Author: Paula Noonan

Colorado Senate President James Coleman and state Rep. Jennifer Bacon have introduced a bill, Senate Bill 26-170, to form an education task force, for the umpteenth time, to identify and expand “effective public schools.” Their goal, for the umpteenth time, is to find public schools that have addressed “opportunity gaps” based on race, geography and…

Colorado’s K-12 school finance, transparency and accountability systems have urgent, connected problems with a slow-motion state response. Money is spilling out of school finance funds to home-schooled and private-school students. This multi-million-dollar flood of funds to cooked-up micro schools, home-school “campuses,” and ersatz “enrichment” programs reveals the grift at the heart of Colorado Department of…

It’s dangerous, even fatal, when government goes rogue whether in a democracy or autocracy. Government officials who ignore or taunt laws that constrain bad acts should be given the heave ho. We’re witnessing these egregious scenarios now at the federal and the Douglas County level. Scorn of basic rules of governance at the federal level…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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)…