As a line crew chief for the city’s electric utility, he and his team are responsible for the infrastructure that delivers electricity to more than 79,000 customers with an advertised 99.99% reliability. He couldn’t do it without his neighbor.

Before Vance and his wife started their family, the woman next door made them an offer: Whenever they had kids, she’d take care of them. That arrangement now allows both parents to hold jobs, and it’s what keeps Vance showing up for a community that depends on him.

“It allows me to have a career,” he said. “It allows my wife to have a career. It’s vital to me.”

Colorado’s essential workers — including firefighters, utility workers and teachers — are critical to safe and healthy communities. But the childcare system that supports them is fragile, expensive and shrinking.

When it fails, it isn’t just parents and families who feel it. It affects classrooms that go understaffed, the wildfire crew that can’t be backfilled and the power that stays out a little longer.

Essential workers with families are being forced to leave their hometowns and even their jobs. Fourteen percent of children under 5 in Colorado are in families where one or both caretakers didn’t take a job or made significant changes to their job responsibilities because of childcare problems, according to the , a 50-state report of household data developed by the .

As Elliot Haspel, an author and early childhood policy expert, writes in his book “Building a community without childcare is building a community on sand.”

Two jobs, few choices

Hygiene might seem like an unlikely place to be impacted by Colorado’s childcare crisis. The unincorporated Boulder County community, west of Longmont, is home to an aging population and a handful of small shops.

Though the community itself has just a few hundred residents, the serves a population of 3,240 residents across 43 square miles.

The fire department used to be fully volunteer-based, and staff responded to calls from their own homes. But those people “are now all retired,” said Lukas Moller, a volunteer Hygiene firefighter.

Rising housing costs are affecting the fire department����ap ability to recruit and retain staff. The district����ap 60 personnel now primarily live outside of the area and come into Hygiene to work at the station, including Moller and his family, who own a home in Longmont.

“The town of Hygiene is not a place where it����ap affordable to live,” Moller said.

The median home value in Boulder County is $756,300, which is 40% higher than the state median of $539,400 and 127% higher than the national median of $332,700, according to the .

Moller is a solutions engineer for , a software company, and his wife works in user experience at .

“If we both didn’t work,” he said, “we wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage payment and afford everything else.”

Add the cost of childcare to the cost of housing, and life gets a lot more expensive. How much more expensive? Moller said the cost of care “eats up 30% to 40% of your take-home before mortgage, bills, food and all that.” His 3-year-old son attends daycare five days a week so he can hold down a job and be a volunteer firefighter.

Without childcare support, staff with families couldn’t respond to emergencies.

“There have been times where a battalion chief has called off, saying, ‘Hey, we need backfill at the station. Crews on a wildfire in Left Hand,’ ” Moller said, “and I can’t go backfill because I’m home alone, and I can’t bring my 3-year-old.”

The need for emergency responders is becoming more acute. In 2024, the Hygiene Fire Protection District responded to more than 300 calls for structure fires, emergency medical services, hazardous materials incidents, utility issues, wildland fires, car crashes and technical rescues.

Proper staffing is critical, especially during a severe drought. This year, the area had more red flag days by March than it usually has in an entire season, Moller said.

On top of his full-time job, Moller typically spends 48 to 72 hours per month responding to health and fire emergencies. It����ap a lifelong dream, he said, and childcare is the only thing that makes it possible.

“This was something I always wanted to do. If our kid wasn’t in daycare, there’s no way I would’ve been able to pull that off with us both working full-time.”

The luck factor

The shortage of available childcare spots makes life even harder for those who serve their communities. In Colorado, licensed childcare facilities have the capacity to serve only two-thirds of children under age 6 in families where both parents work.

Consider Joey Angstman and his family. Angstman teaches biology and environmental science at .

“Just being with the students… watching them become people and be curious gives me hope for the future,” he said.

Angstman and his wife, who is also a teacher, are now parents to a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. Their son has attended an at-home daycare since he was 4 months old. The couple found the center through a friend.

“We were looking for childcare forever,” Angstman said. “We’d call people and nobody would respond to us.”

A coworker told his wife about a mutual contact who ran a daycare service. They called the provider immediately, and she “just happened to have an infant spot.”

The care experience for their son has been more consistent than it was for their daughter, who had to move centers a few times due to childcare center closures.

Private providers are in a precarious moment right now due to funding strains caused by , rising operational costs, and enrollment decreases tied to .

A 2026 showed that 25% of providers reported being at risk of closure this year or struggling to stay afloat.

Angstman was grateful to find somewhere for his daughter to land before she went into public school.

“We felt like just whatever we could find was kind of the best at that point,” he said.

Reliable childcare for their son gives both parents the chance to work and, as Angstman put it, to make an impact beyond their own home. For Greeley West, it means having the staff students need, which isn’t a guarantee: Colorado’s teacher shortage rate has nearly doubled since before the pandemic, according to .

Angstman sees his job as critical to equipping students with critical thinking about future policy and climate issues. His environmental science curriculum focuses heavily on preparing students for the challenges of a changing climate.

“This generation’s going to really have to be educated when it comes to understanding how climate change works and changes that need to be made,” he said.

The impossible choice

Vance, the line crew chief for Fort Collins Light and Power, and his wife are from northeast Colorado, near Fort Morgan. After having kids, they considered moving back to the area for cheaper care and housing, plus the family support available there.

“I pay more in daycare than I do my mortgage,” said Vance, who pays $2,200 a month for two kids, versus a $2,000 mortgage payment.

In Colorado’s 10 largest counties, families spend 18% to 25% of their monthly income on childcare, according to a report on licensed childcare from the Colorado-based, business-funded think tank . The federal government����ap benchmark for affordable childcare is 7%.

Ultimately, the Vances decided to stay in Fort Collins.��“It����ap hard to leave this community and hard to leave my job,” he said.

Vance takes great pride in his work.

“We serve our community,” Vance said. “Without line workers and without power companies, a lot of things we take for granted would not be here: your lights, your refrigerators, your TVs, your communications.”

It����ap a job Vance wouldn’t be able to do if their 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter weren’t taken care of by their neighbor, the at-home childcare provider.

For many middle-income families like the Vances, the cost of childcare has even affected how many children they plan to have.

“We’ve decided two is enough because if we were to throw a third one in, we’re like, ‘Oh geez, how could we afford that?’ That would be another $1,100 a month.”

The Vance family makes things work by delaying future costs, such as buying a larger home. They decided to wait and “stick it out where we’re at,” reassessing the possibility “once we can drop the daycare bill.”

Until then, Vance keeps showing up to work, helping keep the lights on for his neighbors.

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.

The then- superintendent and his wife, the district����ap chief human resources officer, extended a work trip and joined other guests of a conference in visiting the centuries-old city during the peak Halloween season. The excursion to the city, which is known for its Baroque architecture, cobbled streets and surrounding volcanoes, was arranged and paid for by the American School of Guatemala, which also footed the bill for the Smiths’ entire trip to the conference in nearby Guatemala City.

“We would be happy to go to Antigua,” Brenda Smith wrote in an email to school officials when asked if she and her husband consented to the trip. “It sounds like a beautiful place!”

But the international school has a connection that ethics experts say raises questions about it paying for the Smiths’ trip: The school is a client of , whose executives, David Palumbo and Richard Boerner, ran the conference that week.

The businessmen already knew the Smiths well. The couple had signed off on nearly $3 million worth of contracts a year earlier, when Cherry Creek Schools hired Education Accelerated to help the district create a teacher residency program.

The school paid at least $2,149 for both Christopher and Brenda Smith to travel to Guatemala, including for their plane tickets and hotel rooms, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Denver Post via a request.

The Smiths’ travel to Guatemala, which has not been reported before, was one of at least two paid international trips the couple accepted after Cherry Creek Schools began working with Education Accelerated three years ago. Though they had traveled on multiple work trips involving Palumbo and Boerner, including domestically, their journey to Guatemala and another trip to Brazil are notable because — unlike the others — they were paid for by international schools tied to Education Accelerated.

The travel and other connections between the Smiths and the company shed light on how Colorado’s fourth-largest school district became embroiled in a leadership scandal that former Cherry Creek employees say was enabled by the school board’s lax oversight of the superintendent.

The district, The Post found, sets few restrictions on the gifts the superintendent can accept, allowing its top official to receive payment for travel, conferences, social events and other honoraria.

The Post reviewed hundreds of pages of emails, calendar items, plane tickets, hotel reservations, social media posts and other documents that shed light on the Smiths’ travel and ties to Education Accelerated — including to Palumbo, the company’s chairman, and Boerner, the chief innovation officer.

The relationship between the Smiths, Palumbo and Boerner appears to have gone beyond a business connection, with emails suggesting personal travel between the couple and the executives during the months Cherry Creek Schools awarded contracts to Education Accelerated.

“It got to the point where it is the tail wagging the dog, because the superintendent didn’t have a lot of check and balance with the board,” said Jennifer Churchfield, a former Cherry Creek school board member who has called for more oversight of the superintendent in recent months.

As the ties between Education Accelerated and Cherry Creek Schools grew, Palumbo also began seeking business with a second metro-Denver school district, emails show. eventually hired the firm, along with , another company run by Palumbo and Boerner.

In Cherry Creek, the acceptance of��the paid trips to Guatemala and Brazil by Christopher and Brenda Smith appear to have violated that prohibits government employees from receiving a “gift of substantial value” that could influence their decision-making, ethics experts told The Post.

K-12 school districts, which receive billions of dollars of taxpayer money statewide, are largely left to govern themselves when it comes to ethical concerns, such as gifts, paid travel and other potential conflicts of interest.

Neither the nor the state’s has the ability to step in. Instead, the responsibility falls on local school boards, unless the violation is severe enough to involve law enforcement, experts said.

“The remedies there are political if (school boards) fail to do their due diligence in policing their own,” said Don Mayer, a professor of the practice of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Denver.

An attorney for Christopher and Brenda Smith pushed back on assertions that the Smiths’ travel to Guatemala was an ethical violation and denied that the paid trips influenced the couple’s decision to award Education Accelerated contracts.

“Absolutely not,” said the attorney, Tony Leffert.

He defended the Smiths’ interactions with Palumbo and Boerner, saying they were reflective of how vendors and districts operate in the education industry.

“This is how people do business,” Leffert said. “That����ap not a conflict of interest.”

The marriage of the top Cherry Creek officials had attracted some notice within the district. Christopher and Brenda Smith were married before either worked in the central office. Brenda Smith, who was first hired in 2019, began reporting to a deputy superintendent after the board hired her husband two years later, according to a 2022 district memo.

Christopher Smith resigned in January, just as the district was starting to face public scrutiny of his leadership. Neither he nor the school board has publicly given a reason for his departure. In early February, Brenda Smith was placed on paid administrative leave.

In the wake of the former superintendent’s departure, the district hired an outside law firm, , to investigate business travel expenses and vendor contracts approved by Christopher and Brenda Smith.

The investigation report hasn’t been released. But the firm found that “a preponderance of the evidence makes it more likely than not that Brenda Smith, and her husband former Superintendent Chris Smith, violated district policy in regard to their travel expenses and relationships with particular vendors,” according to a source briefed on the report who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the document hadn’t been made public.

The Board of Education and Interim Superintendent Jennifer Perry announced Friday, as The Post was preparing to publish this story, that the district had terminated Brenda Smith’s employment because of the investigation’s findings.

“The board did not have access to Chris Smith’s calendar and we were not aware of any trips that were paid for by vendors with contracts with the district,” Cherry Creek board President Anne Egan said in a statement. “Additionally, the terms of Chris Smith’s contract required him to notify the board in writing of all travel. That did not occur.”

The school board also launched an investigation into whether Education Accelerated overbilled the district for monthly travel costs and other reimbursements. Cherry Creek has since terminated any outstanding contracts with the company.

Palumbo, Boerner and Education Accelerated CEO Alicia Densford did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Post in recent weeks, including a list of detailed questions.

International travel raises questions

The Smiths arrived in Guatemala City on a Monday in late October. They spent seven days in the country, arriving two days before the conference and leaving two days after, according to plane tickets and itineraries reviewed by The Post.

Brenda Smith’s schedule showed she expected to spend the second day of the trip meeting with administrators of the , including the finance and HR directors. Christopher Smith was set to get a campus tour and other activities, documents showed.

The American School of Guatemala invited the Smiths to the country for a seminar of sorts that Education Accelerated refers to as a “think tank.” The event focused on apprenticeships, preparing students for postsecondary education and workforce readiness, said former board member Terry Bates.

“The hosting campus includes both a high school and a community college model, with pathways similar to those being developed in Cherry Creek,” Bates, who resigned April 24, said in an May 12 email. “The school specifically sought Cherry Creek’s guidance on building partnerships and advancing these types of programs.”

Cherry Creek Schools’ partnership with Education Accelerated developed the district����ap Aspiring Educator Pathway, which gives people an alternative way to obtain a teachers license by having schools train participants in their own classrooms while the students earn a bachelor’s degree from the .

The Guatemala event began on the third day of the Smiths’ trip to the country and lasted three days, itineraries showed. The Smiths went to Antigua on the Saturday after the event.

If employees decide to stay any extra days while on a work trip, they should pay for that additional time themselves, said Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously was executive director of Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission. She is also chair of the .

“That����ap a gift,” she said. “It takes it out of ‘this is a conference that is relevant to your job’ and puts it in the boondoggle category.”

Documents do not detail what the couple did while they were in Antigua, but they show the American School of Guatemala booked the educators a room at the five-star hotel. The room cost $257 for the night, according to the reservation.

The Smiths traveled on a bus to Antigua with other guests of the think tank, but they did not stay overnight, said Leffert, their attorney, adding that the couple went back to Guatemala City. He did not know who paid for their accommodation for their final night.

Leffert provided an email to The Post from the school, dated May 13, that confirmed the Smiths did not stay at the hotel in Antigua. (The school did not respond to the newspaper’s request for an interview.)

“They had a flight to catch out the next morning, so they did not stay there,” he said.

The Guatemala trip was the second time in two years that the Smiths traveled internationally to attend a “think tank” event facilitated by Palumbo.

The Post reported in March that Christopher Smith traveled to Brazil in April 2024 for a think tank put on by Palumbo and paid for by , which Boerner was superintendent of at the time.

Ahead of the Brazil trip, Boerner emailed Christopher Smith and told him the school could pay for his travel expenses, including if he decided to extend his stay through the weekend to “enjoy São Paulo.”

Brenda Smith also attended the conference in Brazil, the Post found. The international school paid for her trip, Leffert said.

The Guatemala and Brazil trips posed potential ethical violations because they involved foreign travel and the acceptance of payment for that travel by a client of a company that does business with Cherry Creek Schools, ethics experts said.

“There seems to be a likely conflict of interest here; public officials have a duty to the public not to be influenced by any personal benefits a supplier might offer,” said Mayer, the DU professor.

The think tank events appear regularly in the Smiths’ and Cherry Creek Schools’ history with Palumbo, Boerner and Education Accelerated. The district hosted at least one of the events, The Post found.

The think tanks bring together educators, administrators and other “thought leaders” to build a community and consider “what could be, what should be, and boldly, what will be,” Palumbo and Boerner wrote in a.

“The Think Tank concept acknowledges that education’s most complex challenges need thought space,” Palumbo and Boerner wrote. “As the world grows more complex and tomorrow’s careers are uncertain, relevance for schools means embracing characteristics such as adaptivity and agility and pushing themselves to be forward-thinking.”

In February 2025, Palumbo and Boerner organized at an conference in Washington, D.C., which was also attended by Christopher and Brenda Smith.

Cherry Creek Schools paid at least $2,992 for the couple to attend the conference, including their hotel, meals and airfare, expenditures reviewed by The Post show.

Bates defended the Smiths’ travel, which he said was not connected to any contract discussions with Education Accelerated. School board members, Bates said, were also aware of the trip and district staff stayed in touch with the Smiths when they were in Guatemala.

“It is also important to note that this type of travel is consistent with common practice among school district leaders, both within Cherry Creek and across the country,” Bates said. “Ongoing engagement with innovative programs and global peers is an important part of maintaining relevance and effectiveness in a rapidly evolving educational landscape.”

Bates, who was elected in November, resigned last month during a meeting in which the board revealed he made racist remarks.

“Terry Bates and his wife, Kelly, who was on the board from 2017-2025, are suggesting they had information that other board members did not,” Egan, the school board president, said in a statement. “That raises questions about Mr. Bates’ sources and the timing of these comments.”

Other travel, connections with company

By the time Christopher and Brenda Smith landed in Guatemala, they had known Palumbo for roughly three years.

The pair met the businessman on a cruise in the fall of 2022 — a story both the Smiths and Palumbo told Cherry Creek employees after Education Accelerated began working with the district, former staff members told The Post.

“There was definitely a personal relationship there,” said Jill Schneider, a former Cherry Creek Schools HR employee.

Months after the cruise, Cherry Creek Schools hired Education Accelerated to conduct a study on the feasibility of a teacher residency program. It was the first of at least five deals between the district and the company, which, if fully realized, would have paid Education Accelerated more than $3 million through 2028.

After the district’s Aspiring Educator Pathway was launched, Christopher Smith extolled its promise.

“I do believe this is going to change the way we educate teachers to be teachers across the country,” he told The Post for a story on the program in 2024.

On June 11 of that same year, Brenda Smith had signed the first of two Education Accelerated contracts that received school board approval. The deal was for $368,000 and continued the work the district and company began a year earlier.

Two weeks later, Palumbo emailed Christopher and Brenda Smith and invited them to Pittsburgh to watch the Steelers play in his hometown in October of that year, emails show. One of the Smiths’ sons played soccer for the University of Denver, and the team played in Pittsburgh the night after the Steelers challenged the Cowboys in that game.

“We could do a two fer,” Palumbo wrote to the couple.

When asked about the email exchange, Leffert said Palumbo never showed up to the soccer game.“They did business together and they were friendly,” he said.

On a Thursday morning in October 2024, Boerner emailed Christopher and Brenda Smith and told them about a new company, TruFit Talent, that he was forming with friends as a “new ‘way’ to consider recruitment.” (Palumbo is chairman of the company, according to TruFit����ap website.)

Boerner included a link to a podcast about TruFit in his email, which was sent four days after the Steelers game in October 2024.

“It����ap only 10 mins, so hopefully you can sneak a few mins to listen. Perhaps on the plane…LOL,” the now-CEO of TruFit Talent wrote. “Anyways, the company we are forming is called TruFit Talent. You guys are so well positioned to offer your thoughts and frankly as things get rolling I was hoping, Brenda, you might be willing to sit on our advisory board for our startup.”

Brenda Smith responded to Boerner a few hours later.

“Of course! I will listen to it today!” she said. “We are developing our comprehensive learning plan which starts with recruitment so I’m sure I’ll learn more great information to incorporate into Creek! See you in two days!”

“Awesome, thanks Brenda!” Boerner emailed back. “See ya’ beachside soon :)”

Documents reviewed by The Post do not show where the Smiths traveled after the email exchange with Boerner. Their calendars and Cherry Creek Schools’ travel records don’t show either travel with Boener that weekend or a work trip.

Both Boerner and Leffert have denied that Brenda Smith served on TruFit����ap advisory board.

Twelve days after Boerner and Brenda Smith’s email exchange, Christopher Smith approved Education Accelerated’s largest contract, a multiyear deal worth $2.6 million.

Feldman, the ethics expert, said Christopher and Brenda Smith should have disclosed their relationship with Palumbo and Boerner to the school board because the connection could have altered the directors’ decision to rubber-stamp the contracts approved in June and October of 2024.

“Frankly, they shouldn’t have been involved at all in awarding the contract,” she said of the Smiths. “… If this was a no-bid contract, it����ap inappropriate and it appears to be illegal.”

The contracts, in fact, did not undergo a bidding process, which would have made Education Accelerated compete against other firms for the job. Cherry Creek Schools spokeswoman Abbe Smith said the work was considered professional services, a category that doesn’t require a competitive process.

But she added: “Former Superintendent Smith administered the contract and it did not run through the typical procurement or legal review process.”

No-bid contracts need rigorous vetting so school districts know what they are getting in the deal, said Mayer, the DU professor.

The two contracts approved by the board in 2024 were part of board meetings’ consent agendas, which directors usually vote on at the recommendation of staff and without discussion.

Churchfield, the former board member, said the contracts for Education Accelerated, especially the multiyear deal for $2.6 million, should never have been part of the consent agenda. Instead, she said, district staff should have singled out the proposal so that directors could discuss the contract.

“If the board didn’t necessarily catch that, it should have been Chris’s responsibility to highlight that and have a conversation,” Chruchfield said. “… These types of things were massive lapses in how business should be conducted at Cherry Creek.”

Lawmaker: ‘I would be mortified’ as a taxpayer

The Smiths’ travel to Brazil occurred after Cherry Creek awarded smaller contracts to Education Accelerated. The Smiths approved the two largest contracts, which were worth about $3 million combined, after the trip, documents show.

Cherry Creek Schools’ work with the company was well-cemented by the time the Smiths traveled to Guatemala last year. The district also awarded a $350,000 contract — which has since been terminated — to EA FLGA Campus Partners LLC in July 2025, three months before the Guatemala trip.

That entity has some ties to Education Accelerated. is a real estate developer based in Washington, D.C. The firm’s Executive Vice President Fred Greene III, is an operating partner with Education Accelerated, according to the company’s website.

The district hired FLGA as part of a plan to potentially make employee housing part of the teacher residency program, documents showed.

The company’s work was in the early stages, looking at feasibility, land use considerations and other planning, when the contract ended, Greene said in an email.

“As is common with initiatives of this nature, the work was iterative and exploratory and had not advanced to project authorization, final design or implementation,” he said.

He added: “Neither I individually nor FLGA as an entity is a formal partner of Education Accelerated. We did however collaborate as it related to work at CCSD surrounding the exploration of a district workforce housing initiative.”

Ethics experts said the Smiths’ travel and the Education Accelerated contracts raise questions because state��law prohibits local government employees, including those at K-12 districts, from accepting a gift, which “would tend improperly to influence a reasonable person in his position to depart from the faithful and impartial discharge of public duties …”

Local officials are also “discouraged” from accepting a gift after they have already rewarded a person with an official action, such as a contract, according to state law.

But there’s a gap between the statute and the ability to enforce the law when it comes to K-12 districts. School systems don’t fall under the purview of the state Independent Ethics Commission, which places on the value of gifts that government officials might receive, such as paid travel.

The commission doesn’t oversee districts because the state constitution says jurisdiction applies only to municipalities and counties, said Dino Ioannides, the executive director of the commission.

State Rep. Tammy Story has tried repeatedly to pass legislation that would place K-12 school districts under the ethics commission’s purview. Had she been successful, residents could have filed a complaint with the commission against Cherry Creek Schools over the Smiths’ ties with Education Accelerated and the district����ap contracts with the company, she said.

“If I was a taxpayer in Cherry Creek, I would be mortified that public tax dollars were being used in this way,” Story said. “That just seems like a significant conflict of interest.”

Oversight of the superintendent and employees falls to the local school board since the commission doesn’t have jurisdiction, ethics experts said.

Cherry Creek Schools has its own , which is heavily influenced by state law. Still, it allows the superintendent to accept payment for travel to conferences, for social functions and for speeches.

By comparison, , the state’s largest district, explicitly prohibits employees, including Superintendent Alex Marrero, from accepting gifts of value from companies and organizations that conduct business with the district.

“It surprises me that a large district wouldn’t have pretty strict (policies),” Feldman said.

A $15,000 a month retainer fee

In June 2024, Palumbo emailed a superintendent at a neighboring school district to let him know he was in town.

He was persistently recruiting Aurora Public Schools’ business, including proposing a possible $15,000 monthly retainer to become a consultant to Superintendent Michael Giles, documents showed. Palumbo also asked Giles to meet in person when he was already in town meeting with staff at Cherry Creek Schools — which would later reimburse the businessman for those trips to the Denver metro, documents showed.

It����ap unclear if Giles, who previously worked at Cherry Creek Schools, ever hired Palumbo on a monthly retainer. APS did sign a $300,000 memorandum of understanding with Education Accelerated last year that ended in August. The district also worked with TruFit Talent until January.

The company helped APS with leadership development and in its hiring of the district’s chief information and technology officer and its talent acquisition coordinator, APS spokesman Corey Christiansen said in a statement.

“Education Accelerated and TruFit provided strong work and served as thoughtful partners as we transitioned new leaders into our school district,” Christiansen added.

As recently as April 7, Education Accelerated featured APS prominently on the company’s website. But the company has since deleted all but one mention of the district.��

Billed as , 5280 Recovery serves about 100 teenagers who deal with substance abuse and addiction. The school uses strategies such as coaching and group meetings to help kids get sober — and stay sober — one day at a time, said Keith Hayes, who served as the school’s director of recovery from 2020 to 2026. Many of the staff are also recovering addicts with their own past troubles and life lessons to share.

On one “Winning Wednesday” last May, Hayes stood in front of bleachers full of students and handed out chips to those marking monthly milestones of continuous sobriety. It was the last Wednesday of the 2024-25 academic year and one well worth celebrating. That year, the student body boasted an average of 440 days sober from drugs and alcohol, the highest average since the high school’s opening in 2018.

“There is no chaser with anything that we do here at 5280. It is raw, it is uncut and it is real,” Hayes said in an interview. “The ability to be vulnerable with each other without judgment, without shame, is a beautiful thing. And I think the only way that real recovery works is that we can have difficult conversations about difficult things.”

After the presentation, recovery coach Brittany Kitchens then led a group discussion to talk about the challenges of staying sober during the summer without the structure and accountability of school weeks. She asked the teenagers in the room how they would fill their free time and who they would surround themselves with in the absence of their classmates.

Educators say it����ap critical to build trusting relationships between students and adults, and to entrust student leaders to help shape the culture in their communities. For some, this also means working closely with students who get into trouble as well, and instituting deeper forms of development than simple discipline or punishment.

But approaches remain a patchwork across Colorado since the state’s “local control” form of governance leaves it up to individual school districts to determine curriculum content. When it comes to drugs, state law only requires that some type of prevention education must be taught, though it lacks specifics about what that should look like.

That means the breadth and depth of information covered varies “dramatically” between districts, said James Hurley, comprehensive health and physical education content specialist at the Colorado Department of Education.

This is the second story in The Denver Post����ap three-part series examining how drug education has evolved alongside changing cultural attitudes towards substances like cannabis and psychedelics, both of which are now legal in Colorado.

The Post spoke with five districts, both urban and rural, about their approaches; we also attended classes, virtually and in-person, at two. Prevention and intervention efforts within these districts are fairly new. Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest district, developed its programming in 2015 in response to marijuana legalization. Comparatively, the small Gunnison Watershed School District in southwestern Colorado hired its first student wellness coordinator in 2024 to oversee health programming and partnerships.

Normalizing sobriety

Educators said nicotine, cannabis and alcohol are the most common intoxicants they see and hear about among school-age kids, though awareness about opioids and psychedelics is growing.

In 2023, 20.5% of high school students reported they currently drink alcohol, according to the latest data available from the , issued every two years by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The survey found 12.8% of high schoolers use marijuana, 8.7% vape nicotine and 3.1% smoke cigarettes.

Additionally, 3.5% of respondents said they take prescription pain medicine not prescribed to them or differently than prescribed. (The 2025 Healthy Kids Colorado survey results are expected to be published in June.)

Some of those statistics mark a notable decrease from the prior survey issued in 2021, when 23.6% of high school-aged kids reported drinking alcohol, and 16.1% reported vaping. The percentage of students who reported abusing pain medication also dropped, from 5.9% in 2021. Marijuana and cigarette use remained flat.

Despite concerns that underage marijuana use would skyrocket after legalization in 2014, rates largely remained stable before decreasing significantly in recent years. In 2019, the use rate among high schoolers was 20.6%,compared to 21.2% in 2015, according to the survey.

The 2023 survey added a new question asking high school-aged kids if they had ever used psychedelics, and 3.8% reported that they had.

The data underscores that most local teenagers are not using drugs and alcohol — even though they often overestimate the number of their peers who are. For example, 42.8% said they thought a majority of their peers binge drank — defined as four or more alcoholic drinks in one night — compared to just 12.1% who reported having done so in the previous 30 days, according to the 2023 survey.

“We need to normalize sobriety,” Hayes said. “We need to normalize that it����ap OK to be comfortable in my own skin, I don’t need a social lubricant.”

A focus on trust and transparency

When talking to students about drugs, Colorado educators said transparency and trust are key to making an impact, especially for a generation with the world’s information at its fingertips.

During his tenure at 5280 Recovery High School, Hayes sought to create a judgment-free zone so kids felt comfortable being honest with their recovery coaches.

“Let’s stop telling people drugs and alcohol are bad because that’s not true. Because if they were so bad, would anybody be out here doing them?” Hayes said. “So we tell kids, ‘We love drugs, we know they’re phenomenal. We love alcohol. But if I truly work in an active program of recovery, that can be even more phenomenal.’ And that����ap the messaging. Kids dig that.”

In more traditional high school settings, the tone is typically more tempered. But educators still aim to create an environment where trust and honesty are reciprocal with their students. Having trusted adults to confide in is one critical factor that ultimately supports youth emotional and physical well-being, experts said, and well-being is inextricably linked to substance use and abuse.

At Ridgway Secondary School, where enrollment in grades six through 12 totals just 150 pupils, Shawnn Row has a unique opportunity to build a rapport with students and their families. In addition to being a health teacher, Row serves as the athletic director, an English teacher and outdoor education coordinator, so he sees the same kids in numerous capacities for many years.

As the ninth graders filed into health class on a chilly February morning last year, it was clear they were immediately engaged. For one, Row was speaking their language. The first slide on the day’s presentation about marijuana featured a meme with a picture of a young boy smiling, his head flanked by text. “4/20? Puff puff pass? I’d rather pass today’s math quiz, thanks.”

As the kids repeated the punchline and giggled, Row stood at the front of the room with a welcoming smile. “Today we’re gonna talk about weed,” he said.

Health is a year-round class here, though the subject matter varies with the semester. Students receive sex education in the fall and drug education in the spring. Row began creating all the lessons himself several years ago after finding that out-of-the-box curricula didn’t resonate. His presentations combine scientific information about the adolescent brain, the known benefits and risks of various substances, and personal anecdotes from his own life.

Row appreciates that his school leaders believe drug education should be a continuous conversation, instead of something that����ap relegated to a specific timeframe or initiative. That also gives him the flexibility to address what specifically interests students.

“Usually at the beginning of eighth grade (and) ninth grade health, I say, ‘Hey, write down topics you’re curious about or you’ve seen somewhere or you’ve heard about,’ and I’ll try to integrate them into the lessons I have planned already,” Row said.

Row’s lecture about cannabis didn’t sugarcoat the fact that it is widely available in Ridgway, a town of about 1,200 residents and three recreational dispensaries near downtown. The students were well aware of that, of course. You can smell it “walking around on any given Tuesday,” one said during class.

Row broke down the differences between cannabidiol and tetrahydrocannabinol, explaining the psychoactive effects and how those distinguish the CBD products in grocery stores from the THC products in pot shops. He also shared a study tracking youth use and later life outcomes, and a story about how Kansas police once pulled him over and searched his car because of his Colorado license plate.

After class, then-freshman Izzy Katz said she learned a lot from the presentation, but still wasn’t sure if she considered marijuana good or bad. Some drugs, like fentanyl and heroin, have very clear harms, she said. Cannabis didn’t seem similarly dangerous, but it also didn’t seem benign like Vitamin C.

“I feel like marijuana is kind of put in that grey area where people don’t know how to categorize it,” Katz said. Her sentiment exemplifies the challenge of discussing once-demonized drugs that are now being reframed in light of legalization.

“I really hammer away on (the fact that) the teenage brain is not fully developed, and no matter what substance it is you put in your body, it����ap going to have a bigger effect on you than it will on a 25-, 30- or 35-year-old,” Row said in an interview. “That is kind of the challenge with the legalization of weed and now psychedelics is, if adults don’t see it as harmful, the kids are less likely going to, as well.”��

Row navigated this again when he tackled psychedelics during an April health class. While substances like psilocybin and LSD aren’t as popular as vaping, cannabis or alcohol, Row believes kids have been exposed to them enough through movies, social media and the news to warrant a discussion. And he’s probably right.

The freshmen were noticeably excited the morning they arrived and saw a presentation titled “psychedelics/hallucinogens.” After discussing the role of the brain’s thalamus and how psychedelics suppress its ability to filter all the sensory experiences of the world, one student suggested that this may be a good thing in moderation. After all, The Beatles “took LSD all the time and they had fire music during that timeframe,” she said. Another said she has read that microdosing ‘shrooms can help with anxiety.

Yes, psychedelics could boost creativity in some cases, and yes, research has shown they can be beneficial in therapy, Row responded. But the effects are not all just fractals and rainbows.

“If our thalamus wasn’t working, we would be in sensory overload all the time, and when people do acid, do mushrooms, usually once they wear off, they are completely depleted,” Row told the class. It can take a day or more to recover from a single 8- to 12-hour trip, he added.

Youth leaders cultivate culture

Three hundred miles away, substance prevention specialist Leah Raffa is tasked with disseminating drug education to the 89,000-plus Denver Public Schools students. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. Instead, Raffa and her colleagues in the Exceptional Student Services sector, which addresses mental health and student well-being, curate a menu of prevention resources and give each school autonomy over the best ways to serve their unique student populations.

Offerings include curricula that focus specifically on vaping, cannabis, prescription drugs and opioids, as well as programming designed to help students cope with stress and create meaningful connections with peers and adults at their schools. Where intervention is needed, DPS will deploy school social workers and psychologists to work directly with individual kids.

Perhaps one of the more interesting ways the district seeks to address whole child well-being is through a program called . The program, which resurfaces throughout elementary, middle and high school, teaches kids to identify and draw upon their personal strengths as a means for creating healthy habits and lifestyles.

At the high school level, Sources of Strength is an extracurricular activity intended to cultivate a group of peer leaders who effectively act as positive influences in their schools. At Denver South High School, the group includes about 10 students, freshmen through seniors, who work with onsite social workers on initiatives that amplify inspiring stories and build community within the student body.

While this program doesn’t directly educate kids about drugs, it works as a prevention mechanism by empowering students to shape their school’s culture and build a peer support network for those who might be struggling, Raffa said.

Rose Negler, who graduated from Denver South last spring, spent several years participating in Sources of Strength and said the most impactful projects were often some of the smallest. For one initiative, students wrote down the name of a positive friend on a slip of paper and then collectively linked them into paper chains that decorated the hallways. The skills she learned also benefited her theater class once when a student went missing. Negler was able to talk to other students who were stressed and help diffuse the situation.

“A lot of my Sources skills came in handy there because I knew what to do in that kind of crisis and I was able to handle it,” she said.

At 5280 Recovery High School, the students even sponsor one another. “We can talk to the kids ‘til we’re blue in the face about what we did to get sober, but it hits different when it’s a 16-year-old who has your same experiences and got their way out of that hole,” Hayes said.

Whole child solutions

In some districts, the most significant evolution has come in how educators react and intervene when students are caught using. In the Montrose County School District on Colorado’s Western Slope, strategies revolve around identifying environmental or circumstantial factors, such as food insecurity, that may be causing students’ drug use and connecting them with community organizations to help remedy those, said Megan Farley, the district����ap manager of student health and safety.

“What we find is (a student) might be using nicotine or something, but that����ap the tip of what����ap actually happening,” Farley said. “We go in with a whole person, whole family approach. Like if it����ap food that you need from the food bank, we hook you up with deliveries from the food bank.”

The district began shifting its approach in 2018, in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and injured 17 others. A decade ago, Montrose had no school social workers in a district serving roughly 6,000 students. Today, Farley manages a team of up to 20 nurses, therapists, social workers, behavior coaches and school resource officers to support students’ needs.

The district also maintains partnerships with local organizations, like Hilltop Community Resources, so that young people can be connected to specific groups or specialists they may need for support. All someone within the district has to do is express concern about an individual kid and Farley’s team will jump into action.

This ethos applies if a student gets in trouble for something other than drugs, too, said district spokesperson Matt Jenkins.��“A child who is in crisis is not going to go away. We’re not going to expel our way out of that problem. We have to find an intervention and find the solutions in concert with that family to turn the corner.”

Most of the educators who spoke to The Post said they were reevaluating discipline methods in hopes of finding long-lasting solutions. Instead of pushing kids away with punishments like suspension, these educators want to bring the students closer.

Here, again, is where trust comes into play, said Hayes. Given that students at 5280 Recovery High School are in recovery, relapse is a real possibility. When that happens — as it sometimes does — the staff works to comfort and support the individual, connect them with groups and assure them they are not a moral failure.

“A lot of us come into recovery with so much guilt and shame for the things that we’ve done. These kids need love — lots of love and lots of grace and lots of understanding,” Hayes said. “Being able to be there for them and supporting them and encouraging them to keep going is very important.”

This series was reported with support of the .

Last week, the state legislature’s to the , part of a host of cost-saving measures lawmakers are taking to address Colorado’s massive budget deficit. The bill to dissolve the program is set to be heard by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.

Cutting the program would result in savings of $1.6 million in the 2026-27 fiscal year and $2.7 million in the 2027-28 fiscal year, according to legislative documents.

The��TREP program, as it’s known, was born out of a . TREP recruits qualifying high school students interested in becoming teachers and places them on a path to complete college courses while still in high school. The program keeps students enrolled in their high schools for two years after graduation to collect per-pupil state funding that pays their tuition while they take their first two years’ worth of college courses.

The JBC’s proposal would only allow TREP students in their fifth year to finish out the program next academic year. All other students, including those currently in their senior years of high school, are no longer eligible for the program, .

“We understand that the JBC intends to include this budget reduction in the long bill as part of their ongoing work to balance our state budget,” said Jeremy Meyer, Department of Education spokesman.

Stephanie Christian’s daughter, 18-year-old Abby Christian, has been in the TREP program at Highlands Ranch public charter school since her sophomore year. The teen’s autistic brother inspired her to become an elementary educator.

Stephanie Christian said the funding provided by the TREP program was appealing for an aspiring teacher who would enter a historically lower-paying career.

“It’s a pathway because educators are paid so little that they can’t really afford to take out massive amounts of loans they can’t pay back,” Stephanie Christian said. “This pathway established a pipeline for more teachers to go into education to address our extremely high teacher shortage problem.”

Abby Christian was set to attend the in the fall as a TREP student. Last week, her high school counselor informed her that funding for the program was being cut and she was no longer eligible.

The first two years of Abby Christian’s college tuition would no longer be covered as promised, and, because students in the program were still technically counted as high schoolers, they had not previously been eligible to apply for financial aid.

“We don’t have the money for Abby to go to college now,” Stephanie Christian said. “We’ve reached out to see what’s possible, but universities are telling us they’ve already given out their institutional aid. They weren’t allowed to apply for financial aid. Everything is blown up… She’s at a point we either have to do a gap year, where she doesn’t go to school next year, unless something else comes up.”

About 220 students were enrolled in TREP across the state with a focus on recruiting students from lower-income and diverse backgrounds, according to the Department of Education. It’s not clear how many of those students were about to begin college and will lose that funding.

Recent data from the Department of Education indicated that 10 of the 221 students in TREP have earned a credential through the program. State officials said it will be years before they know how many of those students became teachers, but that the program was growing in popularity prior to this funding decision.

Stephanie Christian said choosing to cut this program signaled to the state’s education workforce that teachers are not valued.

“Our only hope is to raise awareness to get the JBC to reconsider,” Stephanie Christian said.

State Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat and vice chair of the JBC, could not be reached for comment about the program.

Stephanie Christian contacted her state senator — John Carson, R-Douglas County — about the issue.

Carson told The Denver Post he’s had multiple families in the same boat as the Christians contact him about the situation.

“I think the proper approach to cutting it is��(to) at least grandfather in the students in it now who are about to graduate,” Carson said. “We’re in a tight budget situation, so I realize we’re certainly going to have to make some painful decisions in the next couple of weeks, but I would think if you’re going to eliminate a program like this, at least cut it off in a way that phases it out in a different way.”

Updated 3:15 p.m. April 7, 2026: This story has been updated to correct the title of state Sen. Jeff Bridges, who serves as the vice chair of the Joint Budget Committee.

And worker safety advocates have winced at attempts federal safety regulations that they say will leave workers facing unnecessarily dangerous conditions.

All are examples of the new uncertainty surrounding federal policy since President Donald Trump returned to office last year. Colorado’s Democratic legislative majority already had sought to insulate the state from Republican priorities that are at odds with their own — resulting in laws that have enshrined protections for immigrants, abortion, voting and more in state law.

And now lawmakers are turning to areas where the federal government has pulled back under Trump. This year, Democrats have already unveiled a suite of bills that would give the state more say in authorizing vaccines, would grant it more authority to enforce workplace safety and would aim to better protect students with disabilities, among other legislation.

In all cases, the backers have cast the efforts as the state stepping in where an unreliable federal partner has stepped back.

“We have never had to question whether or not the federal government is a reliable partner, and now we do need to,” said Heather Tritten, the CEO of the Colorado Children’s Campaign and a backer of the disability rights bill. “When we think about the programs like civil rights in education, or even in Medicaid or TANF (the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program) or education, we’re seeing that the money and partnership we could always rely on just isn’t there. And that means we need something here that can take up that space.”

House Speaker Julie McCluskie, a Dillon Democrat, says it’s not a posture unique to Colorado.

She recalled that during a meeting with legislative leaders from other states last year, there was “a desire to really assert state authority in this moment.”

“So many of the issues that I think we’ve looked to the federal government to resolve are now falling to the states to grapple with,” McCluskie said.

It remains unclear how assertive Gov. Jared Polis, also a Democrat, is willing to be when it comes to passing such laws, which have drawn opposition from Republicans and, in some cases, business groups. Eric Maruyama, a spokesperson for Polis, said the governor will review every bill that reaches his desk individually.

But he also understands the legislative priority.

“It is not surprising that the legislature is trying to fill gaps being created by the federal government and congressional inaction on some of the hardest problems facing the country,” Maruyama said in a statement. “Regardless of federal chaos, the governor is focused on delivering on better education, more housing options Coloradans can afford, less expensive healthcare, and protecting our Colorado for all.”

Months of silence from federal office

One new piece of legislation is aimed at helping families like Sutton’s.

Her high school-aged daughter lives with serious medical conditions — the type of things where, without specific care, she could lose the ability to walk or risk organ shutdown, Sutton said. At the beginning of the school year, the family sought and received a 504 plan, a federal designation meant to guarantee that people with physical disabilities have the same access to education as their peers.

It didn’t take long for Sutton to suspect that the accommodations required by the 504 plan were not being met. She said she raised her concerns to Palmer Ridge High School officials in October, then to the school district before she escalated it to in December.

Three months later, Sutton said she’s heard nothing beyond an acknowledgement her complaint has been received.

Her daughter, meanwhile, has faced new diagnoses and has spent more time in the hospital. All the while, school work has piled up as her accommodations aren’t met, Sutton said. Sutton declined to discuss some aspects of her daughter’s situation, as well as some details of her medical conditions, with The Denver Post because of a pending legal complaint and to protect her daughter’s privacy.

“We’re in the thick of it right now,” Sutton said. “Beyond the emotional effect it’s had on my child, it’s had real academic harm for her. The implications are very real. For our students, depending on what their post-high school goals are, are we setting them up for success — especially when they already have to do so much to overcome their existing disabilities? I don’t think so.”

In a statement Friday, Rick Frampton, executive director of student services for Lewis-Palmer School District 38, didn’t address Sutton’s situation but said the district “believes in implementing all 504 plans with integrity and a commitment to ensuring that students with disabilities receive equal access to education.”

“We follow a structured process and work closely with families to implement and develop those plans,” Frampton said.

Stories like Sutton’s spurred Sen. Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat, to introduce . Last March, the federal Office of Civil Rights laid off more than half of its staff and closed more than half of its regional offices, .

The office also “deprioritized” its usual work of investigating civil rights complaints, such as those filed by students with disabilities, according to the think tank.

SB-125 would give the state similar power and authority that was previously left in the hands of the federal office. Kolker says the goal is to recreate what had previously been accepted practice at the state level.

As it stands now, 504 plans are solely the purview of federal enforcement and outside the scope of state offices.

“The cases (the federal office) investigates are very important for these families to have someone look into what is happening,” Kolker said. “This is just a fundamental right for our disabled community.”

Madi Ashour, a policy advisor with the Colorado Children’s Campaign, said the goal is to make it so there’s “no wrong door” for families looking for recourse when their children’s needs aren’t being met.

Advocates also hope the bill, if it becomes law, would give families needed support even if the Trump administration, or the next president, reverses course. Ashour estimates the bill would require the addition of three attorneys at the Colorado Department of Education to help families navigate and seek support for their 504 plans or other accommodations. Legislative analysts haven’t yet released a fiscal note.

Paying for the bill��is one of its bigger hurdles, Kolker said. Advocates estimate it may cost about $500,000, though nonpartisan fiscal analysts have not yet released their analysis. Kolker has introduced other bills that may produce budget savings that he hopes to leverage to pay for SB-125, but nothing is set in stone.

For Sutton, she sees the bill as vital to making sure families can get the support they need and avert the stress her family has experienced. Delays of even a few months represent time no one can get back — and for children, it����ap especially formative time that could be key to their education.

“Parents shouldn’t have to become experts in civil rights law just so their child can receive the accommodations their school has already approved,” Sutton said.

Money worries loom over ambitions

Other proposals this year are intended to give the state some enforcement power in places typically covered by the federal government. But how to pay for the enforcement remains a hurdle in a particularly cash-strapped year.

The sponsors of seek to enshrine federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards — those intended to keep workers safe — in state law. But because the state doesn’t have money for new programs, it would rely on labor unions, individuals and state agents by giving them the ability to sue over violations.

The bill has drawn staunch opposition from business groups.

Sponsoring Reps. Manny Rutinel and Elizabeth Velasco, both Democrats, said they hoped to expand the proposal in future years to include direct state enforcement. But with the Trump administration threatening to rescind OSHA’s — an umbrella regulation that requires generally safe workplaces — for “inherently risky professional activities,” they felt urgency to act now.

“If I had the magic wand, of course, I would want to have a state OSHA, a state entity or department that could be protecting workers and doing this rulemaking and looking at all the things that need to be done to hold bad actors accountable,” Velasco said. “But with our budgetary environment — with the barriers we are seeing — we believe that this is one good avenue to start with this issue.”

The Colorado Chamber of Commerce contends that the bill would create duplicative enforcement and regulatory systems. Meghan Dollar, the chamber’s senior vice president of government affairs, also expressed concern about it expanding civil liability for employers.

“It could lead to conflicting legal standards with multiple levels of overly complicated rules, creating confusion over how state and federal enforcement interact,” Dollar said in a statement. “Regarding filling hypothetical gaps in OSHA enforcement, there are more effective ways to address issues that arise with changes to federal rules — layering separate state standards and creating new litigation risks will only increase costs, uncertainty and regulatory complexity for business.”

HB-1054 cleared its first hurdle at the end of February, passing a narrow 7-6 vote in the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee. It now heads to the Appropriations Committee, where voting members will determine if the state has money to push the matter.

That question may not be resolved for a month or longer, as state budget writers look at how to shave nearly $800 million in planned spending for the upcoming year to close the state’s gap.

“When the Trump administration decided to gut our health care, Medicaid — to the tune of almost $1 trillion — it gutted OSHA in the process,” said Rutinel, a Commerce City Democrat who’s running for Congress. He was referring to the omnibus spending package that Trump signed into law last summer. “(The administration) did it all to give tax breaks to his corporate donors and to pump billions of dollars into immigration enforcement.

“Colorado is having to step in and find ways so that, despite our budget concerns, we can still find ways to protect our most vulnerable workers”

‘Trying to insulate Colorado’ on vaccines

A similar motivation is behind recent vaccine legislation at the Capitol.

Asturias, the Children’s Hospital Colorado doctor, said that over the past year, he’s seen a huge amount of anxiety among families that are trying to navigate changing federal guidelines and do what����ap best for their children.

Since Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long trafficked in about vaccine safety, to head the federal health agency, Kennedy has moved to change the recommended vaccine schedule.

“We have seen a huge amount of patients and families and parents being confused now,” Asturias said. “Even parents who are health care providers are now reaching out and saying, ‘Can you give me a good explanation of what’s changing?’ ”

To calm those concerns, Asturias is supporting . If it becomes law, the measure will give state health officials the authority to use immunization guidance from medical professional organizations, and outside of the federal advisory committee steered by Kennedy, when approving vaccine schedules. It would build off prior efforts by the legislature and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment to maintain vaccine access in Colorado.��

Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat and emergency room nurse by trade, doesn’t see vaccines as a partisan issue. But when he brought the bill to the floor for debate in February, he was direct in his diagnosis.

This bill, Mullica said, is about “trying to insulate Colorado from some of the dysfunction that we see coming out of Washington, D.C., and with Secretary Kennedy.”

That wasn’t meant as a partisan jab at a Republican administration, Mullica said, but was him “calling balls and strikes,” just like he would if a Democrat was doing something he disagreed with.

“I think that it’s just the facts,” Mullica said. “They are doing things … that just do not follow the science and do not follow the experts and what we should be doing.”

He said it was time for state policymakers to “step up.”

But the bill nonetheless has caused substantial bristling among Republicans. None voted for the measure when it passed the Senate, with several raising concerns about liability for people harmed by vaccines.

Senate Minority Leader Cleave Simpson, an Alamosa Republican, said the vaccine bill was interesting enough to warrant consideration. But starting the conversation with a posture of opposing the Trump administration “certainly slanted it a little bit.”

“As the minority leader, and a lifelong Republican, these are probably opportunities for some level of thoughtful engagement and conversation,” Simpsons said. “But it starts from that place of the influence national politics might be and are having on the conversations here.”

He said he’s been approached about supporting other measures that he substantively agrees with. But language that’s designed “to put a stick in the eye of the federal government” keeps him from signing on.

“We should, where we can, be thoughtful and avoid those kind of conversations, and just focus on what����ap good for Colorado and the reasons why — and not what the current administration makeup looks like,” Simpson said.

The agency issued its decision — which was made public Wednesday and found Cherry Creek was out of compliance with the federal — after a parent of a 10-year-old student filed a complaint in October.

The investigation determined that 11 students had individualized education programs, or IEPs, that required Cherry Creek to provide them with sign-language interpreters at school. But the district did not adequately staff the building — an elementary school that is not identified — with interpreters for about three months, according to the .

As a result, Cherry Creek did not provide students with disabilities the “free appropriate public education” that children have a right to under federal law, state investigators wrote.

“The IDEA (Act) does not excuse noncompliance with IEP implementation due to staff shortages,” state investigators wrote.

Cherry Creek was temporarily unable to provide interpreters for students at the school because the district needed to renegotiate contracts with several staffing agencies last summer, district spokeswoman Ashley Verville said in a statement.

“As soon as the Department of Special Populations recognized these services couldn’t be provided for students, they made families aware of the issue and worked with families to identify alternative supports,” she said. “As the CDE decision states, school staff made every effort possible to provide support for these students in the interim.”

The school at the center of the report employed only one interpreter, but used staffing agencies to fill remaining positions to ensure there were enough interpreters to cover each grade level with a student who required their services, according to the education department.

But Cherry Creek ended its contract with a staffing agency in early August, a week before students were expected to return to class for the new school year, according to the report.

The school required five interpreters for the 2025-26 academic year, but employees found out on Aug. 6 that four interpreters supplied by the staffing agency were no longer available, the report said.

School employees notified parents the day before school started that their children — who ranged from kindergarteners to fifth-graders — would not have access to interpreters. Three employees who knew sign language “attempted to push into students’ classrooms as needed to provide communication support,” the report said.

But teachers told state investigators that the three employees, who had other duties, were not enough to meet students’ needs, and despite their efforts, “all students were adversely affected by the lack of interpretation services,” the state found.

Two students were “substantially limited in their ability to participate in classwork,” according to the report, which found the children were unable to understand instructions given or participate in class discussions.

A different student — a third-grader with autism — began having behavioral concerns because the child was frustrated at not being able to communicate at school, according to the report. A fourth student — also a third-grader — had “significant attendance issues,” according to the report.

“The CDE recognizes the value of the work school staff performed on short notice to address unexpected vacancies,” investigators wrote. “Specifically, these three signing-proficient staff members performed work far beyond their job descriptions to support students during an exceptionally difficult school year.”

Still, “there was a shortfall in sign language interpretation services for each of the students,” the report said.

Cherry Creek eventually reached an agreement with two staffing agencies to resume their contracts and to supply sign-language interpreters. The first contract interpreter began working at the school on Oct. 30, but the school didn’t become fully staffed with interpreters until Nov. 12, according to the report.

The education department is ordering Cherry Creek to take several steps as a result of investigators’ findings, including submitting a corrective action plan by March 17.

The district must also provide all affected students with the opportunity to take compensatory lessons, which are to be provided at Cherry Creek’s expense and taught using American Sign Language or with an interpreter. The lessons must also have at least 50 hours of student engagement time and give the children the opportunity to interact with their peers, according to the report.

“CDE further determined this is not a systemic issue, and the district is developing and implementing a corrective action plan to make up for the loss of these services and to address potential staffing issues in the future,” Verville, the district spokeswoman, said in her statement.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on Friday, is one of several cases across the nation that aim to open the door for state governments to use public dollars to operate religious schools.

The Colorado lawsuit involves , which opened in August with 29 students and calls itself the state’s “first public Christian school.”

The news that Riverstone was a faith-based school caught state officials by surprise, spurring them to caution school leaders that the could withhold funding since the state constitution prohibits religious public schools, .

Riverstone and the , which authorized the school to open, are now challenging that state law with their lawsuit — a step that the school appears to have been designed for.

Emails from an attorney representing the school and the Education reEnvisioned BOCES last year revealed that, after the on whether to allow Oklahoma’s government to fund a Catholic charter school, the attorney was asked by the religious legal organization to “find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado,” Chalkbeat reported.

BOCES provide educational services such as special education, staff development and other support across multiple school districts to help the districts split costs.

“Colorado’s laws discriminating against religious schools are unconstitutional under the First Amendment based on a series of recent cases which find that states are not free to exclude religious actors from generally available government programs based on religion,” said Jeremy Dys, one of the attorneys representing the Education reEnvisioned BOCES, in a statement.

“We look forward to the court declaring this odious discrimination unconstitutional and affirming the rights of religious students and parents to be treated fairly,” he added.

Riverstone and the Education reEnvisioned BOCES filed their lawsuit against state Education Commissioner Susana Córdova and members of the state Board of Education.

Jeremy Meyer, a spokesman for the education department, declined to comment Wednesday, citing the ongoing litigation.

A has also been filed by Wilberforce Academy, which wants to operate a religious school in Knox County, Tennesse.

Riverstone has received state funding, but the education department is now undertaking an audit of the school’s pupil count, according to the lawsuit.��The school alleges that “those funds will imminently be clawed back following the ongoing audit,” according to the lawsuit.

in El Paso County, is the fiscal agent for the Education reEnvisioned BCOES. The group has an with , which allows Riverstone to operate within that district����ap boundary.

Riverstone leaders didn’t mention religion on their application for a school code with the state nor did they mention it in the agreement with Pueblo 70,

In October, the state education department sent a letter to District 49 Superintendent Peter Hilts and Education ReEnvisioned BOCES Director Ken Witt, telling them that the agency had recently learned that the group had “opened a fully outsourced and privately contracted ‘public school’ called Riverstone Academy.”

The per-pupil funding that Riverstone received from the October statewide count of K-12 students comes from the state via District 49 and the Education ReEnvisioned BOCES, according to the letter.

Education reEnvisioned BCOES will give Riverstone $324,330 in per-pupil funding based on the school’s 2025-26 enrollment count, Dys said.

The education department’s letter also noted that the school has advertised itself as a religious school, but the Colorado Constitution requires public schools to be nonsectarian.

Witt, who is the former superintendent of the Woodland Park School District, replied to the education department����ap letter by saying, “We are alarmed at the threat to funding a school due to the religious status of Riverstone Academy.”

“…Education reEnvisioned does not find that Riverstone Academy is ‘sectarian’ under Colorado law,” he wrote, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The Post.

The education department said in a Feb. 13 letter to Witt that its audit of Riverstone’s pupil count is “based on neutral criteria that were applied equally to all districts, BOCES and the Charter School Institute,” according to a copy reviewed by The Post.

“…(T)he religious status of the entity providing instructional minutes is not relevant to the analysis,” wrote Jennifer Okes, district operations special adviser, for the Department of Education.

It’s not clear where Riverstone Academy is currently located.

In January, Pueblo County officials ordered Riverstone to close its building because of unaddressed safety concerns, Chalkbeat reported.

Riverstone moved to a new location for a few weeks and expects to be back in its building soon, said Michael Francisco, one of the school’s attorneys.��But he declined to say where the school is now operating.

The drop in students — a 1.1% overall reduction in the current academic year — comes as fewer Coloradans are having babies. The state’s biggest K-12 districts also reported larger-than-expected enrollment declines, a trend officials at Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools attributed to fewer immigrant students attending their schools as the Trump administration ramped up mass deportations.

Statewide, districts enrolled 870,793 students in preschool through 12th grade when the official count took place in October, which is down from 881,065 pupils in 2024, according to new data released Tuesday by the .

“Colorado continues to experience enrollment trends shaped by a declining school-aged population, increasing racial and ethnic diversity, and shifts toward part-time and online learning,” Education Commissioner Susana Córdova said in a statement. “These changes require thoughtful adaptation, and our schools are working diligently to continue serving students effectively across the state.”

The agency also released data Tuesday that showed Colorado’s high school graduation rate reached its highest level in more than 10 years as 85.6% of students received their diplomas on time during the 2024-25 academic year.

The last academic year’s graduation rate increased by 1.4 percentage points from the previous school year as more than 60,380 students graduated in four years, the data showed.

The statewide dropout rate for 2024-25 also fell by less than a percentage point from the previous year to 1.6%, or 7,437 pupils. It’s the lowest rate in state history, according to the education department.

In Colorado, students can take up to seven years to graduate from high school. The dropout rate reflects how many students in seventh through 12th grade left school before graduating.

“Colorado’s graduation and dropout data show encouraging progress, with more students earning their diplomas and fewer leaving school before graduation,” Córdova said in a statement.

DPS, the state’s largest district, saw its four-year graduation rate increase from 79.9% during the 2023-24 academic year to 81.9% last year. The district said that was the largest year-over-year jump since 2006-2007.

Jeffco Public Schools, the state’s second-largest district, had an 86.7% four-year graduation rate for the 2024-25 academic year, which is not only up from 85% the previous year but a 16-year high for the district.

“We are just really proud to have the highest graduation rates ever,” said Superintendent Tracy Dorland.

Jeffco Public Schools’ district-run high schools also saw their four-year graduation rates increase a percentage point to 94%, she said.

The district has not only prioritized academics, but also created a sense of belonging for students via clubs and non-academic activities that help keep them engaged with school through graduation, Dorland said.

“There’s not a single thing we’re doing that isn’t worthwhile,” she said, adding that it’s why it’s difficult for Jeffco Public Schools to implement the districtwide budget cuts currently underway because of declining enrollment.

saw its dropout rate decrease by 1.3 percentage points to 1.4% as well as a four-year graduation rate of 88.9%. The district’s graduation rate was even higher — 90.6% — among Latino students.

Superintendent Barbara Kimzey said Pueblo School District 60 has worked on engaging students, such as through transition programs for sixth- and ninth-graders, and creating city bus routes for high schoolers.

“Our goal is for every student in our schools to have at least one adult who is trusted, and they can go to and get support,” she said.

A multi-year decline

Public school enrollment has been falling nationwide in recent years as a result of fewer Americans having babies. Colorado’s changing demographics and high housing prices have also altered where families live.

The in Carbondale saw enrollment plummet at a higher percentage — 4.2% — than the state, which district officials attributed to a “sharp” increase in housing costs and shortages. The district has 5,621 students, state data showed.

“We have been aware of declining enrollment trends in our district for the last year and a half,” Superintendent Anna Cole said in a statement. “While these trends are not unique to (the Roaring Fork School District), they present real challenges that we must manage. (The district) will be exploring all options as we begin working on the 26/27 budget to help ensure our students have the best education possible.”

Statewide, enrollment peaked at 913,223 students in 2019.

In October 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, enrollment dropped 3.3% — or by more than 30,000 students — from the previous year.

Since 2020, enrollment had steadily fallen by less than 1% annually, except for a small, 0.4% increase of 3,318 students in 2021 when schools mostly resumed in-person learning.

An influx of immigrant families to Colorado in recent years has provided a buffer to districts experiencing declining enrollment, but the federal government has ramped up mass deportations since President Donald Trump resumed office a year ago.

Córdova said during a media call Tuesday that state officials “anticipated some impact” in enrollment from the changes in federal immigration policy.

Statewide, enrollment of multilingual learners dropped by 5.7% —��or nearly 6,000 students — to 99,385 children between October 2024 and October 2025, according to the education department.

The state also saw 4,395 fewer Latino students enroll in schools this academic year compared to the 2024-25 school year, which is when the population’s enrollment jumped by 8,722 pupils from the previous year.

The expected to have about 350 fewer students in its classrooms this year, but lost 483 pupils. The district has 48,035 students.

Spokeswoman Lauren Snell said in an email that changes in enrollment for at-risk students and special populations, such as English language learners and immigrant students, “increased more than anticipated.”

The Cherry Creek School District’s kindergarten class is the smallest it has been in about 25 years, she said, noting that fewer students live in school boundaries as more people are “aging in place” and don’t have school-aged children.

Low enrollment felt by urban, rural districts

Declining enrollment is hitting districts financially as they receive less per-pupil funding from the state when there are fewer children in their classrooms. This was most recently seen with , the state’s second-largest district, which expects to run a $49 million deficit for the 2025-26 academic year and is cutting jobs.

Jeffco Public Schools, which has 74,191 students, expected enrollment to drop by 933 pupils this year, but instead lost 1,530 students — a $5 million hit to the district����ap revenues.

“(I’m) struggling with the fact we have to make these reductions, given the lack of funding that the state of Colorado gives education,” said Dorland, the district’s superintendent.

Smaller districts will have an even harder time adjusting their budgets to declining enrollment, said Tracie Rainey, executive director of the .

“When you lose students, they don’t all come out of one building or one grade level,” she said. “So it doesn’t mean that you can cut staff or resources easily.”

Districts in mountain communities, including Summit County and Aspen, are also seeing larger-than-expected drops in enrollment because of federal immigration policies, said Frank Reeves, director of operations for the .

Meanwhile, districts on the Eastern Plains are affected by the struggling agriculture industry, as well as by the culture wars that emerged during the pandemic and have driven families to homeschool their kids or put them in online schools, Reeves said.

“We are losing some kids that we don’t want to lose because of that,” he said.

Statewide, the number of students who are homeschooled jumped by 5.5% to 10,367 pupils in the fall. By comparison, about 9,826 students were homeschooled in 2024, data showed.

The state also saw a 2.9% increase in students registered in online programs. More than 34,600 pupils attend school online compared to 33,629 students in 2024, according to the data.

Riverstone Academy officials must acknowledge by Monday evening their intent to close the school at its current location, according to a Jan. 6 letter sent by the assistant county attorney to Quin Friberg, Riverstone’s executive director.

If school leaders don’t comply, county officials will seek an emergency injunction from the courts requiring immediate closure, the letter says.

The county’s order marks the latest development in Riverstone’s short and controversial existence. It opened in August with about 30 kindergarten through fifth grade students, advertising itself as offering “a Christian foundation” and Christian curriculum.

It����ap unclear if the closure of Riverstone’s building, a former office located in an industrial area, will spell the end of the school or if its leaders will seek to move it elsewhere or switch to an online format. In a December email to a county official, Friberg wrote that Riverstone had “gotten a bit ahead of ourselves” but wanted to find a way to keep its students in school, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat in a public records request.

Friberg did not respond to requests for comment Friday evening or Saturday. Ken Witt and Lis Richard, the executive director and board president, respectively, of Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, the public education cooperative that authorized Riverstone to open, did not respond to requests for comment either.

News of the school burst into the open in October, when Witt publicly declared it Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” surprising state education officials and members of the public.

Leaders from the Colorado Department of Education quickly warned that they could withhold public funding for the school because the Colorado constitution bars religious public schools. Witt countered that withholding public money from the school would amount to religious discrimination.

An that over the question of whether public money can be used for religious schools. The U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on such a case out of Oklahoma last spring. Brad Miller, a Colorado lawyer who represents Education reEnvisioned, wrote in the June email that he’d been approached by a Christian law firm about starting a new test case.

In July, Friberg met with county officials about his plans for a school in leased space inside a former office near concrete, landscaping, and marijuana businesses. In late August, county officials sent a six-page letter detailing numerous zoning and building changes that would be needed first, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat through an open records request. But Friberg had opened Riverstone two weeks earlier.

In late October, shortly after Riverstone’s existence became widely known, Pueblo County health, fire, building, and zoning officials cited and put the school on “fire watch,” which requires someone to patrol the school every half hour to look for signs of fire.

The Jan. 6 letter to Friberg, signed by Assistant County Attorney Marci Day, outlined a series of failures by school officials in ensuring the school meets regulations and is safe for children.

“You were notified at a meeting with Pueblo County Planning and Development in July that the zoning for the property did not allow for the use but proceeded to open Riverstone Academy to the public in August,” she wrote.

She noted that as of Jan. 6, school officials had not turned in three required applications. They include one for a special use permit that would allow the school to be located in a light industrial zone, one for a site development plan, and one to change the building occupancy from a business use to an education use.

She said without the occupancy application, local fire and health officials can’t determine what changes will be required to bring the building up to code.

“Due to the current conditions and the construction that will be required to bring the buildings and property into compliance with all building, fire, health, and zoning codes it has been deemed unsafe to allow the continued occupancy of the buildings, particularly by school children, prior to final approval by Pueblo County,” she wrote.

The removal of multiple walls inside Riverstone’s building, new sinks, drinking fountains, fire safety fixtures, and the construction of a wheelchair ramp at the building’s entrance are among the changes necessary, according to architectural plans submitted by Riverstone officials in December and obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request.

Carmen Howard, the director of the Pueblo County Planning and Development Department, said by email Friday evening that the department had received Riverstone’s special use permit application.

Other documents obtained through public records requests show that Friberg knew the school’s future was in jeopardy because of zoning and other problems.

In a Dec. 30 email from Friberg to Howard, he thanked her for organizing a visit to the school site to “explore whether there’s a path forward that keeps these students in school.”

“I also appreciate your willingness to help us work through a situation where we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves,” he wrote.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.��Sign up for their newsletters at .