Friday morning teachers and staff at Littleton High School and all over the LPS district held a walk-in before school. They held signs reading “Honk for Education”, “Protect” and “Respect”. They were staging their walk-in to get back the money taken away by the Colorado State Legislature in an IOU, a legal form dictating the presence of debt.
“The teachers of littleton are out here to make sure teh state pays what it owes based on constitutional requirements,” said Will Daniel, Chair of the History Department.
The situation goes back to 2009 when the Great Recession led the state legislature to form the Negative Factor.
Amanda Crosby, the Union president at Colorado Education Association, explained the situation. “Basically the Negative Factor allows the state to claim that it is fully funding schools as mandated by the state constitution, but then pull back money in IOU fashion.”
Another way to look at the situation is to see that current seniors in Colorado have not ever had a fully funded budget during their time in the public education system.
On Friday morning Mr. Daniel informed me that educational funding in Colorado is $10 billion. However, “Littleton public schools in particular is missing 167 million dollars the state has said they were supposed to pay us over the last ten years. ”
While we will never get back the money lost between 2009 and today, there are ways to solve this problem.
According to Crosby the solution is “that the voters need to give the legislature more money, and the legislature needs to spend more on education.”
Though the situation could worsen, there is a greater push than ever to end the Negative Factor in Colorado’s education systems. This would allow budgets to be restored rather than taken from.
