A Mesa County teacher slid his hand up the leg of a seventh-grade student in what he said was a game called “fire truck.” A Denver teacher shoved a student into a locker after she pretended to give him a high-five and called him a name. A frustrated Littleton middle school teacher grabbed a student by the shoulders, cursed at him and then walked off the job. A Boulder teacher lifted students’ skirts and touched their breasts.
Teacher discipline in Colorado spiked over the last five years, with the revocation, suspension and surrender of teachers’ licenses reaching a record high in 2022 with 31 lost licenses and remaining elevated in the following years, according to a Denver Post analysis of disciplinary records kept by the .
Incidents that led to educators losing their teaching licenses increased by 77% between 2021 and 2025 when compared to the previous five years, The Post found. Sexual offenses by teachers also went up along with the overall jump in disciplinary cases, though not as sharply: 29 teachers lost their licenses for sexual offenses between 2016 and 2020, compared to 45 between 2021 and 2025, a 55% increase, The Post found.
The uptick in the most serious type of educator discipline, which reflects a tiny fraction of the state’s teachers, comes after the COVID-19 pandemic threw schools into turmoil and follows a handful of high-profile cases of teacher abuse that have cost Colorado schools millions of dollars in legal settlements. The increased discipline also follows legislative changes that strengthened the state’s mandatory reporting laws and comes as the state faces a shortage of teachers.
Each of those factors might be influencing the increased levels of discipline, experts told The Post. They generally felt the higher number of disciplinary actions reflected better training and reporting, rather than an actual increase in bad behavior.
“As a society, our community has done a much better job of making it possible for people to come forward and feel safe,” said George Brauchler, who has handled a number of teacher sex assault cases as the elected district attorney for the 23rd Judicial District, which includes Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties.
“What I don’t want to believe — and I’m not convinced is true — is we are seeing an increased number of teachers who are going to prey on our kids,” he said. “My hope and thought is that because we are looking harder, we are taking it more seriously, the outcry is increased, and we are able to investigate and hold more people accountable for this.”
Colorado has about 54,000 teachers at the kindergarten through 12th-grade levels, according to the state Department of Education.
The Post examined 341 cases in which teachers surrendered their licenses or state authorities revoked or suspended licenses between 2000 and 2025 and sifted through thousands of pages of to build a complete picture of the state’s teacher disciplinary history during the last quarter century.
That analysis showed that sexual offenses by teachers led to nearly half — 44% — of lost teaching licenses in Colorado over the last 25 years.
The most common reason for teachers to lose their licenses was sexual contact with students, accounting for 76 cases, according to The Post’s review. The second most frequent reason was a non-sexual criminal conviction, seen in 52 cases, followed by sexual contact with minors who weren’t students, noted in 20 cases.
Theft, excessive physical force on students, possession of child sexual abuse material and domestic violence were also common reasons for teachers to lose their licenses.
Colorado’s upswing not reflected nationally
The disciplinary cases included a Morgan County wrestling coach who taped a boy to a bench as punishment for misbehaving in 2006, including taping over his hands and mouth, as well as a Pueblo middle school teacher who watched pornography and masturbated in his classroom in 2012 — an act that was observed by two 13-year-old girls who peered into the classroom through a partially covered window.
A Montrose teacher sent sexually explicit text messages to a teenage student and tried to arrange to have sex with him in 2024. A Douglas County middle school teacher sexually assaulted a 14-year-old boy for more than a year beginning in 2023, then stalked the student, creating fake phone numbers to try to reach him by text.
The Post’s analysis is based on the date the offenses occurred, not the year the teachers’ licenses were revoked, as the license actions routinely trail incidents by months or years. In some cases, teachers lost their licenses occurred because an adult victim came forward about prior childhood abuse, the records showed.
That pattern suggests that lost licenses for incidents that occurred in 2025 are likely to rise over the next year.
The upswing in Colorado’s discipline wasn’t seen to the same degree nationwide, said Jimmy Adams, executive director of the , can organization that maintains a nationwide database of teacher license actions. Prior to 2020, the agency received, on average, records of 6,000 teacher license actions annually from all 50 states, Adams said.
That nudged up to an average of 6,100 actions annually beginning in 2020 and has remained around that average since, he said, noting that each state sets its own standards for discipline, which makes it difficult to draw comparisons across state lines. The vast majority of teachers never face license-level discipline, Adams said.
Until 2022, Colorado saw 18 or fewer lost teaching licenses annually, the records reviewed by The Post show. That jumped to 31 in 2022, then 24 in 2023 and 28 in 2024. So far, 16 teachers have lost licenses for incidents in 2025, according to the records.
“When you are driving down the road somewhere, the vast majority of other cars are doing exactly what they are supposed to do,” Adams said. “When you go to the doctor, the vast majority of doctors do exactly what you want them to do. And the same is true for teachers.”
Shifts in discipline are often caused by changes to the state’s approach to enforcement, improved training and education, or shifts in state law, Adams said.
Colorado Department of Education spokesman Jeremy Meyer said the state agency has not changed the way it handles discipline in recent years. He declined to make anyone available to speak with The Post about the shifts in discipline, saying agency staff — who do not track how many teachers are disciplined annually or why — could not comment on The Post’s findings without doing their own additional research.
Spotlight on teacher sexual abuse
The jump in Colorado teacher discipline came soon after a handful of high-profile cases put a spotlight on teacher sexual abuse and the responsibility of administrators and colleagues to report such allegations to outside authorities.
In 2018, Denver prosecutors brought criminal charges against five East High School staff members for failing to report an alleged sexual assault by one student on another. The charges were all dropped in 2019.
Also in 2018, three staff members at Aurora’s Prairie Middle School were charged with failure to report child abuse after they pressured a 14-year-old student to recant her claims that a teacher sexually abused her, ultimately forcing the student to apologize to the teacher and hug him before suspending the girl for making a false report. The teacher later confessed to sexually assaulting five students at the school.
The Cherry Creek School District paid $11.5 million to settle a lawsuit from the five victims. The failure-to-report charges were dismissed against the staffers in that case as well, because they fell outside the statute of limitations. In 2019, Colorado lawmakers extended the statute of limitations on failure to report child abuse from 18 months to three years.
As part of that $11.5 million settlement, the school district agreed to put together a comprehensive training on mandatory reporting, said attorney Siddhartha Rathod, whose law firm represented the five victims. The district went on to put together a “phenomenal” program that reached beyond just the Cherry Creek district, he said.
“So when teachers do see something, they are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we really do need to say something,’ ” he said, adding that he thinks the license actions show just “the tip of the iceberg.”
Similarly, more people have attended trainings offered by the in recent years, with annual attendees climbing from about 8,000 in 2018 to nearly 12,000 in 2025, according to the .
Those trainings cover topics like child sexual abuse prevention, mandatory reporting and cyber safety, said Gianna De Fries, a spokeswoman for the , which houses the office.
State lawmakers reformed Colorado’s mandatory reporting laws in 2025 in an attempt to clarify the often-misunderstood law, which requires certain professionals to report suspected child abuse to state authorities. Across the state, 27 people were charged with failure to report child abuse between 2018 and 2025, according to the . The highest annual count was six cases in 2022.
