Author: Paula Noonan

Paula Noonan Federico Peña is a south Texas boy, born and bred. He’s a white hat kind of guy, riding high on a steed like the bright-blue mustang with blazing red eyes at Denver International Airport. Let’s just say he’s on his high horse, reared up to take on… Denver Public School’s Board of Education…

Paula Noonan State school and district performance ratings arrived recently and the legislature’s task force on school assessment and accountability is now meeting. It’s a useful convergence to examine this trainwreck of attempts at judging how schools are doing their work. Some history: Every year in March and April, third-through-eighth graders take the CMAS (Colorado…

Paula Noonan Foundation philanthropy has progressed to a new level of conceit with the Daniels Fund’s “Big Bet” to bring 40,000 charter and private school seats to Colorado. Did Hanna Skandera and Luke Ragland, Fund CEO and Daniels’ Sr. VP of grants, ask the people of Colorado if this was a good idea? Did these…

Paula Noonan The storyline on Colorado’s charter schools from Colorado’s charter schools is they get less funding than district public schools. Not sure why that canard is hanging on out there. A recent review of district per-student funding reveals a wide variety of dollars per district and a huge variation in dollars spent through county/district…

Paula Noonan Should we assume an executive agency, the Air Pollution Control Division (APCD), and its oversight entity, the Air Quality Control Commission (AQCC), are under the ultimate authority of the executive branch of government, or Gov. Jared Polis? If so, then the Air Pollution Control Division’s GEMM 2 scheme to trade in air pollution…

Paula Noonan The Denver School Board race for three seats is turning into an expensive brawl. The contest is between, on one side, those who want to dump DPS’s neighborhood and comprehensive schools and turn the district into charter or innovation schools run by non-profits and for-profit management companies and, on the other side, those…

Paula Noonan As part of the medical shift to deeper patient inquiry done fast, elders on Medicare now complete a questionnaire to help providers understand their mental and physical health. Some people of conservative persuasion might label the questionnaire “woke.” Those on Medicare surely call the questionnaire wrong-headed as the health conditions described don’t fit…

Paula Noonan Dilatory, slow-mo, recalcitrant and unresponsive are descriptors of the Polis administration’s, and the state legislature’s, Joint Budget Committee responses to numerous urgent – even existential – state problems. In 2020, the legislature passed SB20-023 unanimously to study school safety issues. In 2022, the legislature passed HB22-1274, to continue the working group that had not…

Paula Noonan Ken Witt, superintendent of Woodland Park School District, made jaw-dropping comments about a lawsuit filed by the Colorado Education Association (CEA) related to the Woodland Park district’s abridgement of employees’ First Amendment rights. His cynicism must leave Woodland Park’s residents incredulous. Witt stated CEA’s lawsuit “feels like a coordinated political attack by various…

Paula Noonan The shooting tragedy at East High School this spring connects failure dots from state policy, to Denver’s policing, to Denver Public School vulnerabilities, to the purposes of public education, to how education is delivered and governed. It’s become a microcosm of what ails us and what needs to be fixed before the next…