Author: Paula Noonan

Paula Noonan The charter school movement receives its support and advocacy funding from two sources: far-right conservatives such as the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity and investors from the super-wealthy technology class such as Reed Hastings of Netflix, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg Business News. Other large funders for charters in…

Paula Noonan Colorado’s SB24-188, Public School Finance bill, was introduced last week. The appropriation puts a modest $10 billion toward educating about 880,000 students. The legislature thoughtfully added $416 per student to the total to settle Amendment 23’s constitutional requirements to cover inflation plus a little more. Our public school finance system is notorious. We…

Paula Noonan The charter school world is experiencing a pique of hysteria. Their model of spending Colorado taxpayers’ hard-earned money on schools run by unelected, private boards is being challenged by HB24-1363, Charter School Accountability. So far Americans for Prosperity, the mouthpiece entity funded by the right-wing Koch brothers, has hired 11 lobbyists to oppose…

Paula Noonan Orphan oil-and-gas well statuses in Colorado are a moving target. Orphan well numbers grew from 982 in 2022 to more than 1,400 in 2024 based on our Energy Carbon Management Commission’s (ECMC) figures, with 649 in the pipeline for plugging. Apparently, small operators, as predicted, are getting out of the drilling and operations…

Paula Noonan Fifty years ago, the Denver Public Schools’ de-segregation litigation known as the Keyes decision finally came to a conclusion. Denver Public Schools, the federal district court decided (and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed), segregated its schools particularly in northeast Denver where Black and White populations lived on either side of Colorado Boulevard between…

Paula Noonan A Venezuelan mother, “Maria,” arrived in the United States late last year with her three children. She left Venezuela at 23 when conditions became too grim. She emigrated to Colombia. There, she followed her career as a hair stylist and nail technician, but circumstances deteriorated and she decided to make the difficult journey…

Paula Noonan First-introduced bills by tradition represent the most important priorities of legislators. This year’s initial batch fit into categories identified below. “Ever-hopeful” bills relate to money. HB24-1065 will reduce the state income tax rate from 4.4% to 4%. Not surprisingly, it has three GOP sponsors and no Dems. If the legislature changed its rules,…

Paula Noonan Governments assess sin taxes to reduce “sinful” behavior by charging more for the thing that causes the sinning. A corollary result is more money for government to spend on something the public deems is positive for the common good. Tobacco and vaping taxes were passed by 67% of voters in 2020 to pay…

Paula Noonan Profiles in courage are hard to come by these days. If “Profiles in Courage” author and former President John Kennedy, from the day of the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter a decade ago to now, examined courage in relation to safe firearms/gun control legislation he’d be hard-pressed to find any. The Washington Post…