Meet Bella (names have been changed), a delightful 6-year-old in a Spanish-speaking household whose only real experience with formal education was behind a semi-functioning computer during her pandemic-defined kindergarten year.

At the start of the summer, as Bella looked forward to first grade, mask and all, her mother was worried that her daughter’s English was lagging along with her early reading. Enter the Learning Dollars Initiative sponsored by ReSchool Colorado, which provided Bella’s family with a small stipend to pay for summer tutoring. Two months later, mom reports that the reading and learning supports closed the gap, and that Bella is now confident and ready for the school year ahead.

Now meet Eva, a young, Denver-area girl who struggles with dyslexia. Her parents used a modest $200 in Learning Dollars to purchase an assistive technology smart pen to help their daughter with note-taking and other schoolwork. This was an expense their ultra-tight, always-stressed family budget could never have afforded.

Finally, here is Nathan, who is getting ready to enter sixth grade and is studying filmmaking at the Denver School of the Arts. Where other camps never really appealed to him, his economically struggling family used a small Learning Dollars grant so that Nathan could attend a series of summer arts programs to occupy his good brain and further pique his innate curiosity.

Funded by a number of leading Denver foundations, Learning Dollars amassed a pot of $400,000 to distribute to needy, deserving families in advance of this summer. Eight hundred kids benefited from this philanthropic investment and foresight.

Now imagine that instead of being a rather small, local pot of charitable funds not guaranteed to recur, this was a growing, statewide account of public funds to finance such out-of-school, educational supports and opportunities.

That is exactly the intent and structure of the LEAP ballot initiative, which Colorado voters will have a chance to approve this November.

LEAP stands for Learning Enrichment and Academic Progress. (How would government function without acronyms, no matter how forced?) This measure, still awaiting an official ballot number, would increase the retail marijuana tax by 5% and dedicate a small portion of other revenues from state-owned lands to finance a statewide program for out-of-school learning opportunities.

While eligibility would be universal, the program is designed so that the overwhelming share of resources would go to low-income students and their families. As they should.

Middle and upper income families spend, on average, over $6,500 on each child each year for such out-of-school programs and enrichment. Think of the list which is virtually endless. It includes tutoring; test preparation; art, music and dance lessons; youth theater; summer camps; sports teams and camps; all sorts of technology and materials; therapies to address various learning differences and disabilities; and on and on you go.

For low-income families, the annual number is closer to $700 per kid. That difference of more than nine times is referred to as the “opportunity gap.”

The core approach of LEAP, by design, is to empower families to pick the offerings most suited to their child. This stands in contrast to the long-established government practice, quite paternalistic in nature, of funding programs for low-income families through its own public agencies and through large grants to nonprofit organizations.

Just as middle- and upper-income families are able to pick and choose among an almost limitless array of programs, LEAP would give families lower on the economic ladder similar autonomy by affording them control and discretion over such resources.

Families would direct their financial aid to the program provider or providers of their choosing. Then the LEAP enterprise would send a check to those providers as a protection against any misuse of funds.

Come campaign-time this fall, the usual, predictable objections will be aired. The marijuana industry will trot out its “black market” talking point. As if bumping a tax assessment by a mere 5% will provide such a trigger.

Some who put their faith, even devotion, exclusively in the public sector will complain that all such funds should go to school districts. Such a position is based on the faulty assumption that districts always know best and are a superior judge of the out-of-school needs of an individual child than his or her parents. Further, it presumes that private or nonprofit providers have little of value to bring to this equation.

Tell that to my wife who, though retired, spent two intense weeks this June as a teacher at the Logan Learning Lab. In just its third year, the Lab is run at zero cost to participant families by one of Denver’s premier independent schools. It offers nearly 50 gifted, sometimes nerdy kids, mostly from low-income families, an immersive experience in studying a topic entirely of their individual choosing and passion.

One young child, let’s call him Darius, expressed his only complaint about the program by asking why it did not include Saturdays and Sundays.

While the Logan Learning Lab is tuition-free to participants, that does not mean it is without its substantial costs. Since its inception with just a handful of kids, those costs have been covered by generous donors and foundations. Now think of how many such programs in all kinds of communities and with all manner of focus could be developed and scaled with LEAP dollars.

Here is a reality to consider: Less than 25% of a child’s waking hours are spent in school. This includes, of course, weekends, vacations and summer break as well as all those hours every day before and after school.

So much of our attention on the achievement gap centers on the school day. LEAP is an effort to shift that focus just slightly and augment it by also taking into account the critical importance of those abundant non-school hours and the pronounced opportunity gap there.

For now, never mind the whole heated discussion about equity of outcomes. If we believe even minimally in the bedrock, accepted principle of equality of opportunity, it is hard to turn a blind eye to all that goes on in those out-of-school hours, days, weeks and even months. 

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Denver Gazette. Follow him at @EricSondermann on Twitter.

Read his previous columns here