Try as they might to smother our state’s innovative, flourishing and wildly popular public charter schools, teachers unions and their minions in the Legislature can’t seem to get the job done. It is, perhaps, a testament to the incompetence of anti-charter special interests – but also to the depth and breadth of genuine support for charters among parents.

The failure so far to stymie charter schools – public schools that are autonomously designed and run but publicly funded – is of course a good thing. As of the 2022-23 academic year, 268 public charter schools were educating, uplifting and, in many cases, changing the lives of more than 137,000 students across Colorado. That’s over 15% of total public school enrollment.

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It’s a potent reminder of the demand for meaningful educational options throughout the Centennial State. Parents of super smart STEM-sters or extra-creative kids who seek to be immersed in the arts; parents with special-needs children; parents whose kids crave more structure than they get at a neighborhood school – the list goes on. All want options. And wide-ranging charters have played a pivotal role in serving such diverse needs ever since they first were authorized by a Republican Legislature and a Democratic governor back in 1992.

Yet, like some sci-fi Terminator, the would-be assassins of charter schools won’t stop trying. And so they’re back on the attack once again, this time with House Bill 24-1363.

The bill, introduced last week in the state House by Reps. Lorena García, D-Adams County, and Tammy Story, D-Evergreen, amounts to an all-out assault on charter schools. Touted as an effort to increase accountability, it actually would deliver a death by a thousand cuts.

A few of HB24-1363’s provisions are straightforward enough to expose the bill’s underlying intent outright – like its repeal of a charter school applicant’s right to appeal to the state when a local, anti-charter school board rejects a charter application a second time. But most of the dirty work in the legislation consists of obscure, arcane policy twists that do their damage while flying under the radar. The net effect is to create a broad array of hurdles.

The bill, for example, repeals a requirement for a school district to provide a list of vacant or underused buildings to its own district charter schools, and it scraps the ability of a district charter school or charter applicant to apply to use a district building or land. More egregiously, it would let a school district hostile to charters charge them rent for a district building. And it sets up phony, gratuitous checks, like “a process for community members” – i.e., union ringers – to appeal a school board’s approval of a charter application.

It’s all a set-up to undermine charter schools.

Organized labor opposes charter schools simply because their faculty members tend to be non-union; never mind that charter teachers generally have no interest in unionizing. And the unions’ water bearers in the political world are either driven by blind dogma or naively buy into the tediously familiar, long-debunked scare tactics and smears employed against charters.

The good news is that, decades after charter schools were made possible through a broadly bipartisan endeavor, solid support remains among some of the Democrats who nowadays dominate our state’s politics. Foremost among them is Gov. Jared Polis, a founder of two charters and a committed believer in educational choice.

Our hope is that Polis will get fellow Democrats who run the Legislature to see the light and assure this irredeemable legislation meets with a swift demise. Colorado’s kids urgently need more educational options, not fewer, and we trust the governor would agree.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board