DENVER | A bill intended to lure educators to rural Colorado school districts with stipends and other perks passed out of the Senate education committee Thursday, collecting a quintet of relatively benign amendments in the process.

Senate Bill 104, sponsored by Sen. Nancy Todd, D-Aurora, outlines several incentives meant to entice teachers — specifically those who are trained at Colorado universities — to work on a longterm basis in rural school districts across the state.

“This is not a silver bullet,” Todd said during the committee meeting. “This is not a bill that has all the answers, but it is a step in the right direction.”

Passed by a vote of 6-3, lawmakers made several tweaks to the bill’s slew of original stipulations via five separate amendments. Sens. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, Tim Neville, R-Littleton, and Committee Vice Chair Vicki Marble, R-Fort Collins, voted against the measure.

Although the majority of the changes passed without pause, committee members extensively debated the intricacies of an amendment aimed at replacing a prong of the bill that called for the addition of four rural education centers spread throughout the state. The contested amendment, which was moved by Todd, replaces the quartet of education centers with a single education coordinator based at Western State Colorado University, who travels around the state to help rural districts fill teaching vacancies. Passed by a tight vote of 5-4, the amendment slashed the price tag of what was formerly the measure’s most expensive provision from more than $700,000 to roughly $200,000.

“My biggest fear is that if we do not have a coordination with all of the things that we have in place, I think we’re at high risk of not being as successful as we need to be,” Todd said shortly after introducing the coordinator amendment.

Despite several other adjustments brought on by the various amendments, most of the bill’s original stipulations remained largely intact, including additional stipends for teachers, teacher training programs for high school students and funds for rural teachers to get their national board certifications.

Several rural educators testified in favor of the bill, citing the difficulty their district’s have had in recent years finding and retaining qualified teachers.

Robert Mitchell, a policy officer with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, also testified in favor of SB-104 and quantified the lingering recruitment dilemma facing some of the state’s more isolated schools. Mitchell said that Colorado will need about 4,200 teaching positions filled next school year. That’s despite the estimate that the state’s teacher training programs only pump about 1,200 teachers into local school districts each year.

“We’ve kind of gone over a cliff,” Mitchell said. “We are definitely in a crisis in terms of teacher numbers. Make no mistake.”

Rep. Jon Becker, R-Fort Morgan, and Rep. Bob Rankin, R-Carbondale, are co-sponsoring SB104 in the House, and a quintet of Democratic lawmakers join Todd as co-sponsors in the Senate. Sen. Jerry Sonennberg, R-Sterling, joined Todd as a co-prime sponsor.

SB-104 now moves on to be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Another bill bearing Todd’s name in the sponsor field, HB-1082, also unanimously passed out of senate education on Thursday. The measure would officially change the term used for local workforce institutions from vocational schools to technical colleges in the Colorado Revised Statutes. All three of the state’s technical colleges — Pickens Technical College in Aurora, Emily Griffith Technical College in Denver and Delta-Montrose Technical College in Delta — already use the more modern term to describe their operations. The bill would merely strike the antiquated term of “vocational school” and update the state statues with the more accepted moniker of “technical college.”

After already receiving unanimous approval in the House education committee as well as on the House floor, HB-1082 now moves on to be heard by the full Senate.