Author: Paula Noonan
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Untraditional education platform makes fool out of state ed department | Paula Noonan
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It’s April Fool’s week and ERBOCES, Education Re-envisioned BOCES, is one of the state’s biggest jokers. This untraditional education platform authorized through five founding school districts including Falcon School District 49 in El Paso County has played the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) and its state board for chumps. The legislature has yet to stop…
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Colorado’s place in President Trump’s oil-and-gas approach | Paula Noonan
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Head spinning is the unwanted reality of today’s world. Let’s start at the international level. The wars in the Middle East since the 1950s have never ended. Though religion and ethnicity are factors, oil and gas access is always predominant for the U.S. Since oil-and-gas tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz controlled by Iran…
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Penny wise but foolish by pounds | Paula Noonan
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Leadership of Colorado’s General Assembly introduced the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Legislative Appropriation bill, HB26-1333, at $75.72 million. That will be the budget to run the state legislature next year. About $74 million comes out of the general fund and the remainder from other sources. The allocation works out to about $12.80 per Colorado resident at…
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The backstory behind the school-funding TABOR ballot initiative | Paula Noonan
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Last session, the General Assembly took in a report on K-12 public school funding. The legislature ordered the report because an idea circulated Colorado was among the bottom five states in dollars allocated per student even though it is one of the most highly educated states in the nation. The facts proved the poor conditions…
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Not-so-public comment in Douglas County | Paula Noonan
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Let’s do some high and low history. First, the high history. England’s King George III didn’t like the complaining he heard from the American colonies, so he went to war to shut the people up. President Donald Trump doesn’t like to hear from the U.S. Congress when he can have his own way without their…
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Boulder’s bleak oil-and-gas legal entanglements | Paula Noonan
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Good neighbor policy in the fossil-fuel-energy industry stops at Boulder’s door. If any other county or municipality decides to rumble with Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy over their legal exposure to climate lawsuits, those entities will no doubt face “Bleak House” type legal entanglements also. Charles Dickens’ Bleak House records the estate case of Jarndyce…
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Will President Trump’s emissions ‘progress’ turn into pollution regression? | Paula Noonan
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Will President Donald Trump allow gasoline producers to put lead back in petrol? Will he declare by executive order fuel engines no longer need catalytic converters? Just wondering how far he will take his environmental policies before his four years in office are up. Trump’s 2025 executive order to reconsider the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA)…
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Will Colorado’s Trump-and-Polis-approved education grift-gift continue? | Paula Noonan
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If President Donald Trump says it’s free money and Gov. Jared Polis says it’s free money, is it really free money? Both the president and governor claim the Great Big Beautiful Bill’s voucher for education scholarships is “free money.” The rest of us know there’s no such thing as “free money” in government programs. The…
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Grassroots-backed study an excellent basis for game-changing health care program | Paula Noonan
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Nibble here, nibble there. That’s how the federal government and the state have set our nation’s health care policy. President Harry Truman’s effort after World War II to bring universal health care to the United States failed. Now we have what we have. There’s Medicaid and Medicare, two government-funded programs. In Colorado there’s also the…
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Taxpayer money squandered in conservative school districts defending selves from lawsuits | Paula Noonan
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Elizabeth School District, with 2,666 students, has refined the art of wasting dollars on faulty lawsuits. Last year, the district lost an open meetings case when it imprudently failed to properly notify the public of agenda items. That suit ran up an $80,000 bill that could have been settled for much less. This month, the…



