EDITOR: Before approving any public school tax increase, the voters should demand that the following common sense reforms be implemented:
1 — Prohibit paying anyone to perform union work. Public schools exist to educate children — not to benefit the union. Tax funded union work is taxpayer abuse.
2 — Abolish teacher tenure. Tenure protects low-performing teachers at the expense of our children’s education. Furthermore, protecting low-performing teachers is insulting to the average and high-performing teachers.
3 — Slash the number of non-teaching employees. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, only 46.3 percent of Colorado public school employees were teachers in 2015, the most recent data available. Colorado’s public schools have become insanely bloated with non-teaching employees. The focus needs to be put back on the classroom by capping the number of non-teaching employees, to at most one non-teaching employee for every three teachers.
4 — Comply with the Colorado law against seniority-based, reduction-in-force procedures by removing the illegal seniority-based provisions from all union contracts. RIF the lowest performers first, not short timers.
If Colorado would implement the above common sense reforms, more than enough money would be saved to adequately fund public schools without any tax increase whatsoever, statewide or local.
Vote ‘no’ on Amendment 73 (the statewide public school tax increase) and also ‘no’ on any local school district tax increase, in order to help incentivize the public schools to implement discipline and prioritization in the spending of our tax dollars.
— Chuck Wright, Westminster, via letters@sentinelcolorado.com