, would need a little more than two months of extra schooling to match their counterparts, according to results from the group’s MAP Growth tests that it administers several times a year. Across grades and subjects, students continue to perform worse on these tests than similar students did bef...
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A look inside a dyslexia screening program for some of Colorado’s rural students
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Chalkbeat Colorado, State

A look inside a dyslexia screening program for some of Colorado’s rural students

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado When teacher Cindy Haralson would point at her preschool class with a stuffed owl named Baby Echo, most children quickly repeated the letter, word, and sound they’d just heard her say. Think “B, bat, b.” But one little girl — a good listener and natural problem-solver — stared blankly at her teacher day after day last year, unable to reproduce what she was hearing and seeing. Haralson recalled the girl looking at her classmates, as if to say, “How do you guys do that? How do you know that?” The girl’s struggle with alphabet lessons was the kind of red flag that can signal problems learning to read, problems that Haralson believes too often go unaddressed for years. “It seems like we always wait till kindergarten or first grade, and somet...
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