One in five women in the United States has visited a Planned Parenthood clinic to receive health care. And three of seventeen women who are also Colorado state senators showed up to sing karaoke at a bar off the capitol Tuesday night to raise money for the organization’s local political arm, Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado. Denver-area senators Lucia Guzman, Evie Hudak and Linda Newell celebrated accessible women’s reproductive health services from their spots at the bar and from center stage at Hamburger Mary’s, where more than a hundred revelers delivered dramatic renditions of classic hits, tossed back cheap drinks and stuffed pockets with prophylactics.

“The pro-choice community came together for a night of dancing, singing, duets and solos– all for a good cause,” Cathy Alderman, vice president of public affairs, told the Colorado Independent. “Just like the song selections, attendees represented numerous generations and demonstrated the commitment among Coloradans to protecting women’s health and ensuring women always have the right to make personal private decisions about their own bodies.”

Blur star Sen Guzman on karaoke (and in the hat).

Planned Parenthood Votes supports local pro-choice and pro-family-planning policies as well as candidates and officeholders who promote those policies.

The organization also works to advance local comprehensive sex education. This week the group will be hosting online and campus activities that will dovetail with Planned Parenthood’s national “Sex Ed Week of Action.”

According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 10 states and the District of Columbia require that sex education programs in middle school or high school include information about about birth control and only 21 states and the District of Columbia require any type of sex education at all.

House Bill 1292 passed in 2007 sets the standard in Colorado. Schools here don’t have to teach sex ed but schools that elect to teach it have to teach it in a comprehensive fashion, which includes instruction on abstinence as well as birth control. The instruction must be built on a foundation of medically accurate science-based research.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains Communications Director Monica McCafferty told the Independent that the organization this year will seek to educate the public on where school board candidates stand on issues like sex education. She said Planned Parenthood Votes has sent surveys to candidates and will disseminate their responses. She also said the organization fully expects another anti-abortion “personhood” initiative to appear on the 2012 ballot in the state and that her organization will work to defeat this one as it did the last two versions.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Boulder, Tuesday announced he will introduce legislation to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, which promised to pay 40 percent of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities.

His bill, the Defending Special Education Students and Families Act would increase IDEA funding over the next five years. The bill would be paid for by cutting what Polis said are wasteful and unnecessary Pentagon defense programs.

The bill would steadily increase funding each year through 2016, increasing the annual federal allocation from $11.5 billion this year to $30.6 billion in 2016. Beyond 2016, funding would remain steady at 40 percent of the actual state and local cost, according to Polis’s office.

“The foundation of a strong economy and job creation begins with providing every child in America with the best possible education, including students with disabilities,” said Polis in a prepared statement.

“This legislation keeps our promise to special education students and families and provides much needed fiscal relief to cash-strapped states and local school districts. Rather than wasting taxpayer dollars on costly and ineffective defense programs, this legislation reinvests in America’s children and our economy.”

“Funding the needs of our special education students is work that has integrity,” said Cynthia Stevenson, superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools. “As the superintendent of Jeffco Schools, I believe that every one of our nearly 8,000 special education students deserves a great education. I applaud Congressman Polis’ efforts to fully fund special education.”

“Our District’s performance in serving students with disabilities is not where it needs to be,” said Chris Gdowski, superintendent of Adams 12 Five Star Schools. “Funding IDEA at the 40 percent level promised by Congress when the law was adopted would allow us to offer additional services and supports for our students with disabilities so that they develop stronger academic skills.”

“I am thrilled to see a bill being proposed… to fully fund IDEA,” commented Tina Goar, superintendent of Gilpin County School District. “School districts across Colorado have had to make many tough choices and sacrifices for a number of years in order to fund our special education programs and the requirements set forth by federal regulations. Its passage will be a major boost in public education and most importantly for our children.”

Congress pledged to pay up to 40 percent of the excess cost of educating students with disabilities when it passed IDEA. Yet, today, the federal government covers only about 16 percent of special education costs. In Colorado, the special education funding burden falls mostly on the state’s 178 local school districts, which in 2009-10 provided nearly 62 percent of the funds and the state paid about 20 percent of the costs. Federal funding amounted to 18.5 percent.

“In this time of huge budget constraints, the increased federal investment in special education will help our school districts considerably,” said Colorado State Senator Evie Hudak, D-Westminster.

“Special education is one of the most costly items in a district’s budget. IDEA helps provide equity in education, allowing all students to have an opportunity to succeed, even if they have disabilities,” Hudak said.

“In 2010, the number of children in Colorado accessing special education services was more than 80,000, a significant increase from prior years and occurring at the same time Colorado faced the largest cuts to education funding in our state’s history,” said Chris Watney, president and CEO of the Colorado Children’s Campaign. “These additional supports are critical to ensuring that every child in Colorado is given the opportunity to succeed in college and career.”

The bill’s increase in IDEA funding would be fully offset by cutting what Polis says are unnecessary Defense Department weapons systems by $18.8 billion over the next five years. The bill would replace projected purchases of the Navy and Marine Joint Strike Fighters, which have suffered repeated cost overruns, with less expensive F/A-18E/Fs. It would cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a program that Polis said the Pentagon no longer supports.

Senators Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, and Linda Newell, D-Denver, voiced their concern today that children’s lives are being destroyed by zero-tolerance policies in Colorado schools. While Senate Judiciary committee members had no tolerance for increasingly heavy handed punishment of student’s playground pranks, some reform advocates testified the bill may serve to shackle reforms already in the works.

SB 133 as written would direct the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) to study the overuse of suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests and examine racial discrimination in disciplinary actions. The CCJJ would then report those findings to the education and judiciary committees of the General Assembly in December 2011.

“This bill is in line with the national movement to reform school discipline. Our focus should be on student success, supporting student growth, and preparing students for bright futures,” Hudak said. “This bill promotes school safety and academic success by helping to identify policies that will keep our classrooms safe and guide young people to learn from their mistakes.”

The bill is being offered in response to recent statistics showing that over the past 10 years 100,000 Colorado students have been referred to law enforcement by their schools. During the 2008-2009 school year, 60 percent of such students were referred for minor misconduct including disobedience, defiance, minor fights and disorderly conduct.

Child advocates, including Padres & Jovenes Unidos, who worked with sponsors to bring the bill forward, found behaviors that once put a child in a principal’s office are now landing them in legal trouble.

The group cited numerous cases where students were either charged with crimes or expelled from school for actions that many older individuals may remember as commonplace occurrences around the schoolyard. One example was an 11-year-old boy who was given a ticket for 3rd degree assault after accidentally hitting his teacher with a bean bag chair when swinging it around the classroom.

Bill sponsors said that a no-tolerance policy is deterring students from gaining the proper education and in many cases places them into a law enforcement system ill equipped to handle such matters appropriately.

Bill sponsors offered two amendments during committee in order to eliminate a fiscal note and calm the concerns of the CCJJ and Justice Department.

Newell offered the committee what she called a choice between amendments. One of those would go so far as to offer a strike below she said would water the bill down to simply ensure that the CCJJ include the bill’s concerns in their investigations with no date attached.

However, Sen. Morgan Carroll said that if a study was to be done, a date was necessary lest the work never be completed.

Newell told the Colorado Independent she wanted a time frame attached to the study but was working on reducing a $200,000 fiscal note that appeared to be a significant challenge to the bill’s passage.

“We would prefer to move forward with a time frame. Our concern is that if we don’t have a time frame we are going to be sitting on this two years from now without a solution,” Newell said. “Too many kids are being accidentally thrown into [law enforcement] and we just need to solve this problem.”

She said that she and stakeholders would be working to try and eliminate or whittle down the fiscal note over the next few days.

Regina Huerter, chair of the CCJJ committee to be tasked with the bill’s mandates, said that among other problems the bill moved too fast.

“What exactly are the questions we need to be asking,” Huerter said. “We will not know that until we have done this greater analysis of all of these different issues that are coming out across all of these different systems. We are beginning that work in March.”

She said their time line would not see them reaching the bill’s target due date, though they would provide recommendations next year.

Sen. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, said he was sympathetic with the concerns laid out by Huerter. However, he said the committee should make certain that the questions embodied in the spirit of the bill were being actively solved.

“We have to be able to step back and we have to let our law enforcement step back and say ‘kids are different from adults,” King said. “Having been a school resource officer, quite frankly, I was there to help the school. I wasn’t there to strictly enforce the letter of the law. I was there to enforce the spirit of the law. And we have gotten away from that because of the idea of … zero tolerance.”

The bill was laid over while the amendments are finalized.

“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.”

“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).”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Senate Bill 54, sponsored by Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, that has been fighting its way through the Senate passed a second reading this week. The proposed law would require the state to provide four hours of education per week to juveniles awaiting trial and also require sheriffs to register information about the juveniles being held in their facilities in a central database. As the Colorado Independent has reported, information on the numbers, demographics, charges and conditions of incarceration regarding imprisoned un-convicted youth is at best spotty, compromising efforts to assess and reform a system almost everyone involved, including sheriffs, readily admits is inadequate.

“These kids are in solitary confinement for [an average of] seven months and as a result have a poorer future,” Hudak told lawmakers from the floor of the Senate Tuesday. She said that 25 percent of these cases are either dismissed or come back as not guilty. The effect is that we have young people living for months in adult prisons and missing schooling for no good reason. Youth held in such conditions, she said, become depressed and fall into a downward spiral. Hudak’s bill would reduce jail suicides and fight recidivism.

Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, said that he was sympathetic to the plight of the young people the bill seeks to address, he thought the law would negatively effect a larger number of students in Colorado for the sake of a few students who had “made poor decisions.” He doubted that the allotted funding would truly cover the program and criticized the four-hour-per-week education requirement as ineffectual. King seemed not to fully consider that the young people the bill aims to help have not been convicted of any crimes.

“Kids incarcerated in a jail do not have the opportunity to attend school because they have violated the law. This is going to create a hardship for students in school by taking the teacher away from those students… We are not getting anywhere close to the minimum number of hours here,” King said, “At the most, you could get a partial credit toward graduation.”

Hudak said she cut the minimum-hour requirements precisely to ensure the allotted money would be adequate.

Like King, Sen. Scott Renfroe, R-Greeley, argued the bill was designed to help people who had made poor choices.

“This bill is putting a burden on school districts. This is people who have been charged with crimes that a DA thinks is strong enough to charge them as an adult.”

Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, reminded the Senate that “these young people are entitled to a presumption of innocence.” He said the lawmakers were bound by the Colorado Constitution to provide young people an education. “This is still a positive bill that will make sure these students receive some of the education they are entitled to… The time lost should not have that detriment on their education.”

Hudak added that the program would have a number of ancillary benefits that were beginning to take shape just since she introduced the bill. She said sheriffs supportive the provision that would compel county jails to report juvenile detentions to the state and include details on the kinds of education they are receiving and that many sheriffs, upon her introduction of the bill, have taken it upon themselves to begin reporting the juveniles to their education districts on their own.

“We’ll now be able to find out how many children are in county jails and we’ll discover whether or not they’re being educated.”

Ted Tow of the Colorado District Attorney’s Council told the Colorado Independent he supported the bill.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Jeanne Smith, director of the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, said a large part of the problem is a lack of data. She told the Independent that the state doesn’t conduct the most rudimentary research on minors being held in adult prisons, a fact she suggests is at odds with the state’s aggressive direct-file law, which grants prosecutors not judges the decision-making power to try juveniles as adults.

“It takes money to do evaluation and research and right now Colorado doesn’t have it,” Smith said. “I don’t know that there is anybody in the state who has done a study of the county jails and what they are doing,” Smith said. “The state judiciary has the numbers on how many [juveniles] get filed on but they don’t know how many are being held in juvenile facilities or in county jails.”

Minors being held in adult prisons often can’t take advantage of services offered to adults because state law requires for safety reasons that minors remain separated from the adult population. As a result, juveniles awaiting trial as adult are often held in solitary confinement.

Education

Discussion surrounding a bill introduced this legislative session by State Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, highlights the netherworld these youth suspects have fallen into in Colorado.

As the Colorado Independent reported last month, Hudak is seeking to address the fact that the state is in violation of its constitutional responsibility to educate these minors. But representatives for the Colorado Association of School Boards say educating these kids is the state’s responsibility, not the responsibility of the school districts, and that there is no money to pay teachers and buy supplies and set up space for instruction. Jane Urschel, a lobbyist for the school boards, told the Independent that Hudak’s bill would simply establish an unfunded mandate. All parties agree this is a serious problem in search of a solution yet Hudak admits her bill will likely fail to pass this year as lawmakers struggle to cut millions from the budget.

In 2008, Colorado “direct filed” on 179 juveniles, according to the Legislative Council. Although numbers vary widely depending on whom you ask, Legislative Council estimates that an average of only 15 juveniles would receive educational resources under state Sen. Hudak’s bill.

But Jessika Shipley, the research associate for the state who wrote the fiscal note for the bill, said that the number 15 was merely “a stab in the dark” because no department currently tracks the numbers of juveniles held in adult jails. There’s no way at this point, she said, to solidly map the contours of the problem the bill hopes to address.

Suicide

Colorado law requires that prison administrators and employees keep juveniles held in adult facilities separated from adult inmates in a way that they can neither be seen nor heard. Most all parties agree the requirement is a good policy but they also agree it forces juveniles into isolated cells and reduces their access to resources and services.

Smith told the Independent that a 2008 panel on direct-file laws and juvenile-adult detention raised concerns that young suspects held in isolated conditions might be suffering higher levels of serious and even life-threatening depression.

“I can say that was a concern at the committee hearing… but can I tell you that there was any study done on the matter? Can I tell you that X amount of times [a suicide] has happened? No, I can’t tell you that. It was an issue that was raised,” Smith said, again lamenting the lack of data.

According to a report put out by the Campaign for Youth Justice , three juveniles awaiting trial in adult facilities committed suicide over the last two years. The circumstances vary and have not been reported in detail.

James Stewart, a minor housed in Denver County Jail, committed suicide an hour after being placed in solitary confinement. Stewart had reportedly fought with his cell mate, which led to his placement in solitary.

Sandy Mullins, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar told the Colorado independent that Stewart had begged not to be isolated.

In Pueblo County Jail, Robert John Borrego, Jr., 17, had been housed for about 20 days in a space with other juveniles before he committed suicide.

Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office Captain Dave Lucero declined to comment on the Borrego case because it is currently the subject of a lawsuit. He said he didn’t think the death was tied to the facility but that he strongly agreed the facility was not suited to housing minors. Lucero sent a letter to the Department of Corrections outlining his concerns, explaining that Pueblo’s jail wasn’t built to manage juveniles and felt it would be better to house them in an outside facility.

Kim Dvorak, a criminal defense attorney who advocates for juvenile rights, told the Independent that Denver County Sheriff Major Vickie Connors sent a similar letter. Connors didn’t return requests for comment.

Lucero said that complying with “Colorado sight and sound regulations” was difficult but that he can house a “couple of juveniles in medcells,” which are 23-hour isolated lock-down facilities.

“While they are in a 23 hour lock-down area, we do provide them with games and TVs. We make sure we get them out for the recreation time when we can, which is inconvenient because we have the majority of the adult population that we have to regulate throughout the day. So we might not be able to recreate a juvenile till 4 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the morning,” Lucero said.

Lucero said in some cases he simply uses a curtain to keep the juveniles out of sight of adult prisoners.

Direct file

These sorts of problems are intrinsic to the “direct-file” system, which allows D.A.’s to try as adults juveniles 14 years of age and older, mostly on suspicion of violent crimes, according to child’s rights advocates. Although juveniles in Colorado used to undergo a transfer hearing by a judge who decided whether a juvenile should be charged as an adult, in the wake of the 1993 “summer of violence,” the General Assembly voted to institute direct file to address gang crimes. Child advocates have been working for years to return to the system that called on judges to make the decision.

But Ted C. Tow, executive director for the Colorado District Attorney’s Council, said D.A.s here guard their direct-file privileges closely. He said “transfer hearings” require members of the judicial branch to do work that rightly belongs to members of the executive branch. Direct file is a better way to get at justice, he said.

But Tow spoke also of Colorado’s Youthful Offender System (YOS), a program that reduces sentences while preparing those convicted under direct file to be productive members of society.

“In other words [a judge is] going to sentence you, say a juvenile who has been convicted as an adult where he pistol whipped somebody. The judge will say ‘I am going to sentence you to 18 years in prison but I am going to suspend that if you successfully complete the YOS program.’ That prison sentence hanging over their head is one of the main reasons that [the YOS program] is so successful. Because the [juveniles] have every incentive to keep their butt out of big boy prison.”

Tow said he didn’t have up-to-date data but guessed that about 100 direct files occur per year, or about 1 percent of felony cases filed against juveniles.

Mullins, of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said his organization would like to push legislation this session that would track the number of children who die while being held in the state’s prisons and that would document the conditions in which they are being held.

Unfortunately, this is a bad year to act, she said, referring to the budget crunch.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“Anything with a fiscal note won’t get passed,” Hudak told the Colorado Independent weeks ago, acknowledging a reality of a year where lawmakers are seeking to cut billions from the budget. Hudak however said the plight of the youth prisoners is a tragedy and that it has to be remedied. She’s working to make her bill cost-effective to win over legislators as well the board of Colorado school districts, which opposed the proposal for setting up an “unfunded mandate” that would put the responsibility to educate youth in custody on districts stretched to the breaking point, where layoffs in K-12 staff and faculty are all but certain.

Hudak said there were three main ideas being discussed informally in advance of a meeting scheduled for next week.

“One thought is to use some one-time money available from the facilities schools budget (there was more than $2 million unused there this year) to cover the cost of the students… Then in the future, they would just be in the base of the School Finance formula,” Hudak wrote in an email.

This fix fails to address the districts’ concerns that paying teachers to conduct instruction in the prisons would exceed per pupil revenue limits, which are a little more than $7000.

Hudak said she is considering creating a state authority to in effect pool per pupil revenue so no single small district, for example, would be hit with a bill too big to pay because one of its student went to jail.

Hudak said they are also discussing digital education. Although prisons don’t provide access to the internet, she said it might be possible to give students laptops so they can exchange discs with teachers, the students would read and produce material saved to a disc and the teachers would send back reviews and graded work.

But even minimal costs are still costs. The districts board has said it simply views educating juveniles charged as adults and held in adult prisons as the state’s responsibility.

“The state charges a child as an adult, incarcerates and feeds the child, but does not let the child out to go to school. So we feel that it is the state’s job to see that the child gets educated,” Jane Urschel, lobbyist for the Association of School Boards, told the Colorado Independent.

An idea Hudak is looking at again would see the Department of Youth Corrections take up the responsibility of educating youth charged as adults.

“Some people still insist that… juvenile detention provide the education services. I don’t think this is viable. We had discussed it in committee over the summer. But we will look into it again,” Hudak said.

Juveniles charged as adults are sometimes held in solitary confinement in the state’s overcrowded prisons while they wait for their day in court. Solitary confinement is harsh but authorities are looking to provide safety by segregating the juveniles from the adult population.

“Kids are in a jail cell all day long for months and months and months,” Hudak said. “Most of them don’t end up serving life terms.” They’re going to come back out into society at some point, she said.

Contact the author at jboven at coloradoindependent dot com. Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an email. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Sen. Dave Schultheis

Schultheis’s bill, SB 089 , in its original version would have allowed teachers to choose not to teach subjects such as evolution and sex education that might conflict with their religious beliefs. It also would have allowed them to distribute religious material and display religious symbols in class, among other things.

With passionate opposition witnesses lined up to testify, however, Schultheis amended the bill to merely require that questions concerning religious rights in the schools be presented to the Colorado Attorney General for consideration. The AG’s answers to the questions would then be distributed to the schools where they would be publicly displayed.

“I am not convinced that what we have in front of us today is necessary or in any way improves upon what we have today,” said Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver. He agreed with others that laws already safeguard the right to take such questions to the authorities.

But Schultheis made it clear that he meant to address a larger struggle with the bill.

“The purpose of this bill is to distribute awareness among the public school system of the religious liberties that are guaranteed to all citizens and, yes, even students, faculty and staff of public schools in accordance with the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Schultheis said at the opening of the hearing.

He said the battle over religious freedom in the United States was being fought in the schools.

“Public schools have become battle grounds in this fight to preserve religious liberty, fought in large part by threats of law suits by organizations such as the [American Civil Liberties Union]. Many public school officials, rather than offering a challenge to these suits because of the cost to do so, simply acquiesce to the ACLU’s demands.”

Most of the testimony heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee reflected the same kind of opposition that greeted a version of the bill backed by Schultheis in 2007. That earlier version also died in committee.

State Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, said her perspective on the bill was shaped by her Jewish faith and by history.

“I appreciate that [public] schools do not teach Christmas,” she said. She said the month of December breeds feeling of marginalization for non-Christians. “I feel like I am a second-class citizen or like I am not American.”

“It sounds like you believe that our school should be teaching the birth of Christ in December and you need to be aware that many children do not celebrate that holiday,” Hudak said.

Schultheis said that his amended bill would only ask a neutral party to weigh in on controversial questions and that it was a provision that could be exercised by adherents to all religions.

“I could not disagree with Sen. Schultheis more,” said Steve Foster, senior rabbi at Denver’s Temple Emanuel. “I’m glad that the ACLU is on top of this because it guarantees your right to practice your religion as you choose but it doesn’t give you the right to practice your religion to try to get me to change mine in order to make you whole.”

Foster said that the original bill could lend support for what he called the “tyranny of majoritarianism” and weaken the U.S. commitment to secular society.

State Sen. Scott Renfroe, R-Greeley, responded to Foster’s critique by saying that he didn’t believe America was a secular society.

“You said we were a secular nation and I would disagree with you, sir.”

Renfroe said he didn’t want to see any religion prohibited. “It is true that all religions are under attack in our public schools– except for the religion of global warming.”

Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, asked each speaker how they would feel if the bill was stripped down to only the section that required the AG be asked to develop answers on related religious questions that arise in the schools. Detractors said school districts can consult the AG at will.

I am looking for straight neutrality in the decision making, Schultheis said.

In the end the committee the bill as simply redundant.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“Kids are in a jail cell all day long for months and months and months,” she said. “They’re entitled to receive an education but no one has worked out how to provide that education.”

State law requires juveniles in detention receive education. An estimates puts the number of students awaiting trial as adults at more than 130. Hudak said the Colorado Department of Education is aware of the problem but has yet to work out how to address it.

“Nobody knows where to [hold instruction], who is going to provide the instruction and how are you going to pay for it. It’s very important for these kids to get an education. Most of them don’t end up serving life terms.” They’re going to come back out into society at some point, she said.

A bad year to address a bad situation

Hudak has introduced legislation that attempts to address the issue but, given the historic strained budget crisis facing the state, the odds are high it will fail to gain sufficient support to pass. The Colorado Association of School Boards, for example, has already opposed the bill, arguing that school districts do not have the money and that the state would have to pick up the tab.

Hudak said that a quarter of the cases where juveniles are charged as adults are dismissed.

“A number of them are acquitted and the rest pretty much go to the youth offender system for three to seven years and then they are out.”

Hudak said the resulting gap in education leads to recidivism. She also thinks it increases the likelihood of deep depression and suicide.

In the last year, two juvenile suspects have committed suicide while awaiting trials as adults. Hudak says that in part it is a result of an inability to see a future for themselves.

“They sit there in an empty cell for weeks and weeks thinking about how they ruined their lives. They are children. I see this [legislation working] to not only educate these students but to allow them to have some hope and vision of a future.”

Sandy Mullins, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar (CCDB), agreed. She said that CCDB would like to push legislation this session that would track the number of children who die while being held in the state’s prisons and document the conditions in which they are being held. Unfortunately, this is a bad year to act, she said, referring to fiscal realities.

But Mullen said no child should lose services, including mental health care and education, because they have been charged as an adult.

“We think that anything helps. These kids should have more contact with the outside world.”

School districts versus the state

Jane Urschel, lobbyist for the Association of School Boards, told the Colorado Independent that while the Association agrees that these juveniles need to have schooling, it is the state’s responsibility.

“Articles 9 sec. 2 of the State constitution is what is called a thorough and uniform requirement. ‘That the state must establish a thorough and uniform education for every child.’ We read that to say the state must do that. We believe that the state charges a child as an adult, incarcerates, feeds the child, but does not let the child out to go to school so we feel that it is the states job to see that the child gets educated.”

Urschel sees Hudak’s bill as establishing an unfunded mandate.

“If there were a lot of money the districts, I think districts would be fine with this.”

District budgets are being slashed across the state, by up to 12 percent, resulting in teacher layoffs and class-size expansions and reductions in services. Urschel doesn’t see any way to create a new expenditure without affecting students.

“It is unfair to make the district choose between the kids sitting in a classroom and the one kid sitting in jail. It makes us choose the needs of the one over the needs of the many.”

Presenting options

Hudak’s said that while the Association of School Boards had said there was no money for the programs, she explained her bill allows school districts to count students in jail for their state-supported per pupil revenue.

She said the average per pupil operating revenue is about $7,000 across the state. She said that amount was unlikely to pay for the program costs that would be mandated by her bill, which would include travel, establishing safe locations for instruction in jails, and teacher pay.

Hudak said she still felt that the majority of costs could be paid through the funding mechanism included in her bill. She also said counties could consolidate juvenile incarceration in a way that would make the program more cost effective and lead to less cases of juveniles being held in solitary confinement.

Although some jails may house only one juvenile at a time, such as the one in Jefferson County, others have pods of cells designated for youth offenders. Arapahoe County sends its juveniles awaiting trial as adults to the Adams county jail, which has segregated juvenile space. Hudak said that if all counties used this method, the cost of educating these students would fall, teachers instructing greater numbers of students at each location. She also said keeping juvenile offenders together also might alleviate psychologically depressive isolation. “That is something I am really hoping can be arranged. If Arapahoe county is doing this, why can’t other counties?”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.