Education funding would get a boost from ballot initiative

Grassroots support of Initiative 25 growing locally

A chance to stop the bleeding of revenue from the state’s schools is mobilizing a group in the Gunnison Valley to join a statewide effort to push a ballot initiative in November that would raise some state taxes and revenue, dedicated solely to the state’s schools.
“The problem is, there’s no end [to the education funding problem] in sight,” says Kristi Hargrove, a local education advocate who is helping lead an effort to put Initiative 25 on the state’s November ballot. “This proposal isn’t a permanent fix, it’s a five-year Band-Aid.”
Colorado Initiative 25, originally championed by state Senator Rollie Heath, would simply turn back the clock on taxes to 1999, when the corporate and personal income tax rate was 5 percent and state sales tax rate was 3 percent. Today the taxes yield 4.63 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively.
But while the tax increases might seem modest, the payout is not, with anticipated revenues of about $532 million per year going to prevent more cuts to public education, from preschools to universities, Hargrove says. If voters adopt the proposal, the tax rate would go up starting in January 2012 and would expire five years later.
If the state’s economy recovers before the five-year term of the proposal expires, the money would still go to education, according to the group Great Education Colorado, which has signed on in support of Heath’s proposal.
The money would also backfill funding that was cut during the past three years.
In that time, as fixed costs like insurance and utilities have risen consistently, Gunnison RE1J school district superintendent Jon Nelson says the per pupil funding has dropped by more than 16 percent. Next year’s funding bill will cut another $332 million from schools statewide and more than $640,000 from the local district.
Hargrove, who is involved in the local and state Parent Teacher Associations, points to the possibility of a more permanent fix down the road and says, “I had hoped for a broader initiative, but that’s going to take a couple of years… Right now there are major structural problems in Colorado and it’s going to take a major fix to bring funding consistently up to where it needs to be. The Band-Aid will do little more at this point than stem the cuts.”
Already the cuts have cost the RE1J school district a dozen teaching positions (most to positions that were retirees and resigned and were not replaced), a large portion of the district’s alternative program, most field trips and the realignment of some major departments.
Finding an immediate way to stop the losses, if temporarily, is better than doing nothing, Hargrove says, so she and group of volunteers are trying to collect 1,700 signatures for the petition to get the initiative on the ballot, or about one vote for every student in the district. “We hope to blow through that, though,” Hargrove says.
“We’re seeing a lot of support for it,” she adds. After an early push to collect signatures to gauge support for the proposal May 28, the group was able to turn in more than 300 signatures by June 4. To get on the ballot, the initiative will need the valid signatures of 85,000 registered voters.
Extensive polling early in the year made it clear that nobody wants education cut. “But when you start trying to find a solution for how to solve it, the [poll] numbers change dramatically,” Hargrove says. “People want it but they don’t want to pay for it.
“The problem is, you get what you pay for or you don’t get what you don’t pay for and we as a society need to make those decisions.”
In the weeks ahead, the effort will pick up pace as the group hurries to meet a July 20 deadline. “We’re getting on the stick here pretty quick,” Hargrove says. “We’re doing a grassroots online petition process that is new and has never been done before.”
The form is a pdf that can be downloaded only once and has an identification number to help ensure that the forms are original. People can sign petitions at the Red Lady Realty office with Maggie Dethloff in Crested Butte or at Hargrove Construction in Riverland, or look for petitions popping up outside the post office.