Officers responded about 8:26 a.m. after another student spotted the gun and notified a teacher, who secured the weapon and the child’s backpack, police spokesperson Joe Moylan wrote in an email.

“There was not a live round in the chamber, but the firearm was loaded,” Moylan wrote. “There is no indication at this time the student had any intention of causing any harm” to students or faculty members.

Police said the lockdown lasted just a few minutes, and no charges are expected for the student. The student’s mother was given a court summons for charges of child abuse and failing to safely secure a firearm, both misdemeanors.

A Cherry Creek School District spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the incident.

The 6.5% tax on manufacturers and sellers — including pawnbrokers — of guns, gun parts, and ammunition will generate an estimated $39 million a year. The money is aimed primarily at crime victim services, including groups that help victims of domestic violence. Some of it is earmarked for behavioral and mental health for veterans and youth, and a sliver will support school security.

Firearm deaths in Colorado since at least 2006, growing more quickly than the state’s population, and with a notable bump in homicides early in the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted a national . The tax could have public health effects beyond generating money for social services, researchers said. But they don’t know for sure because only one other state, California, has a gun-and-ammo tax — an 11% tax that has been in effect only since July.

directs the Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and wonders if the tax will change consumer behavior. “The question is whether that will change gun sales or not,” she said.

A has been levied on gun manufacturers for more than a century — currently at 10% for pistols/revolvers and 11% for other kinds of firearms, plus cartridges and shells.

Colorado state Rep. and Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Democrat, co-sponsored , scheduled to take effect in April. Voters approved it in November as Proposition KK. The connection between firearms and domestic violence is stark: Nationally, every month are killed by an intimate partner using a gun. that 59% of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 in the United States were related to domestic violence.

Support groups for victims of domestic violence and other crimes receive funding through the 1984 federal Victims of Crime Act. Those dollars mostly come from fines and penalties from convicted federal criminals and fluctuate annually the Department of Justice pursues. Federal prosecutions and fines have dropped, so the state’s pot of money has , when Duran was first elected, to about $14 million in 2024 — a 76% drop.

But the need for victim support services has grown, said Duran, who is a gun owner and a survivor of domestic violence who used such services to escape homelessness.

Colorado’s new tax is what economists call a “ which seeks to compensate financially for the societal toll or damage a product causes. For example, people who drive cars pay a tax on gas, which goes toward repairing roads.

“It¶¶Òőap not because you’re a bad driver that we’re taxing gasoline. It¶¶Òőap because we need this money to be able to improve our infrastructure in ways that allow people to continue to use that product,” said , an economist who co-directs the Rand Gun Policy in America initiative.

She said Colorado’s gun tax is similar: It supports the social infrastructure that¶¶Òőap required in a society with firearms.

In 2022, the U.S. that people can carry a gun outside their homes for self-defense. Smart said the decision made it harder to pass laws restricting gun possession and highlighted the importance of historical precedent. Both the California and Colorado tax laws cite taxes passed by eight states and then-independent Hawaii between 1844 and 1926.

The actual effect of the Colorado and California laws won’t be known for some time. But should other states pursue similar policies, researchers think focusing taxes on specific weapons or places might be more effective at reducing harm, rather than simply generating revenue.

Smart, for example, found that if the goal is to reduce harm, would be to follow the lead of alcohol policies and have based on an item’s likelihood to cause harm.

, a doctoral candidate in economics at Stanford University, at the national level, by rejiggering the federal tax to be 13.3% on handguns and nothing on long guns, would prevent deaths while holding industry profits steady.

The Colorado tax applies to firearms dealers, manufacturers, and ammunition vendors that make at least $20,000 a year (excluding sales to law enforcement or active-duty military). Neither state officials nor lawmakers nor industry groups could confirm what fraction of firearm businesses that represents. According to , about 2,200 firearms dealers or pawnbrokers and manufacturers of ammunition/firearms operate in the state. Ammunition sellers aren’t tallied in that figure.

Some firearms businesses worry the tax will drive people across state lines to purchase guns.

“We’ve already got people saying, ‘Well, we can run over to Utah or Wyoming instead,’” said Frank Sadvar of Northwest Outfitters, a gun store and pawn shop in Craig. The city is a 40-minute drive to Wyoming and 1Âœ hours to Utah.

“The way it was worded on the ballots, it looked really good,” he said. But Sadvar suspects the revenue will fall short of the $39 million estimated because supporters didn’t factor in sales lost to other states.

In Cortez, which is a half-hour drive from New Mexico, Jesse Fine said he’s heard people say they’d rather drive there to buy a gun than pay the tax in Colorado — even though they’d face a there.

Fine, who manages Goods for the Woods, an outdoor gear shop carrying a range of firearms and hunting equipment, said he believes the tax discriminates against gun owners who are exercising their civil rights.

“It makes it hard for a mom-and-pop shop to stay in play,” he said. “We’re going to take the biggest hit because we’re not a big corporation.”

Victim services organizations said they will be in a tight spot financially until the new tax’s revenue starts to fully flow in 2026.

Courtney Sutton, public policy director of the , said most victim service agencies in the state, many of which are members of COVA, “heavily, heavily rely on” the federal funds that have been ballooning up and down.

“We did get $6 million from the state budget, but that¶¶Òőap not very much across 215 programs,” she said, referencing the state’s four victim services coalitions.

The new tax is estimated to bring in $30 million a year to such groups.

Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center executive director said she hopes the new tax revenue will help the center restart a program for people sorting out protection orders, housing issues, and name changes, among other things. Nestaval said that, for now, crime victims in Colorado are on their own.

is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF–an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

These organizations offer a critical service for Coloradans. Whether it¶¶Òőap a domestic violence organization offering shelter to a mother and her two children after police arrive to a dangerous situation involving a gun or a volunteer from the district attorney’s office sitting for hours with a family after someone has committed suicide in a home – victims’ advocates are essential to helping Coloradans recover from the unimaginable.

However, the funding from the federal Victims Crimes Act is not only unreliable but is drying up, leaving these organizations across the state to make tough decisions about how many victims they can serve and the level of service they can offer. Does the mother fleeing her own home get a week’s stay in the shelter and legal aid, or just one night and an ex-parte form to file on her own? Does a family get put in a hotel room while the location of the suicide is processed by detectives, or must they find their own place to stay at 3 a.m. without a credit card or any other personal belongings?

Coloradans have a chance during this election to give these critical services the funding they need.

would levy a state-wide 6.5% excise tax on large gun and ammunition sellers in Colorado.

The hope behind this new tax is not to reduce the number of guns sold in the state, but rather to generate revenue to fund critical services for the victims of crime. Not all crisis services involve a gun, but we do know that if a gun is involved in a crime, domestic violence incident or suicide attempt, the outcome is worse.

Already, the federal government charges an 11% tax on most gun and ammunition sales. Colorado lawmakers decided last year to ask voters to add another 6.5% onto that to fund state-wide victims programs. The fund will raise an estimated $39 million and the first $30 million will go through the existing board to award grants for victim assistance. After that, $8 million will go to the Behavioral and Mental Health Cash Fund ($5 million of which is earmarked for veterans programs) and $1 million to the School Security Cash Fund, both of which are administered by lawmakers in the General Assembly.

Proposition KK is a smart way to assess a tax directly on objects that play a role in making crime worse. The tax will only be levied on gun dealers and manufacturers who sell more than $20,000 worth of new guns and ammunition every year, meaning the tax won’t hit small gun sellers or used gun dealers. Sales to police officers or members of the military are exempted because we do need a well-regulated militia or, in this case, a police force.

Additionally, we are thrilled that the bill does not create a new program for administering grants to victims’ advocates; instead, it relies on the existing to make recommendations to the Department and the Division of Criminal Justice.

We would ask that future gun owners in Colorado view this tax not as a punishment but as an investment in services should their gun ever fall into the wrong hands or be used in a tragedy or crime. These services are essential.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Updated Oct. 22, 2024 at 6:17 p.m. Due to an editor’s error this editorial had the wrong amount the tax would raise in the first year. The estimate is $39 million.

AI facial-recognition functionality means school administrators or security officers can upload a photo into the system identifying someone as a “person of interest.” When anyone matching that photo is caught on camera, school officials are notified and immediately given the relevant video footage.

The cameras can also pinpoint and track people using search terms. For example, a principal could type in that a student wearing a red shirt and yellow backpack ran away from their classroom, and the AI-enabled camera system could find students matching that description and quickly determine which way they went.

“There are some interesting cases of how it can be used to quickly find people in an emergency and enhance building security in an emergency,” said , who sponsored legislation that created a task force to discuss how the state can effectively govern AI usage. “We need to balance that for potential misuses and overly zealous surveillance. That¶¶Òőap what we’ve been grappling with.”

A handful of Colorado school districts and higher education institutions have implemented AI surveillance technologies in a bid to keep students safe, though a statewide moratorium has prevented the majority from doing so — though that could change next summer, when the prohibition ends.

At the same time, state legislators and technology experts are debating how to best regulate AI usage in schools, where security concerns butt up against the ethics of using artificial intelligence to surveil children.

Last month, California-based security technologies company convened at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver for a showcasing its cutting-edge products to thousands of potential customers, including local school district officials.

Existing Colorado customers, including representatives of the Cheyenne Mountain School District and Greeley’s , came to talk up the technology they said has drastically improved their campus security.

AI cameras weren’t the only tech offering of the day.

Verkada sells wireless systems that can lock all doors in seconds with the push of a button in the event of a school lockdown. The company also offers mounted panic buttons with 24/7 monitoring and the option for immediate police dispatch.

The company also makes air quality sensors that Cheyenne Mountain hangs in secondary school bathrooms to detect students vaping. A software upgrade on the sensors can even detect whether the vape smoke contains THC. Verkada cameras stationed outside school bathrooms can then help identify a culprit, said Greg Miller, executive director of technology for the Cheyenne Mountain district.

“We went down a road of Verkada, even though it’s definitely not the cheapest, because it¶¶Òőap something as a small district without adding more people that we could easily support,” Miller said. “It¶¶Òőap been critical in multiple incidents where we can click on a face and know which door that child exited so they can find them and safely make sure they aren’t harming themselves. We can do that in under 30 seconds with the staff at a school having access.”

“Not meant to scare, but to prepare”

While the conference drew people from all over the country, Colorado’s tragic school-shooting history offered an unfortunate array of options for booking speakers who addressed the need for robust campus security.

Frank DeAngelis, who was principal of Columbine High School during the 1999 massacre, was a panelist alongside Pat Hamilton with the , founded in 2006 after the Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis in Bailey, during which 16-year-old Emily Keyes was shot and killed. The foundation’s programs for crisis response are used in more than 50,000 schools and other organizations worldwide.

DeAngelis stressed the importance of cameras and push-button locking doors in schools, noting that security measures were “not meant to scare, but to prepare.” Seconds matter in disaster preparedness, DeAngelis said, and if AI-enabled cameras allow law enforcement to more quickly assess a threat and respond, then that’s worth it, he said.

Hamilton spoke of the necessity of having a like the “I Love U Guys” Foundation teaches, including the lockdown procedure of “locks, lights, out of sight” used to keep classrooms quiet and orderly during an emergency.

While Hamilton said some of the newer school safety technologies may seem beyond the reach of public schools, they could be funded by money raised through bonds and mill levies.

In 2021, K-12 schools and colleges in the United States spent an estimated $3.1 billion on security products and services, up from $2.7 billion in 2017, according to an issued last year on the education technology surveillance industry.

Cheyenne Mountain officials declined to say how much in total the district has spent on Verkada products and services, but noted the district has paid an average of $35,000 per building on the company’s access control system and $60,000 per building on cameras. The district is made up of eight schools.

Aims Community College officials said they have spent about $1.25 million on Verkada products in the five years the school has used the company’s services.

Aims’s campus uses Verkada camera and the company’s monitoring system. John Fults, director of campus safety and security, said the school can set up a around building perimeters and receive alerts and video footage when people cross the invisible line.

Fults said the college tells students upfront about the nearly 300 AI cameras on the Greeley campus.

“We always relate it to there is nowhere you can go in a city or building where there is not a camera watching every move you make,” he said.

No consensus that AI improves school safety

The increasing use of AI led the Colorado legislature to discuss best practices and regulations around artificial intelligence technologies, including notice and disclosure requirements, protecting disproportionately impacted communities from algorithmic discrimination, privacy concerns and data retention.

In 2022, state legislators passed a bill that placed a moratorium on statewide public schools contracting with vendors that offer AI facial-recognition technologies until July 2025. However, districts that already had these technologies — like Cheyenne Mountain — before the bill are allowed to continue using them.

Hansen, a Denver Democrat, sponsored the and the creating the AI task force comprised of 26 people across the technology, surveillance and artificial intelligence spectrum.

The task force is trying to determine how many school districts in Colorado are currently using AI or facial-recognition surveillance.

Hansen said he expects there will be legislation in the 2025 session that would create safeguards around the technologies.

“More and more school districts are talking about it,” Hansen said. “With many of these new technologies like AI biometrics, there are great upsides and some significant potential downsides.”

Namely, there’s no consensus as to whether AI technologies  actually make schools safer.

Anaya Robinson, senior policy strategist at the who is serving on the legislative AI task force, said everyone agrees keeping kids safe at school is a top priority, but there’s disagreement over how to do so.

“We don’t think that the potential benefits — and there’s not a whole lot of data to prove those exist — outweigh the harms not only to privacy but also the general safety and comfort and ease that students should get to feel in the place they spend the vast majority of their youth,” he said.

Robinson said he struggles to understand how the money spent on education technology surveillance wouldn’t be better spent on more school staffing.

Among the leading reports on school safety technology, found there are no “honest brokers” to test or recommend specific technologies or vendors to schools, leading many campus officials to rely on vendor-sponsored research, word of mouth or advice from law enforcement. The study found limited evidence of the success or cost-effectiveness of technology in schools to prevent and mitigate crime, disorder or catastrophic events.

The found marginalized students including those in the LGBTQ community, students of color, low-income students and those who are undocumented or have undocumented family members are particularly susceptible to harmful consequences brought on by school surveillance.

One of the reasons for the temporary prohibition on the technologies, Hansen said, is because the legislature was presented with evidence about AI cameras misidentifying students, particularly students of color.

Pressure to “do something, do anything”

Miller said the Cheyenne Mountain School District doesn’t use its cameras to target students.

“If a kid is not a risk to himself for some reason — like a preschooler who is running off — outside of things like that, we do not keep kids uploaded to where a principal or vice principal at a site level could continually watch,” Miller said. “We’re not in the business of trying to shift a bias on a kid. We are only in the business of trying to keep a kid as safe as possible.”

When parents, teachers or community members express concerns over the use of AI in schools, Miller said their fear often comes from ignorance of the technology and that educating them on its benefits are key.

“It’s like, are you more worried that someone is going to steal this data or that someone is going to get hurt and killed?” Miller said during his Verkada conference panel.

Mollie Markey, Verkada’s associate communications manager, said the company does focus on privacy-protecting measures like the option to blur faces on video security feeds and configure privacy zones to block certain areas from being recorded. The firm’s technology builds in permissions for administrators to determine which people can access which features, and AI features have the option to be toggled on and off, she said.

Kenneth Trump, president of , said there is little to no evidence that AI security measures make schools safer. Instead, Trump said vendors of these technologies practice “marketing on steroids” that bombards school administrators.

“Administrators are under an enormous amount of pressure in school communities to do something,” Trump said. “That creates a ‘do something, do anything, do it fast and do it now’ policy.”

Trump said administrators should invest in proactive approaches to keeping schools safer rather than reactive. Funding more educators, staff, counselors and better training for the people on the ground should be the future of school security, he said.

“The real future is not in bells and whistles and shiny objects,” he said. “It’s in your people.”

Jason Koenig, chief information officer at the , said districts across Colorado are eagerly waiting for the moratorium on AI and facial-recognition surveillance technologies in K-12 schools to lift.

Koenig believes integrating these technologies into Cherry Creek’s safety procedures could shave off response time in an emergency and also benefit everyday school security.

For example, if an administrator received a tip that a student was considering self-harm and urgently needed to find them, they could upload the student’s photo and find them instantly rather than only relying on people on the ground, he said.

Koenig likened the emerging technologies to social media, noting that social media is a powerful tool that can be used for good but also has the potential for misuse. With proper safeguards, Koenig believed AI and facial-recognition security technologies would benefit Cherry Creek schools.

“They’re not for anybody to have access to track a student through the hallway,” Koenig said. “It really should be for a safety situation where it¶¶Òőap more of a district leadership or security team. It is very powerful.”

Parenti, a freshman member of the House’s Democratic supermajority, is not resigning her seat and will serve out the remaining months of her term. She informed House leadership Friday morning.

Because Parenti’s decision comes after the June legislative primaries, a vacancy committee in House District 19 will select a candidate to replace Parenti on the November ballot.

She said in a statement that her decision to leave her reelection race was influenced by a Capitol culture that rewards “personal agendas and special interests … at the expense of our districts, each other and the integrity of the body in which we serve.”

“While many factors have weighed into this decision, ultimately it comes down to this: I cannot continue to serve while maintaining my own sense of integrity,” she wrote. “The two are simply incompatible.”

In an interview Friday afternoon, Parenti said she often felt that “we were being asked to compromise our values, to compromise the promises we made to constituents.” She declined to provide an example of a specific bill or policy for which that compromise occurred, saying she wasn’t “interested in poking anyone publicly in the face.”

Parenti sponsored an unsuccessful bill this year that would have required more training for armed school security officers who are not law enforcement. She also sparred with fellow Democrats on the House floor over legislation regulating youth sports. A version of that bill was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Jared Polis.

In brief statements Friday, House Speaker Julie McCluskie and Majority Leader Monica Duran, both Democrats, wished Parenti luck on her next steps and thanked her for her service.

Parenti is the latest member of the 2022 freshman class to depart the House. Two other House Democrats, Reps. Ruby Dickson and Said Sharbini, resigned late last year. Several House Republicans are also leaving, though that’s to run for other political offices.

Parenti noted the number of departures among new lawmakers and said she hoped legislative leadership was taking notice.

The race for Parenti’s District 19 seat is likely to be one of the most tightly contested in the state and may help decide whether the Democrats maintain their supermajority in the House. The district has a slight Democratic lean, according to a nonpartisan state analysis. Parenti was set for a rematch with former Republican Rep. Dan Woog, whom Parenti beat in 2022.

Staff writer Nick Coltrain contributed to this story.

Our country is dealing with an epidemic of teen/child fragility. One cause is social media, the other is mass shootings. Schoolyards used to be safe spaces for kids to play in before or after school. Now they all have security fences, cameras, security guards, lock-down drills and fob IDs to enter the buildings. Or, as one teen put it to me: “The badges are so they can identify you after you are shot.”

Sadly, the news trickles down on the playground. As a mental health clinician, I’ve had to talk to children as young as first and second grade about their fears of a shooter coming to their school or what to do if you are locked out of the classroom or if your teacher is shot. No parent I know of wants this to be a reality for their children. Here in Denver, as reported by The Denver Post, 1 in 10 of our high school students reported not going to school because they felt unsafe. Perhaps taking a public health issue approach can solve the problem of mass shootings that politicians have not been able to solve.

Craig A. Knippenberg, Denver

U.S. is headed to financial disaster. Does anyone care?

I recently read and confirmed our federal government is borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. This amounts to about $3.6 trillion per year. When you divide the $1 trillion amount by 100 you get a daily total of $10 billion borrowed per day. These are truly staggering figures and the glaring lack of attention to them are indicative of a national government in total denial of the irresponsible path it has chosen.

Tax-paying citizens and the businesses they work for would not, and could not manage their personal and business finances in this manner without placing their financial solvency at risk. Why our federal government seems to think the priority of sound financial management does not apply to them is magical thinking seeking to ignore and escape the boundaries of fiscal reality.

Per a study by an Ivy League business school, current fiscal policy is unsustainable. The U.S. only has about 20 years to implement serious corrective action without which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts will be able to avoid default.

This would be a future likely to include rampant inflation, serious disruption of our economy, a significant reduction in the capabilities of the U.S. government and adverse impacts on individual prosperity, savings and investment. Does our government have the will to address this problem seriously? Sadly, it seems unlikely. However, I think it would be worthwhile if we all contacted our Congressional representatives and senators and asked them to make this a priority issue.

Robert Heath, Lakewood

Voters’ powers taken by monied interests

Data from a Princeton study collected over 20 years has found that in spite of all of the public polling, all of the windbaggery on TV and in newspaper opinion editorials, and all of the virtue signaling done by our elected politicians — the opinions of average citizens have next to zero impact on laws.

Laws are nonetheless made, so what does have an impact? Money, of course! This seems like the world’s least surprising finding, but why is this acceptable to us, and why doesn’t the media do more to try to highlight who actually holds all of the power? The people with the most money more often than not win the elections. And those who receive the most money more often than not acquire it from rich benefactors. These rich contributors, business interests, and lobbying groups do not contribute from the goodness of their hearts; they have agendas.

So as we come off of one primary election where the media gaslights us into believing that “centrists and moderates” won out, it¶¶Òőap worth keeping in mind, that a lot of these people won because they received money from rich and powerful special interests and lobbyists. The winners of these races are not moderates, they are corporate extremists hell-bent on making sure that we will forever be at war, that your children never receive health care, and that you will never have an affordable place to live.

As we come to the general election remember: They don’t care what you think.

David Gonzalez, Denver

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Two heavily armed shooters had entered the Jefferson County school late in the morning on April 20, 1999, and proceeded to kill 12 of their classmates and a teacher, injuring dozens more in a tragedy that shocked Colorado and the nation.

The shooting, which ended with the two killers taking their own lives, reshaped school security across the United States and served as a precursor to the litany of mass killings that have taken place across the country in the decades since — so much so that the school’s very name, Columbine, remains synonymous with school shootings.

But what happened next, after DiManna fled the building with her colleagues and pupils, is also part of Columbine’s legacy, the one that, 25 years later, both current and former employees talk about the most: the resiliency and hope that persists in a community marked by one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.

“We take care of each other,”  DiManna, who still teaches math at the high school, said in a recent interview. “You don’t really leave your family after trauma — and that is what Columbine is.”

And that’s why the 53-year-old, who will retire at the end of this academic year, has spent her entire career at Columbine despite such tragedy. DiManna is one of 15 current Columbine staff members who were either employees or students at the time of the shooting.

As Jeffco Public Schools marked the shooting’s 25th anniversary, officials held a media day with Columbine and district staff earlier this month to talk about the changes to school security that occurred nationwide in the wake of the shooting, such as lockdown drills and the, Colorado statewide anonymous reporting system for students.

Much has changed in 25 years. Those who were students at the time of the shooting have become parents and the pupils that now sit in the high school’s classrooms are too young to remember the tragedy, having not been born until years later.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that at 11:20 a.m. each April 20 — around the time the shooting began — former Principal Frank DeAngelis gathers at the school with families and staff to read the names of the 12 students and one teacher who died that day: Cassie Bernall, Steven Robert Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matt Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Danny Rohrbough, Dave Sanders, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend and Kyle Velasquez.

“Columbine represents a time to remember,” said DeAngelis, who served as principal for almost two decades, and made it his mission to rebuild the school after the shooting and to help his students through the trauma.

DeAngelis retired in 2014, two years after he fulfilled a promise he made after the attack to remain as principal until all of the students in Columbine feeder schools at the time of the shooting had graduated.

“Columbine also represents hope,” he said. “Columbine is strong.”

The day has also become where students and staff give back to the community through volunteer projects.

“The community came together and made it stronger,” said current Principal Scott Christy, adding, “I hope Columbine is a place of hope for those who have experienced tragedy.”

On the day of the shooting, DiManna was a 28-year-old in her fifth year of teaching at Columbine, a school she also graduated from in 1989.

For DiManna, the moments after she heard screaming followed like this: A teacher pulled a fire alarm to evacuate the building. Her sister, Kim, who was a senior, found her and DiManna told her to leave — but she did not do so herself until after helping evacuate the math department¶¶Òőap classrooms.

DiManna found her sister again outside, where they saw an injured student near a stoplight before going into a house across the street, which is where she called her husband.

Residents opening their doors to students and staff fleeing the shooting isn’t the only thing DiManna remembers. She also recalls youth ministries helping care for students in the days that followed no matter whether they were members of their churches or not.

“I don’t know how many communities could take care of kids as ours did,” she said.

At the time, the shooting at Columbine was the deadliest at a K-12 school in U.S. history. There hadn’t yet been in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, or Uvalde, Texas.

In other words, there weren’t many people who knew what the survivors of the school shooting experienced and how it would affect them in the years that followed. They couldn’t understand how, for Columbine survivors, routine fire drills can be a trigger, how lockdown drills can create a panic, or how each year when April rolls around, so, too, comes anxiety about what might happen, DiManna said.

That’s also why DiManna stayed at Columbine. The support that the community provides didn’t end 25 years ago, she said.

Christy, the school’s principal, checks on the staff members who were at Columbine in 1999 each time there’s another school shooting or something else happens that could upset them, DiManna said.

“We just pick each other up,” she said. “You always knew if you were having one of those days, or something happened, you had someone to talk to.”

The reason DiManna returned to Columbine after the shooting is also simple.

“I wanted to teach,” she said.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

School safety plans that require students be searched daily drew significant attention last year after a 17-year-old student who was subject to such a plan shot and wounded two administrators at Denver’s East High School during his daily search.

The state Supreme Court justices on Monday found that such searches are constitutional and that school officials do not need to obtain a warrant authorized by a judge before searching a student who is subject to a safety plan.

“A search of a student conducted on school grounds in accordance with an individualized, weapons-related safety plan is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Melissa Hart wrote in the .

School safety plans, which are common across the nation, aim to curb students’ problematic behavior. Some include daily searches for weapons, while others may be related to illicit drugs or fighting. The plans are typically put in place by a multi-disciplinary team that evaluates the best approach based on the student’s behavior, home life and mental health history.

The student at the center of the Colorado Supreme Court case, identified only by his initials J.G. in court filings, was put under a school safety plan as a ninth grader at Denver’s John F. Kennedy High School in 2019 after he was found guilty in juvenile court of carrying a gun and menacing in an off-campus incident.

The 14-year-old was then subject to daily searches when he arrived at school for the rest of his ninth grade year, according to the opinion. But when he returned for the start of 10th grade in August 2019, school officials did not search him for his first two days of classes, according to the opinion.

“Nobody was really on notice” about the student’s safety plan when school started, according to Monday’s opinion.

On the third day, school officials stopped the teenager and searched his backpack and discovered he’d brought a loaded handgun to school. The student was then arrested and suspended from school.

In the subsequent criminal case, he argued that the search of his backpack was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, that the safety plan did not establish his consent to be searched, and that even if the safety plan did establish his consent, the plan was no longer active when the search occurred because of the lapse in enforcement at the start of the school year, according to the opinion.

The Colorado Supreme Court justices rejected those arguments Monday, finding that the search was constitutional because the safety plan was still in place. Students have a limited right to privacy while on school grounds and the 10th grader should have known he’d be subject to daily searches, the justices found.

“A search carried out in accordance with a previously established safety plan is reasonable at its inception because the plan diminishes the student¶¶Òőap expectation of privacy,” Hart wrote. “Additional individualized suspicion stemming from the student¶¶Òőap behavior is not required. Therefore, the search of J.G.’s backpack was justified at its inception.”

The justices noted that students maintain their constitutional rights while at school, but that constitutional protections are applied differently in school settings because public school students’ rights are limited by the state’s responsibility to maintain discipline, health and safety on campus.

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.

The backlash left a scar on Democratic leaders, even as the recalled lawmakers said they had no regrets. For several years, legislators introduced few gun-reform bills, and none passed.

But that timidity is now long gone — a turnaround attributable to increasing Democratic electoral dominance in Colorado and growing gun-reform activism that’s been fueled by a local backdrop of mass shootings as well as grimly routine gun violence and suicides. A new cadre of Democratic lawmakers have embraced firearms policy in a big way. They’ve been spurred on by an expanding voter base that, rather than punishing them, has shown up to the Capitol to demand they do more.

“There are pockets and communities that feel very strongly about Second Amendment rights,” said Rep. Steven Woodrow, a Denver Democrat. “But in terms of it being electoral kryptonite — in terms of it being an issue where … you’ve got to worry about hordes of people showing up to the Capitol — I think now the view of our caucus is: Let them show up.”

More than a decade removed from the protests and recalls of 2013, Democratic lawmakers are set to unveil as many as 10 gun-control and -reform bills this session. The measures cover a swath of policy, from new training requirements for concealed-carry permits to mandated insurance for gun owners to a ban on purchasing so-called assault weapons, including semi-automatic rifles.

Collectively, they represent the largest single-year gun reform push in recent memory.

The question is no longer whether tackling gun control is too politically risky. Democrats instead face other questions — chiefly, how far to go legislatively and when to act. Those have spurred internal debates among lawmakers and their leaders, who also are eying the temperature of a sometimes-skeptical Gov. Jared Polis.

Some Democrats have hesitated to support legislation that would ban several kinds of semi-automatic firearms: The “assault weapons” ban introduced last year was defeated by a majority-Democrat committee, and intraparty debates about it helped sink the Democrats’ newly launched gun-violence prevention caucus.

While Democrats have more than enough seats in the House and Senate to pass what they want, Republicans’ historic power deficits in both chambers don’t mean conservatives have no ability to fight back.

Gun rights supporters, who see many of the Democrats’ proposals as affronts to the Second Amendment, are emboldened by a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that set a higher legal bar for gun restrictions. The ruling has made the court system more receptive to challenges.

“The Democrats are looking for what that line is because they want to go right up to it,” said Rep. Matt Soper, a Delta Republican. “Really, from my perspective, the courts are going to be the backstop. We’re not going to stop any of these gun bills (in the Capitol), just because we’re so outnumbered.”

Red-flag law seen as a turning point

Former state Sen. Evie Hudak, a Westminster Democrat, is struck by the shift in political dynamics facing gun measures. She was the lawmaker who resigned in 2013 in the face of a threatened recall over that year’s new gun laws; she remains skeptical that the recall would have succeeded, she said, but she wanted to avoid putting her county through the cost of a special election.

She still remembers the vitriol levied at her by “extremist gun supporters” during the 2013 debate, including one threat deemed serious enough to warrant a law enforcement investigation.

Hudak is among lawmakers and observers who point to a moment, in 2019, when the political risks noticeably shifted. Democrats faced no electoral backlash after passing the state’s red-flag law in the year they regained their current political trifecta in state government, with control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. The law allows a judge to temporarily confiscate a person’s firearms if they’re determined to be a danger to themselves or others.

“For several years after I resigned, (the legislature) wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” Hudak said of gun legislation. “Then slowly, I think, they put forward the extreme risk protection order, and the conversation around that was very supportive.

“That gave the legislators the viewpoint that maybe things have changed and that it was time. People would be open to considering more regulations.”

Since approving the red-flag law — which was expanded last year in response to the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs — the legislature has passed notable legislation instituting a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; banning unserialized “ghost” guns; making it easier for victims and their families to sue gun manufacturers and dealers; mandating that firearms be stored safely and securely; and increasing the minimum age for gun purchases from 18 to 21. The last bill has been put on hold by a judge while a legal challenge plays out.

In contrast to even a year ago, when a package of gun bills was publicly announced at once, Democratic lawmakers have taken a less-coordinated approach. So many legislators are working on the issue — and their communication has been so curtailed by a recent open-meetings lawsuit — that some weren’t aware of the entire breadth of the gun measures were being drafted.

This year’s likely proposals also include one that would require gun stores, which already are federally licensed, to obtain a state permit to sell firearms. Another to aid investigations of sales to ineligible individuals. Lawmakers also want to expand gun-free zones to more places than covered under current law.

Though many of the bills aren’t the sort of eye-catching proposals that have been pushed in years past, this year’s slate represents a uniquely broad, multi-pronged effort. Democratic leaders say the legislation would tighten existing gun laws in a bid to ensure that restrictions already enacted — and those passed in the future — are actually enforceable.

“A lot of the big structural policies have been done,” said Senate President Steve Fenberg, a Boulder Democrat. The new bills are “not like the red-flag law, where it’s been adopted in many states and the question is if we want to do it or not. We’re getting more down into the policy nuances, which I think is a good thing.”

“A conversation we should have every single day”

Sen. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat who’s been a longtime advocate for stricter gun regulations, called this round of bill introductions “one of my most successful” for its efficiency. The speedy, unheralded introductions also fulfill a goal of Sullivan’s: treating gun violence as a horrible, but everyday, problem for the legislature to address, not as an exception that merits press conferences to trumpet lawmakers’ intentions.

Gun violence is an ongoing public health crisis and should be treated as such, Sullivan said. Since the day his son, Alex, was murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater massacre, he said, annual gun deaths in the United States have .

“This is a conversation we should have every single day,” Sullivan said of efforts to reverse that trend. “And I think (these slate of bills) are proving that out. People are talking about it every day.”

Supporters say the bills are broadly intended to improve enforcement of existing gun laws: The CBI bill, for instance, would help the state crack down on gun sales that are already illegal. The bill requiring that gun stores carry a state license is an attempt to ensure that dealers here are following state laws. Legislators said federal investigators have been lax in enforcing dealer laws.

“It’s an enforcement mechanism for the laws that we have passed here in Colorado,” said Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat sponsoring the dealer-permitting bill. “The vast majority of them do follow Colorado laws, but … there would be consequences if they chose not to.”

The likely bill to ban semi-automatic rifles and some other high-powered firearms is certain to draw the fiercest debate on both sides of the aisle.

A similar bill last year sparked internal division among House and Senate Democrats. Sponsor Rep. Elisabeth Epps was among those who argued the bill should move forward, given Democratic voters’ support for a ban on assault-style weapons.

But others, including Sullivan, felt the bill wouldn’t save as many lives as other measures and that debate over it would consume the Capitol. He also argued it would enlist survivors of gun violence to testify and relive their traumas for a bill that lacked a path to becoming law.

The bill died during its first committee vote after three Democrats joined with Republicans against it.

This year’s version, set to be unveiled soon, is again backed by Epps, along with fellow Denver freshman Rep. Tim HernĂĄndez, who was appointed by a vacancy committee last summer.

On its face, the bill has better chances to advance this year, at least in the House: Two of the three Democratic legislators who helped kill it are either out of the legislature or off the House Judiciary Committee — though so is Epps, whose relationship with most of her colleagues has deteriorated in recent months. The new members of the committee, two progressive Democrats, are both likely to support the bill.

Still, internal debate continues. Sullivan argued the bill would save fewer lives than other policies, while fueling the purchase of weapons by ban-panicked buyers. Polis’ office has also reportedly been skeptical, avoiding comment on last year’s version to The Denver Post.

HernĂĄndez acknowledged that mass shootings — which are commonly carried out with AR-style, semi-automatic rifles — represent a small fraction of gun-violence deaths. Still, he argued that Democrats’ success at the polls in Colorado was in part due to their work on gun-violence prevention. The party’s majorities are now 46-19 in the House and 23-12 in the Senate.

Also at play is growing, steady advocacy from gun-reform groups, who increasingly see Colorado as a model for other states to follow.

“We’ve built out the Democrat majority to be the strongest that it¶¶Òőap been in the state of Colorado in 85 years,” HernĂĄndez said. “It’s why communities are asking us to show up boldly.”

“They are not beating around the bush,” gun-rights group says

Depending on what lawmakers pass, the governor’s positions on some measures are still unclear — and several may face review by the courts.

In a new statement to The Post, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman did not directly respond to questions about specific bills, many of which have yet to be introduced. She praised Colorado as “already leading the nation in improving public safety, including passing common sense gun violence prevention laws.”

“The governor sees reducing gun violence as part of his goal of making Colorado one of the 10 safest states,” Wieman wrote. “Gov. Polis is open to any legislation that makes Colorado safer and protects our Second Amendment rights and will monitor these bills as they move through the legislative process.”

Past years’ gun bills increasingly have been set on a collision course with a courtroom. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a conservative group that opposes virtually all reform efforts, has filed a slew of lawsuits against the state in recent years. It has notched some successes, including blocking last year’s law setting a higher age limit for purchases, while losing others.

On Thursday, the group tweeted that its attorneys were reviewing the , introduced the day before.

Taylor Rhodes, the group’s executive director, promised more litigation if any bills he sees as unconstitutional become law. The group has been fundraising from “extremely pissed” gun rights advocates to continue its court battles, he said.

“At this point, they have taken the gloves off and skated to center ice,” Rhodes said of Democratic legislators. “They are not trying to play cute, they are not beating around the bush. They are going for essentially the repeal of the Second Amendment.”

Democrats have been undeterred by the legal threats and have characterized the reliance on lawsuits — instead of prioritizing election challenges of Democrats — as a sign that the window of debate has shifted.

“It sort of validates what we’re doing because it means Rocky Mountain Gun Owners can’t elect people,” said Rep. Meg Froelich, an Englewood Democrat who’s co-sponsoring several gun bills this year. “Their people aren’t getting elected. They’re not moving the needle in the (Capitol) — so yeah, they have to go to court. I mean, they have to use their members’ money somehow.”

Republicans in the Capitol still plan to oppose bills during the session, as does Rhodes. But in the House, GOP lawmakers are a super-minority, preventing them from stopping Democrats from putting time limits on debates and curtailing Republican filibusters. They have slightly more power to push back in the Senate.

Republicans are still waiting to see the full picture of the gun-reform bills emerge. Soper, the Delta Republican, said he could see some Republicans potentially supporting of illegal gun sales. But others, including Rep. Ty Winter, the House’s assistant minority leader, pledged to fight any bill they felt infringed on the Second Amendment.

Even in their diminished state, Winter and Soper said, Republicans are ready to fight — no matter if they can muster only echoes of 2013’s backlash.

“Certainly for assault weapons, expect us to bring everything we have,” Soper said. “Lock down the building, be up all night, a 24-hour filibuster if needed. We will use every rule in the rulebook, and we will definitely make our voices heard.”

Stay up-to-date with Colorado Politics by signing up for our weekly newsletter, The Spot.

Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education voted unanimously less than a week later, on June 11 to phase out school resource officers, or SROs — one of dozens of school districts in the United States to do so amid the national reckoning that followed the murder of Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

The board’s vote was one of the most high-profile outcomes in Denver of that summer’s push for racial justice, and it followed more than a decade of work by community organizers — namely the advocacy group Movimiento Poder — to end the over-policing of students of color in DPS buildings.

But now, three years later, the school board is on the verge of reversing that policy — a move board members say is being spurred not just by the March 22 shooting inside East High School, but by rising gun violence among Denver teens and the increasing number of firearms being discovered inside district buildings.

Divisions have erupted on the board as members disagree on whether to put police back into schools long-term. But board President Xochitl “Sochi” Gaytán called their return “inevitable.”

“The landscape of policing is shifting from the conversations that the Denver community was having in 2020,” she said. “The access to guns and weapons is outrageous, in my humble opinion, especially the access to guns among our young people.”

Board members temporarily allowed armed police to return to Denver high schools after the East shooting by suspending the 2020 policy prohibiting SROs. And they now are weighing two plans to change the policy, which is set to resume in just under three weeks unless the board takes action.

Among the proposals: a plan that would allow Superintendent Alex Marrero to station officers on campuses and another that would create what board members are calling community resource officers, who would be placed in regions across the district, but not inside schools.

The board is expected to discuss those proposals Thursday and could vote by the end of the month. Marrero also is expected to release the final version of his new districtwide safety plan by the end of June.

The crux of the issue is how DPS should respond to growing youth gun violence in Denver and whether having police on campus would have prevented two high-profile shootings at East, the city’s largest high school, earlier this year.

The Denver Post interviewed four members about how the school board has reached the point where some directors are reconsidering their stance on SROs. Two directors — Michelle Quattlebaum and Carrie Olson — declined to comment. Another board member, Scott Esserman, did not respond to a request for comment.

Marrero declined an interview request, with a district spokesman saying that the superintendent is not speaking about his safety plan until after the final version is released later this month.

“The challenge of getting a consensus by the board appears to me as one of the more intense that I’ve seen,” said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, adding, “This one certainly has been fought out in public.”

At a school board meeting last week, GaytĂĄn — Quattlebaum and Auon’tai Anderson — as they pushed back on statements made by Marrero and Denver police Chief Ron Thomas that supported the return of SROs.

“If it took 10 years of research to remove SROs from schools, why does it only take three months to discount that work?” Quattlebaum asked Thomas during the Monday meeting, which was held exactly three years after the 2020 news conference calling for the removal of police from Denver schools.

Rising youth gun violence

The first significant calls to reinstate SROs came from parents and students came after a Feb. 13 shooting outside of East.

Luis Garcia, a junior, was sitting in his car outside of the high school when he was shot in the head. The 16-year-old died at Denver Health Medical Center more than two weeks later.

At the time, East parents and students called for tighter security on campus and teens spoke out about not feeling safe. Students also began protesting, walking out school to urge Colorado lawmakers to take action on gun control.

In response to the February shooting, Marrero and school board members stressed that the incident had not occurred on campus, but rather, near the school.

The shooting, they said, was part of a broader trend of rising gun violence among teens in Denver and they urged city officials to address gun violence in the community and to prioritize safety around schools.

“My call to action is to prevent it from getting into our schools,” Marrero told The Post in February.

Last year, 17 teenagers were killed in Denver — nearly double the number who died five years ago. Another 70 teens were injured in shootings. Most of those killed or injured were shot by other teens, according to Denver Police Department data.

Youth gun violence is on the rise for multiple reasons, including easy access to firearms, children not feeling safe and the mental health toll of the coronavirus pandemic, said Franci Crepeau-Hobson, professor of school psychology at the University of Colorado Denver.

And what’s happening on Denver’s streets is seeping into the city’s schools. The number of firearms found on DPS campuses began increasing during the 2019-20 academic year and has remained steady in the years since despite the pandemic.

The district found 15 firearms during the 2019-20 school year, which was an increase from two guns the year before. There were 16 guns discovered in Denver schools during the 2022-23 academic year, according to the latest data provided by the district.

While the number of actual firearms has remained steady, the district has seen a larger increase in fake guns appearing on campuses. DPS found 42 facsimile firearms last school year, a 50% increase from the 28 found the year before, according to the data.

“You have kids who make bad decisions and are sitting in a classroom with loaded guns,” DPS board member Charmaine Lindsay said.

Lindsay, who was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board in 2022, said she had not supported the decision to remove SROs three years ago. The board, she said, should have moved sooner to reinstate them.

Earlier this year, the school board acknowledged the rise in gun violence and adopted a policy that said the district would collaborate with local law enforcement and community organizations to “mitigate” threats.

“We were proactively doing the right thing and focusing on the right thing,” board member Scott Baldermann said.

But, he said, the policy, which was made under the board’s new governing model, was a long-term solution, one that the district would undertake over multiple years.

Then, less than a month after Garcia was shot, another shooting occurred at East — this time inside the high school.

“Too many incidents were happening”

An East student shot and injured two administrators while undergoing a daily search for weapons on March 22. The 17-year-old student fled the school and died by suicide later that day.

That same day, Marrero sent board members a letter saying that he planned to place armed officers in the district¶¶Òőap comprehensive high schools even though doing so “likely violates” the board’s 2020 policy prohibiting SROs.

“However, I can no longer stand on the sidelines,” Marrero wrote in the letter. “I am willing to accept the consequences of my actions.”

A day later, the board met behind closed doors for five hours. When the members emerged, they voted unanimously to temporarily suspend the policy barring SROs and directed Marrero to craft a districtwide safety plan.

After the second East shooting, the calls for police in schools grew as parents and others in the community criticized DPS for what they called the district¶¶Òőap lack of response to school safety. Much of the scrutiny has focused on the district¶¶Òőap discipline policies and the decision to remove SROs.

It became a topic during mayoral debates. Garcia’s family has said it intends to sue DPS and has accused district and city leaders of negligence because they removed armed police from schools. And a group made up of parents and other community members coalesced, calling for school board members to resign.

The Resign DPS Board movement has accumulated about 5,000 signatures of support and stems from the perspective of concerned parents, said Heather Lamm, who is spearheading the group. She is the daughter of late Gov. Dick Lamm and a former spokeswoman for the DSST charter school network.

Lamm, who graduated from DPS and now has two kids in the district and one who just graduated from East, said she and other parents are disenchanted with the school board’s lack of action following a spate of violence and school safety issues.

She said the group is not for or against SRO’s and that members have mixed feelings about police in schools.

“We started feeling very, very frustrated at what we perceive to be a really dysfunctional board that should not be in charge of making life or death decisions with kids’ safety,” she said.

Board members, including Baldermann and Anderson, said the March shooting was the catalyst for the board to revisit its stance on SROs. If it hadn’t happened, they said, it’s unlikely the board would consider reversing the 2020 prohibition.

“If East never would have happened, this board never would have taken up the conversation,” Anderson said.

The shooting made board members realize they needed to respond more quickly to gun violence than the safety policy passed earlier this year would allow them to do, Baldermann said.

“Too many incidents were happening in short windows of time,” he said.

Anderson said he has heard board colleagues say that they need to act because “people have to see something.”

“The board cares,” he added. “I believe my colleagues and I care about people, but I do believe that we are misguided in this conversation that we are having.”

Instead, Anderson said, the board needs to focus on the root causes of gun violence and prioritize mental health resources in the district¶¶Òőap budget.

Both Baldermann and Anderson were on the board in 2020 when it decided to phase out SROs. Now they find themselves on opposite ends of the SRO debate.

Anderson wants to keep the SRO policy in place, but make a tweak to add community resource officers who can respond when needed but not be stationed inside schools. He called the plan a middle ground.

But Baldermann has proposed a larger overhaul of the 2020 policy, which would give the district’s superintendent the flexibility to station SROs in schools. It would also place limits on what SROs could not do, such as disciplining students.

The board’s decision three years ago “was the right one at the time,” Baldermann said. But, he said, “a lot has changed.”

District leadership has changed both on the board and in the superintendent’s office. The board has a new governance model that it uses to give the superintendent guidance rather than directives like the 2020 ban on SROs.

But, mostly, the number of weapons being found on campuses has been “eye-opening,” Baldermann said, adding that he thinks police in schools will deter students from bringing guns to campus.

“We’re talking about policing Black children”

Other school board members, including Anderson, have argued that officers would not have prevented the shootings at East.

He and Quattlebaum have said having police in schools harms students of color and contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline because Black and Latino pupils historically have been arrested and ticketed at a disproportionately high rate compared to their white peers.

“We’re talking about policing Black children,” Quattlebaum told her colleagues during a June 1 board meeting. “That is what we are talking about without saying it. How do we make sure that white students are safe when they are in school with Black students?

“That¶¶Òőap really the conversation that we are having, but we are trying not to have,” she said.

Research is not clear on whether SROs prevent shootings, but it does show that students of color are more likely to be punished with expulsions and arrests.

Most studies haven’t done a good job at separating designated SROs from other school security or regular police officers, who don’t have the same training but might still appear in a school setting, said Crepeau-Hobson, the professor at CU Denver.

It¶¶Òőap difficult to say whether SROs would have prevented a shooting because there’s no way to prove something that didn’t happen, she said.

What research does show is that there is an association between schools having police officers on campus and disproportionate rates of harsh discipline among students of color, Crepeau-Hobson said.

Studies also have shown that SROs do make a difference in some areas of safety.  found that SROs reduced violence, such as fights, but did not prevent gun-related incidents. At the same time, the study’s findings suggested that having an SRO did increase the number of reported firearm offenses, which researchers noted are rare.

The same study also found that “SROs intensify the use of suspension, expulsion, police referral and arrest of students” and that those actions mostly affect Black students, boys and students with disabilities.

Movimiento Poder has worked for more than a decade to decrease expulsions, suspensions, ticketing and arrests of students by changing DPS’s discipline policy and other efforts, said Jim Freeman, who leads the Social Movement Support Lab and consultant for the organization.

The district¶¶Òőap decision to remove SROs “didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “This wasn’t a knee-jerk response to what was happening in Minneapolis.”

At DPS, the number of tickets and arrests of students has been declining for almost a decade, including after the district voted to remove SROs in 2020, according to last month.

During the 2021-22 academic year, there were 151 tickets and arrests of DPS students. That¶¶Òőap almost an 80% decrease from the 744 tickets and arrests recorded in 2018-19, according to the report. (Part of the period examined in the report occurred during the pandemic, when students were in remote learning.)

“We know for a fact, based on community and historical insight, that this was a huge issue — that our students were being sent to the school-to-prison pipeline and the deportation pipeline,” said Elizabeth Burciaga, a lead organizer with Movimiento Poder.

The school-to-prison pipeline occurs when as a result of policies that use law enforcement to address behavioral issues and discipline.

Board members who are supportive of putting police back into schools agreed that students of color have historically been disciplined at higher rates. But they said they are trusting Marrero and Chief Thomas — both of whom came into their jobs in the past two years — to ensure the inequities don’t return with the officers.

“We should put some guidelines around what we don’t want to see,” Lindsay said. “We don’t want to criminalize high school behavior.”

Reversing policy

DPS is not alone in reconsidering its prohibition on SROs. At least 50 U.S. school districts either ended their police programs or cut their budgets between May 2020 and June 2022. Of the districts that removed police, at least eight have since reversed course,

Districts that are bringing SROs back or are in conversations to do so include those in Alexandria, Virginia, and Fremont, California, said Mo Canady, a former police lieutenant and SRO in Alabama who now serves as executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.

“We’ve seen some districts reverse their decision on the SRO issue because they started experiencing unusual levels of violence when school starts back,” he said, acknowledging that the pandemic was hard on many students and impacted their mental health and behavior.

Canady’s organization has

Among them, Canady said there needs to be a memorandum of understanding between school districts and law enforcement agencies about what SROs will and won’t do. For example, the agreements need to prohibit SRO involvement in classroom management or behavior issues that educators and administrators can handle.

There needs to be rigorous, evolving and continued training on topics like adolescent mental health, implicit bias, behavioral threat assessment and ways to reduce school-based arrest, Canady said.

Officers must focus on relationship-building with students, Canady said, and the officers must be carefully selected.

Denver’s police department prefers to have full-time SROs in all of the city’s comprehensive high schools, Thomas, the police chief, told the school board during Monday’s meeting.

SROs would be from the school community, he said, and the department would review and share data on SROs’ contacts with students, use alternatives to citations and have “absolutely no engagement” in school discipline matters.

Marrero told the board that both he and Thomas “are committed to not going backwards.”

“We must continue to decrease the over-policing of our students, particularly those students of color,” the superintendent said.

But not all board members are convinced.

“I can’t just go off on a leap of hope and say I’m trusting our superintendent to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline with police,” Anderson said, adding, “I don’t believe that we can turn back the clock now. We don’t have enough data to say this failed.”

Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.