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High school seniors and college students across Colorado aren’t the only ones wondering what their fall will look like amid serious hiccups in the new process for applying for federal student aid. Colorado universities are facing their own bout of uncertainty with fears that fewer students may end up enrolling in higher Education , questions about how their budgets will shape up and the anticipation of an unusually busy summer making last-minute adjustments before the new school year. What lies ahead is “one of the roughest years in higher education history probably in this country in many generations,” said Marty Somero, director of financial aid at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. About 28% of students have qualified in recent years for Pell Grants, which are usually awarded to undergraduate students who have significant financial need. When the U.S. Department of Education set out to introduce a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid form and proc...

Gavinn McKinney loved Nike shoes, fireworks, and sushi. He was studying Potawatomi, one of the languages of his Native American heritage. He loved holding his niece and smelling her baby smell. On his 15th birthday, the Durango teen spent a cold December afternoon chopping wood to help neighbors who couldn’t afford to heat their homes. McKinney almost made it to his 16th birthday. He died of fentanyl poisoning at a friend’s house in December 2021. His friends say it was the first time he tried hard drugs. The memorial service was so packed people had to stand outside the funeral home. Now, his peers are trying to cement their friend’s legacy in state law. They recently testified to state lawmakers in support of House Bill 1003, a piece of legislation to ensure students can carry naloxone with them at all times without fear of discipline or confiscation. The bill passed the House and will next be heard by the Senate education committee. School districts tend to have strict...

Colorado’s student count across all 178 school districts has plummeted to its lowest point in a decade , with the state tallying 1,800 fewer students last fall than in 2022, according to data released Wednesday morning by the state Education department. The most recent dip — a 0.2% decline — is not as dramatic as the hit enrollment took during the last school year, when the state reported a drop of 3,253 students, a 0.37% decrease from the year before. But it accelerates a trend of dwindling school populations that emerged across much of the state and country during the pandemic and is poised to reshape how schools operate.  Enrollment in preschool through 12th grade totaled 881,464 students during the state’s annual count in October, with the biggest enrollment drops among its youngest students. The number of kids in preschool , kindergarten and first grade fell by 3,691 kids from 2022 after those same grades experienced a similar decrease the previous school year...

After Teller Elementary School announced plans to set aside half a day every Friday next year for teachers to plan lessons, analyze student performance data and take time for professional development, Principal Sabrina Bates received a slew of sharp words from parents: “You obviously don’t care about our kids,” one fired-up parent wrote. Another sounded off in an email, complaining “the kids barely get enough time to be schooled as it is.” Teller Elementary School, in east Denver, will add to more than 80 out of 207 district-run schools in Denver that will cut classroom time to make room for teacher planning and professional development next year, raising concerns among some parents that schools are going too far in scaling back hours of instruction. More than 80 schools under Denver Public Schools have an early release this school year while another nine schools include a late start in their schedule, according to district data. It’s not clear how many of those schools hav...

Gov. Jared Polis joined higher education leaders and lawmakers Feb. 12, 2024, at the Auraria campus in downtown Denver to announce major investments in health care programs at four higher education institutions across the state. (Erica Breunlin, The Colorado Sun) Gov. Jared Polis and a bipartisan group of Colorado lawmakers are proposing to dramatically expand health care education programs at higher education institutions across the state to combat persistent workforce shortages in health care fields, including by creating a new medical college at the University of Northern Colorado that would graduate about 150 medical professionals a year. Polis joined lawmakers and leaders from higher education schools Monday afternoon at Denver’s Auraria campus to announce a proposal to spend $247 million to expand opportunities for students wanting to pursue careers in health care fields with legislation that was introduced later Monday afternoon. Along with a new medical college ...

GARCIA — Time has barely ticked forward in a 150-year-old schoolhouse near Colorado’s southern edge, where hundreds of dusty books line wooden shelves, worn desks lie entangled in a clumsy pile and a few faded white numbers and letters linger on the dark green chalkboard. Stepping inside is almost like walking into a time capsule — one that a local school district is ready to reopen to restore and return the building to its original use: educating kids who live in a remote pocket of Colorado, many from low-income families. “You think about everything that we’re trying to do with education now and then you look in here and you think about everything they were doing with what they had then,” said Toby Melster, superintendent of Centennial School District R-1, while visiting the schoolhouse in February. “The ones that did teach the kids here were probably saying the same thing (as us): ‘If I only had, if I only had.’” The San Luis district of nearly 190 students in prescho...

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ signature preschool initiative is serving thousands more families than expected in its first year, but its success has come with a costly downside: Fewer low-income children attend full-day preschool today than before the program launched. The trade-off was laid out in stark terms during Joint Budget Committee hearings last month: The more enrollment grows for universal pre-K, the less state funding will be available for at-risk children to attend full-day preschool. Under Colorado’s previous state-funded preschool program, which ended July 1, more than 6,000 at -risk 4-year-olds received funding for a full-day classroom slot last school year. This year, the state provided only 3,500 full-day slots to the most at -risk kids — even as funding for preschool has increased and overall enrollment exceeds expectations. “Those are the kiddos that we think most need access to preschool,” Melissa Mares, the director of early childhood for the nonprofi...

El Paso County commissioners, voices amplified by a microphone, left no room for misinterpretation: Migrants are not welcome in Colorado Springs.  “Keep going. Find a sanctuary city,” Commissioner Carrie Geitner said two weeks ago during a hastily called news conference after a few South American migrants arrived at a church-run shelter. “They asked for those folks to come to their cities. Find one of those. That’s where they should go.” About a week later and an hour up the highway, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston was quoting from the Statue of Liberty: “Please, send us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he said, even as he announced budget cuts brought on by housing and feeding migrants. “These are folks yearning to breathe free, and they believe in the promise this country made that they could breathe free. “We as a city are bigger than this moment,” he said. “And we will find a way through.” Colorado’s two largest cities have long been political opposites...

EL PASO COUNTY — Across 87 acres of sprawling fields near Colorado Springs, a group of Colorado superintendents is setting out to revive schooling in the trades and expand students’ options beyond college — preparing them for jobs in industries battling steep workforce shortages and even training kids interested in construction to one day build affordable teacher housing close by. It’s all part of a plan that education leaders who belong to the Pikes Peak Board of Cooperative Educational Services have been dreaming up for the past four years, motivated by a resurgence in career and technical education, or CTE, and a growing need for skilled employees among local companies. The Pikes Peak BOCES — which provides support, staffing and resources to nine rural districts and 12 bigger districts and other school agencies — is in the early stages of creating what it calls the Pikes Peak BOCES Education Park. It will be a kind of CTE campus where regional students will have new o...