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Are the Denver School Board elections transparent and democratic?

Not really.

Sadly, the Denver School board campaigns are far less democratic than any other Denver elections with two “dark money” groups providing more than 70% of the funding. We are talking more than $1 million from these two groups in 2023, and expect the number to be even higher this fall.

There is no other Denver or even Colorado election with so much soft or “dark” money pouring into an election. Not only is the funding coming from just two 501(c)(4) organizations — the teacher union (Denver Classroom Teacher Associations Action) and a charter school advocacy organization (Denver Families Action) — but neither group is transparent about the sources of their funding or their expectations for candidates.

Denver Families Action doesn’t even list their sources of funding on their website in spite of spending more than $950,000 in 2023. Another dark money group — Better Leaders Stronger Schools — spent more than $1 million.

Instead of school board candidates having to focus on making their case to voters and raising money from Denver supporters, school board candidates must first convince one of these organizations to back them. School board candidates know that without either of the outside group’s support, they have little or no chance of winning. One hundred percent of the 24 candidates that have won a Denver School Board seat since 2011 had the support of one of the two groups.

To be fair, the independent expenditure committees funded by DCTA or Denver Families Action are not allowed by law to coordinate with the candidates, but the reality is that they don’t need to coordinate to provide strong support as we have seen in the last several rounds of elections.

Independent expenditure committees organize for the candidates, pay for flyers, social media and even TV ads.  And if they say something unreasonable, the candidate can honestly say they know nothing about what DCTA or Denver Families Action did on their behalf.

The most comparable election to school board are the Denver City Council elections. In those races, there are independent expenditures that include developers, unions and other special interests. But in none of these elections was the IE funding greater than the candidate’s campaign spending.

And in most of the city council races, the IE funding was less than 25% which meant that the city council campaigns were managed by the candidates with far less influence from outside “dark” groups as compared to the school board elections.

Why are the city council races less influenced by IE’s?

There is a public match that encourages candidates to raise their own funding. The match is publicly disclosed and allows them to run a campaign without having to be dependent on IE’s. City council candidates have more control over their campaigns and this incentivizes them to directly connect to voters. A 2023 report on the impact of the city’s public matching fund showed that there was far more participation in terms of voter support for candidates and more candidates.

So what can be done to enable school board candidates to act independently and allow voters to know it is unlikely that a candidate has been influenced or bought by a special interest group?

Here are three practical suggestions:

• Provide a public campaign match for qualified school board candidates. Return the responsibility for election campaigns to candidates so they do not have to depend on Independent Expenditure Committees.

• Expand the number of regional school board members from five to eleven to follow Denver City Council regions so that school board members can better represent their communities. The current school board regions make it hard for candidates to truly represent the needs of their community because of the size and diversity of the current school board regions.

• Pay school board members commensurate with other city offices like Los Angeles. This will make it possible for far more qualified candidates to run for school board seats. The school board is responsible for managing a budget nearly half the size of the city budget and educating 90,000 students. It’s a responsibility as great as any city council seat.

Denver’s schools are in crisis with chronic absenteeism, declining enrollment, segregation, and too few low-income students thriving academically. Too many teachers cannot afford to live in Denver and public education funding is threatened at the state and federal levels. The district needs thoughtful committed board leaders.

Oddly, as two people that have mostly disagreed on school board candidates and policy, we find ourselves strongly agreeing that without changes to how we elect Denver School Board members, it is unlikely that our beloved Denver schools can live up to their promise.

Now is the time to curb the outside growing influence of DCTA and Denver Families Action, stop the election arms race and return our school board races to the voters. We need to bring democracy back to public education in Denver.

Van Schoales is a former public school teacher, Denver school principal and education improvement (sometimes reform) advocate. Scott Baldermann is a former Denver School Board member, and parent of two DPS students.

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She fled. It was the middle of the night. Her boyfriend had hit her hard enough to blacken her eye. Fearful of going to the police because she was in the country illegally, she went to her workplace instead. Though closed for business, the security guard was on duty, she reasoned, would protect her from another blow. Though my friend, a manager at the company, encouraged the young woman to go to the police, she feared they would tip off federal immigration enforcement. The crime went unreported.

This is the kind of situation that Colorado laws are designed to prevent. By limiting communication between state and local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), victims of crime, regardless of legal status, can feel safe approaching local police to report crimes and receive protection. These laws do not stop federal agents from enforcing federal immigration laws, they ensure that our police officers have the trust of the public as they enforce state and local laws.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration is trying to bully Colorado into repealing these laws with threats and litigation. These efforts, if successful, would cripple our state’s autonomy under the Constitution to govern law and order.

The Department of Justice’s most recent intimidation tactic, a letter sent last month to Colorado and the city of Denver and other jurisdictions around the country, demanded that the state and city repeal their so-called “sanctuary” laws or face criminal charges. The so-called sanctuary laws–so-called because “sanctuary” is nowhere defined in law—refer to legislation passed by the Colorado General Assembly over the past six years limiting communication and cooperation between state and local law enforcement and ICE.

For example, Colorado laws state that local law enforcement cannot arrest someone based on whether he or she is here illegally or share immigration status information with federal authorities unless a judge has issued a warrant in a federal criminal investigation.

Additionally, police cannot hold individuals in jail past their release time so they can be picked up by ICE. However, local authorities can still respond to ICE requests to provide information on when inmates will be released so ICE agents can be on hand.

The threat to prosecute so-called sanctuary jurisdictions comes after the administration’s failed attempts to starve and sue them into submission. The courts quashed the administration’s efforts to withhold funding from noncompliant jurisdictions as a violation of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment and other provisions.

The Tenth Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Policing, a government responsibility nowhere delegated to the federal government, is clearly a state and local prerogative.

For similar reasons, the Trump administration’s suit against the state of Colorado and city of Denver, lodged in May, is also unlikely to succeed. A federal judge dismissed a similar suit against Illinois, Chicago and Cook County reasoning that the Tenth Amendment protects these jurisdictions’ “decision to not participate in enforcing civil immigration law.”

Given past precedents, the Supreme Court will uphold these lower court rulings and back states and localities against the Trump Administration. Back in 1997, when the Clinton administration and Congress tried to commandeer local law enforcement into enforcing the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the Supreme Court ruled in Printz v United States that thanks to the Tenth Amendment, the federal government cannot “command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

The application to this situation couldn’t be clearer. The Trump administration’s efforts to coerce states and localities by carrot or cudgel to repeal duly enacted laws will come to naught, an expensive taxpayer-funded naught, but naught nonetheless.

In the meantime, state and municipal elected officials are to be commended for not backing down.

Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

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This week, President Donald Trump took aim at Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act, which ended cash bail in the state in 2023. Trump pledged to repeal the Act and deploy the national guard as an occupying police force in Chicago.

It’s no surprise that Trump used false claims and fearmongering to vilify the thoughtful pretrial reform law in Illinois. After all, the early success of this reform threatens a key deception Trump relies on for coalescing his power – that more people in cages will make us safer.

For some context, most people jailed in the United States, including in Colorado, are accused and not convicted of a crime and are in jail only because they cannot pay the money bail required for their freedom. Cash bail is a poverty test with dire consequences: poor people remain jailed pretrial, often losing their jobs, their housing, custody of children, and connections with services. People with money buy their freedom, keep their jobs and housing, take care of their families and see far better case outcomes.

Our cash bail system, where wealth determines freedom, is a scourge on the moral fabric of this country and this state. It does nothing to increase community safety, and it further destabilizes and impoverishes our most vulnerable communities.

But in Illinois, because of the Pretrial Fairness Act, money no longer determines pretrial freedom — judges now decide about pretrial release or detention through transparent hearings. While facts may not matter to the Trump administration, Coloradans should know Illinois has ended cash bail with strong results: jail populations are down, crime is down, court appearance rates are steady, and poor families no longer must pool scarce resources and forego rent and food to buy freedom for their kin.

The results in Illinois are positive, but not surprising. Cash bail has never kept our communities safe, because money is a terrible proxy for safety. People who are jailed pretrial on cash bail are not more dangerous, they are simply more poor.

Likewise, more than a decade of data from across the nation, including in Denver and Jefferson County, show that the vast majority of people released on pretrial bond (regardless of whether released with or without payment of money) come to their court dates, resolve their cases, and are not rearrested.

Accusations of violent crime while on pretrial release are rare, although those incidents play an outsized role in the media. The extraordinarily commonplace story of pretrial “success” doesn’t qualify as clickbait and is rarely reported.

The only “beneficiaries” of our cash bond system are the commercial bail bond industry and the Wall Street insurance companies that underwrite them. This multi-billion dollar industry preys on the poorest families in their most desperate times while spending millions of dollars lobbying against commonsense pretrial reform that might impact the industry’s bottomline. This kind of profiteering has no place in a fair or effective criminal legal system. It doesn’t have to be this way – the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that rely on a commercial money bond system to determine pretrial freedom. Illinois shows another path.

The success of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act may well be exactly why it has come under Trump’s gaze. His extreme politics of fear rely on Americans buying into the notion that the only way to be safe and prosperous in this country is to increase federal executive and police power and massively expand the number of people we cage. Illinois’ pretrial reforms affirm that we can be safe and fair.

We can choose to fundamentally reorient away from jailing people for poverty, have fewer people incarcerated, and instead spend our resources building toward true community safety: good schools, affordable housing, meaningful work opportunities, clean water, green spaces, and accessible healthcare for all.

Rebecca Wallace is the policy director of the Colorado Freedom Fund, and she is a board member of the Pretrial Justice Institute.

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Pueblo’s hidden bodies case is why we need to ditch elected coroners

Re: “24 bodies, ‘multiple containers’ of bones and tissue found at coroner’s mortuary,” Aug. 27 news story

The recent Pueblo case raises an old issue. Why is the technical job of determining cause of death relegated to individuals who can be elected with zero technical requirements? And isn’t it in a clear conflict of interest to permit a mortician to become a coroner? Colorado needs to get into the 21st century and establish a Medical Examiner System.

Patrick Ahlstrom, Arvada

Editor’s Note: Ahlstrom is a retired police chief from Broomfield and Arvada and was the executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

Trump goes after Fed board member with a similar conviction to his

Re: ” Federal Reserve: Trump fires governor over fraud allegations,” Aug. 26 news story

Trump is trying to fire a Federal Reserve board member for alleged mortgage fraud? He was convicted himself and his businesses for multiple felony counts of falsifying business records! Typical Trump, rules and laws only apply to others.

Jim Aldridge, Golden

The One Big Beautiful Bill will help Coloradans

The One Big Beautiful Bill (H.R. 1), signed into law on July 4, 2025, delivers meaningful relief for families, workers, and retirees across Colorado. While debate over national politics often dominates the headlines, it’s worth looking closely at what this bill actually does.

First, the law makes permanent the 2017 individual tax rate reductions, sparing Colorado households from a steep tax hike that was set to arrive in 2026. It also expands the federal State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000 per household, indexed to inflation. For many Colorado homeowners, that means thousands of dollars in additional deductions at tax time.

For workers, the bill creates new targeted relief. Tipped employees may deduct up to $25,000 in tip income through 2028, and hourly workers can claim a new deduction on overtime pay, up to $12,500 for individuals or $25,000 for couples. These changes put more money back in the pockets of service-sector employees and hardworking families.

Seniors also benefit. The bill provides a new temporary deduction of $6,000 for individuals and $12,000 for couples below certain income thresholds, helping many retirees shield Social Security and other income from taxation. Families will see the Child Tax Credit increased to $2,200 per child, with future adjustments tied to inflation.

In addition, the bill encourages savings through new “Trump Accounts” for children born between 2025–2028, seeding $1,000 at birth with the option for families and employers to contribute more.

Taken together, these provisions provide real, measurable benefits for Coloradans at every stage of life.

Kelly Hegarty, La Plata County, Durango

Bravo for standing up to RFK Jr.

Re: “RFK Jr. needs to know the cost of his lies and misinformation,” Aug. 24 commentary

The recent article on RFK Jr. by D. Scott Schmid was so intelligent and so well researched and written!  This article should be sent to every member of Congress and especially to those who voted to confirm RFK Jr.

The amount of damage this man has caused will take decades to recover from!

Carol F. Berry, Aurora

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