Future of Colorado charter schools could be determined by Democratic primary for a State Board of Education seat

Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent to affect the primary for a seat on the state Board of Education, a race that could determine the future of Colorado charter schools for years to come. 

What’s at stake is the panel’s willingness to overturn local districts when they reject a charter school’s application. 

Nearly $685,000 from Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students, a pro-charter school state-level super PAC, has poured into the contest in the 2nd Congressional District to support education consultant Marisol Lynda Rodriguez in her bid against former Boulder Valley School Board President Kathy Gebhardt.

Board members are elected to six-year terms in each of the state’s eight congressional districts, with a ninth member elected statewide. The 2nd District — which is highly favorable to Democrats — is centered in Boulder, but also includes Fort Collins and Summit, Routt, Eagle and Grand counties. 

Whoever wins the primary will almost surely win in November, too, replacing Democrat Angelika Schroeder, who is term-limited. There is no Republican on the ballot in the district.

Schroeder is part of the 5-4 majority on the Colorado Board of Education that is willing to overturn local school districts when they deny charter school applications. She has endorsed Rodriguez.

Should the board majority swing, new charter schools could face serious hurdles in getting approval, according to Van Schoales, a senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, which analyzes how well charter schools are performing.

“It’s likely that any appeal to the state board, a charter versus a school district, the school districts will win,” said Schoales, who is supporting Rodriguez. “So I think that that will force the charters to either not exist in those school districts or for them to make whatever deal that school districts offer.”

The Colorado League of Charter Schools independent spending committee, which gets its money from an affiliated nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors, gave $450,000 to Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students in late May, the group’s largest donor.

Are District 2 candidates clashing over charter schools? They say no.

While Rodriguez has drawn massive financial support from charter school proponents, she said she is “not charter for charter’s sake.”

“I don’t believe in just every school should be charter,” she told The Colorado Sun. “We need different things for different students. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Communities should be driving the decisions about what kinds of schools they need, Rodriguez added.

“I really believe in community voice, that communities know what they need and communities know what they want,” she said, “and if you have community members that are coming and saying, ‘we want a charter’ … I think that they should be given a fair shake if they have sound financial practices and a strong academic program and they have community behind them.”

Rodriguez’s career has included traveling the country to help state charter school associations with their strategic plans while working for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools during nine months from 2007 to 2008. She said she has also helped permanently close one Missouri charter school, Carondelet Leadership Academy, through the education consulting company she owns, Insignia Partners, which she co-founded in 2012. 

Through her company, Rodriguez said she helps “organizations and teams basically come to consensus on a shared path forward.” She said her largest client, in Missouri, is “an authorizer that closes bad schools.” Her own visits to schools help inform that process.

The nonprofit CLCS Action has thrown its support behind Rodriguez in hopes of preserving fair consideration for charter schools at the board level, said Dan Schaller, president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools.

“We want to make sure, much like has been the case for the last 20 years, that the state board of education gives a fair shake and a fair hearing to charter schools,” Schaller said. “It has just as often ruled in support of the charter school as it has the local school district, so it’s generally been a 50-50 proposition, and I think we are just very interested in ensuring the state board remains a fair and objective arbiter of these decisions impacting charter schools and making sure that there aren’t folks coming in who are predisposed to right out of the gate not uphold that fairness and that objectivity.”

Meanwhile, Gebhardt told The Sun that she believes charter schools are “an essential part of our choice system” and said they will not be in peril should she be elected in the way that some of her opponents are suggesting through advertisements and mailers.

“I support charter schools,” she said, “and I think that is a fear tactic that is being used that misrepresents my position on choice, misrepresents my position on charters and is used in a way that’s inappropriate.”