“I am opposed to using public funding for private schools,” Hudak said. “The state doesn’t even have enough funding for all the students who are attending public schools. There is no way the state could afford to fund this bill, and it is very poor timing to even propose such a concept.”

Hudak said the bill appeared to be a voucher program for all intents and purposes.

As drafted, The Quality Education and Budget Reduction Act would provide individuals or businesses who pay for a child to leave a public institution and enter into private or home schooling a tax credit. For students attending private school, that credit would be equal to the price of tuition or 50 percent of per pupil funding afforded to students in the state-run system. Home schooled children would receive a tax credit of $1,000.

The Legislative Council reviewed a similar bill last year, noting that it would have saved the state $56 million in fiscal year 2010-2011 and $98.9 million in 2011-2012.

However, the Colorado Education Association, among others, say the bill would be providing funds to programs that are religiously based and not subject to state mandated curriculum.

Sen. Spencer Swalm, R-Centennial, told the Colorado Independent earlier that the bill was an effort to save the state money in a critical time.

“My intent is not to go after teachers or public schools,” Swalm assured. He said with a billion dollar shortfall the state needed to find a way to provide an education for Colorado students “without spending as much as we are spending.”

“Although these tragedies did not happen here in Colorado, harassment, taunting, and violence are pervasive in our schools—despite the policies we have in place,” said Brad Clark, director of gay rights group One Colorado. “We must head off the crisis by addressing this problem immediately. As adults, it is our moral responsibility to make schools safe for all our children.”

In addition to OneColorado, organizations behind the move include the Colorado Education Association, the Colorado Association of School Executives, the Colorado chapter of the American Federation of Teachers and the Colorado Association of School Boards.

The task force would conduct a sort of listening tour of the state’s school districts, taking in the assessments of students and teachers and members of the community, evaluating the effectiveness of local and state-wide strategies, offering trainings and seeking to find areas for improvement. (Read the Safe Schools letter here (pdf).)

A big problem

As has become clear from mounting research and from regular installments of the news, bullied children are sad and isolated. Their grades suffer. They stay home from school. And, as the nation learned in the last months, they jump off bridges and hang and shoot themselves.

In Colorado, according to a 2009 Healthy Kids Colorado survey (pdf), roughly 19 percent of all high school kids report being bullied. Roughly 30 percent say they got into fights. Roughly 7 percent have been threatened with weapons. Indeed, last year more than 5 percent of all Colorado high schoolers stayed home from school for fear of bullying. That’s 12,000 teen students. Among certain demographic groups, the percentages soar. According to Linda Kanan, director of the Department of Public Safety’s School Safety Resource Center, roughly 37 percent of gay and transgender kids avoid school for fear of bullying.

That’s a very serious problem, Kanan told the Colorado Independent, harassment in general being a significant area she seeks to address as part of her office’s mission to help make schools safe. Kanan said that she would welcome the establishment of a task force as a part of the state’s most-bang-for-the-buck approach to school safety, especially given that all federal funding that went to individual school districts in the state for safe school projects was cut last year. She said the task force envisioned, which would deliver a better picture of the diverse lay of the land district to district as a way to ratchet up effectiveness, makes sense.

“Colorado is a diverse place, developing a comprehensive picture is difficult. Nationally designed one size-fits-all approaches will be less effective here,” she said. “What are the issues, exactly? For that, you have to go and examine the climate and culture and the differences from community to community, to see what can be implemented, to develop long-term strategies.”

Kanan added that the issue itself of bullying and harassment changes, that the outline of the problem alters from year to year.

“In the last decade, online media has changed things. How should kids best be safe online, when they’re texting. Conditions change for kids. There are new threats to their psychological and physical safety.”

Post-Columbine Colorado

In fact, Colorado has been a leader in taking up school safety as a priority ever since the Columbine school shootings rocked the nation in 1999. The state legislature a year later passed anti-bullying laws and statutes that outlined procedures and training programs to guard against school harassment, and in 2008 the legislature set up Kanan’s four-person division within the state’s Public Safety Department to direct attention to the issue in a sustained and comprehensive way. This year, Attorney General John Suthers released inspiring data from the Safe2Tell and Safe2Text programs, onetime nonprofit 24/7 anonymous hotlines embraced by the AG’s office and the Department of Public Safety.

In roughly the last five years, Colorado students have filed more than 2,700 reports concerning bullying, gangs and other problems through the program. The AG’s office reports that the tips have been crucial as a prevention, leading authorities to “intervene in thousands of potentially dangerous and life-threatening situations.” Since 2005, Safe2Tell tips have led to 284 school disciplinary actions, 67 arrests, 393 investigations and 344 counseling referrals.

Mike Saccone, attorney general communications director, told the Independent that the AG’s office is committed to continue to find new ways to combat the problem. Like Kanon, however, he nods at both recession realities and the progress Colorado has already made building an infrastructure to address the problem.

“The Office of the Attorney General… would welcome any help from the legislature and the governor-elect and his staff. That said, we are already doing great work through Safe2Tell, with our partner agencies and with the assistance of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. We do not believe the governor or legislature need to start over from scratch.”

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“The bill’s a juggernaut,” said Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, who serves on the Senate Education Committee that approved the measure by a 7-1 margin April 23.

Co-sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, and Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, SB 191 (pdf) links teacher tenure, a key issue for the Colorado Education Association, to academic achievement and student growth. The bill is likely to face tougher debate in the House.

“There are strong arguments on both sides of the bill,” Steadman told the Colorado Independent. “There are strong constituencies on both sides of the bill. And so it’s high stakes all the way around.”

Democrats usually back the unions on tenure issues, while Republicans have pushed performance-based evaluations.

“This is one of those right-side-of-history votes,” Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, said, according to the Denver Post. “I want to commend the senators who have had the courage on the Democratic side to stand up and do the right thing.”

Johnston is a results-based educator and reformer who served as a campaign adviser to the Obama administration on education issues.

Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, who was the sole dissenting vote on the Senate Education Committee, was thwarted Thursday in her efforts to make more changes to the bill that would have made it more palatable to the CEA.

On her website, Hudak calls the bill “the biggest ‘hot potato’ in the education community since Gov. [Bill] Owens’ SB 186 (which mandated CSAPs every year from grades 3 to 10 and used the tests to rate schools on the SAR, School Accountability Report – causing widespread dread and loathing of CSAP).”

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According to the Denver Post, charter-school advocates are warning that a union victory could have far-reaching statewide implications, given the current push for reform at the federal and state level.

Their claim:

If union-backed candidates were elected, the district’s momentum toward improvement would suffer and that could ruin Colorado’s shot at a share of the U.S. Department of Education’s competitive $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” fund.

The $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states that develop comprehensive reform strategies in four areas:  standards and assessments, data systems, teacher hiring, firing and evaluation, and turning around struggling schools. Duncan has made it clear that the money will not be divided equally among the states.

But winning candidates, reported the Denver Post, shrugged off the assumption that they will slow the district’s—or state’s—work toward education reform.

Still, there’s no questioning the fact that the Denver Public School District—historically, one of the state’s most innovative—now looks to be dominated by candidates who have spoken out against the district’s reforms.

Media reports in the days leading up to the election framed the battle as one between unions and charter school supporters. In large part, this was because candidates appeared to either be receiving donations from reform-minded Denver businessman Thomas W. Gamel or unions, including the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association, the Colorado Education Association, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Colorado AFL-CIO.

Gamel was a notable—and generous—contributor to the non-union candidates, spending more than $90,000 on Mary Seawell’s successful campaign over Christopher Scott.

According to EdNews Colorado, union-backed Scott had a less-than-graceful response to his defeat:

“I hope Mr. Gamel is as personally committed to DPS and our children as he is financially,” Scott said. “As we like to say in the consulting business, ‘You buy it, you own it.’  We will hold Mr. Gamel accountable for the actions of the board members his money has supported.”

But union-supported candidates Nate Easley and Andrea Merida won the other two seats—Merida with the help of scary union-backed pamphlets (pdf) about her opponent’s support for charter schools. In the same overblown language that the GOP used in Douglas County, a 527 group called Coloradans for Accountable Reform in Education (CARE) warned voters that charter schools are the enemy of neighborhood schools.

“Why can’t your kids walk to school?” asked the pamphlet. “Because charter schools across town too often siphon tax dollars away from local neighborhood schools.”

Though CARE will not have to release fundraising information until after the election, its spokeswoman told EdNews Colorado that the group receives money from the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association and the Colorado Education Association.

Merida told EdNews Colorado that while she welcomed the group’s support, she had no idea who CARE was.

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