DENVER—Eleven rural school districts across Colorado will get new buildings, roofs and fire alarms with the help of $77 million in state grants, the first wave of money distributed under a new program tapping the value of state-owned lands.
The districts are also pitching in a quarter of the overall $98.5 million that will be spent on the first group of projects announced Wednesday. They include six new schools, four of them in the San Luis Valley.
State treasurer Cary Kennedy, who helped craft the bill that created the program last year, said it was the state’s largest investment in school construction. That wasn’t hard to accomplish, since the state has made few investments in actual school buildings, quipped former House speaker Andrew Romanoff, who sponsored the bill after touring dilapidated rural schools.
While about 40 percent of the state budget goes to help schools pay for expenses like teacher salaries and textbooks, districts are usually on their own in paying for school buildings. Normally, that means issuing a bond and asking voters to pay more in property taxes, but rural land values often are too low to bring in enough money to pay for anything beyond stopgap repairs.
Kennedy said rural schools have had to make do with leaky roofs and caving floors. In some cases, she said, the “fire alarm” is a teacher yelling “fire” while running down the hallway.
“The quality of your education should not depend on your zip code in a state as prosperous as ours,” Romanoff said.
The state’s share comes from interest and revenue earned from properties owned by Colorado since it became a state. Last year, lawmakers agreed to take 35 percent of those earnings and use it to make payments on new school buildings funded through the new program.
One of the new schools to be built in the San Luis Valley will be a pre-kindergarten through 12th grade school to replace two schools about seven miles apart. Lyle Nissen, a farmer who serves on the Sangre de Cristo RE-22J district’s construction board, said school buses waste a lot of gas driving back and forth between the sites and a lot of heat escapes through “big yellow barn” of a metal building that now houses the junior and senior high schools. The elementary school, built in 1932, has a separate building serving as a gymnasium because the building’s original gym was turned into a library and office space.
Nissen said 70 percent of residents backed a $4 million bond—the maximum their property values allowed—in last fall’s election in hopes of winning a state grant. Work could begin as early as this fall, but fellow board member and farmer Mark Beiriger said they will heed residents’ requests to do the project “right.” In an area of extreme temperatures, that includes good insulation and possibly using renewable energy so they can spend on students money that would have gone toward heat, he said.
Beiriger said having a new, modern school in an area that hasn’t grown much in 20 years is about more than just the building itself.
“It makes a community believe that they’re going to be around for the future,” he said.
