A sinkhole formed under a rural school library. Colorado may cut funding to a program that could fix it.

The worry began with a set of library doors that refused to open and close, followed by windows that proved just as stubborn. Soon, cracks spidered across the drywall and ceiling, growing several inches long until school officials at Holyoke Elementary School in far northeastern Colorado had no choice but to shut their school library down.

Perhaps the culprit was a structural problem with the roof, they thought, so they began peering above ceiling tiles and climbing atop the school building to see whether the roof was compromised. 

They were looking up when they should have been looking down.

When Holyoke School District finally took its investigation in that direction, maintenance staff and insurance representatives found a disaster in the making — one that sounded more like the fictional plot of a children’s book sitting on one of their shelves.

A sinkhole forming beneath the school library.

That was about three years ago. After a temporary fix meant to last five to seven years, the small rural district is asking the state for funding toward the construction of a new school through a program designed to help districts afford costly and critical facility repairs, upgrades and building replacements. Following an unsuccessful bid to Colorado’s Building Excellent Schools Today program last year, the district of 514 students has returned this year with a second attempt at garnering state dollars.

Once again, it has found itself in a crowded field of applicants, up against 52 other projects from districts and charter schools across the state — many of which face equally urgent and hazardous facility conditions. Altogether, the proposals aimed at retooling or constructing new buildings add up to $941 million, broken down by $605 million in state funds and $336 million in required local funding matches. To receive a grant, a district must be able to help fund its project with a portion of local money — an extra hurdle for districts who must get community buy-in for major bonds.

The grant program, also known as the BEST Grant Program, will likely dole out only a fraction of that total this year. Lawmakers, tasked with overcoming a $1.2 billion budget deficit, are proposing making a statutory change to cap funding on an ongoing basis at $150 million per year. 

The actual amount of grant funding going directly into school projects next year, however, will total between an estimated $62 million and $65 million, with program funding obligations that include annual payments for a financing tool known as certificates of participation, BEST staff and money that goes toward charter school facilities whittling down the state’s $150 million investment. That would be enough to fund little more than one large-scale project — like a school replacement for Kiowa School District C-2, which has applied for a BEST grant exceeding $56 million.

Advocates and board members behind the state grant program warn that limiting funding for district buildings at a time both construction costs and facility needs are escalating will keep some Colorado schools on shaky ground, in some cases endangering the safety of students and staff.

“There are going to be dozens of school districts who have applied for the grants who need the assistance who are going to have to continue putting their kids in unsafe schools,” BEST board member George Welsh told The Colorado Sun.

Funding for the BEST program — which supports projects with cash grants and through certificates of participation — comes from a few different buckets: state land board revenue; marijuana excise tax money; lottery spillover dollars; and interest earned in the fund that holds all BEST dollars, known as the Capital Construction Assistance Fund. The amount of cash grants the program has dispersed has fluctuated over the past few years, from more than $155 million last year down to over $120 million during the 2023-24 school year and $110 million the year before that. The chasm between the amount of money districts need to fix and enhance their buildings and the amount the state segments for BEST grants is staggering, even as Colorado has increased program spending many years within the past decade.

A letter BEST board members sent to Gov. Jared Polis and the General Assembly in February noted that over the past five grant cycles, the board has considered 291 projects requiring $4.06 billion — $2.46 billion in BEST grants and $1.6 billion in local matching dollars.

Over the same five grant cycles, the BEST program backed 180 grants with $1.37 billion, unable to fund 111 projects that would have required a collective $2.65 billion.

The prospect of an ongoing cap for BEST funding frustrates BEST board member Matt Samelson a few weeks before he will review 1,300 pages of applications, most of which will likely be strong contenders for a BEST grant.

“There’s a good apparatus that’s been set up and it’s been doing the work for a number of years and we’re just going to be handcuffed at the amount of grants and the number of schools that we’re going to be able to help out,” Samelson said. “And the fact that they’re talking about doing this on a permanent basis going forward is the frustrating part because at some point the budget will change and there will be more money available, but we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and you’re going to have to get statutory changes to try and address this and that’s hard to do.”

The BEST Grant Program, developed through legislation in 2008, has become one of the primary ways that districts, particularly those in rural Colorado, can generate enough funding to address large-scale facility needs. When a district attempts to pass a bond during an election, state law dictates that it can raise no more than 20% of the assessed property value. So without state help, districts with low property wealth simply cannot collect near enough local funding to pull off ambitious renovation and expansion projects or new buildings. 

Just how much responsibility falls on the state when it comes to ensuring school facilities create safe, healthy learning environments is up for debate.

Polis’ office said that the BEST program was never intended to fully fund school facility needs but rather help fill in funding gaps.

“Governor Polis is prioritizing making sure BEST funding grows at the same rate as the overall budget, to ensure that we can once again increase per-pupil funding while moving forward on a school finance formula that puts students first,” spokesperson Ally Sullivan wrote in an emailed statement. “This is about putting funding into the classrooms. The Governor looks forward to continued conversations around how to best support Colorado students and educators, and is supportive of the cap being proposed in HB25-1320 so that BEST funding increases along with operational funding for schools.” 

House Bill 1320, a school funding bill currently making its way through the legislature, proposes keeping BEST funding at $150 million and routing about $45 million from the BEST grant program into the school funding formula to support school district operations. The powerful Joint Budget Committee would vote every year on whether to direct more funding beyond $150 million to BEST, according to a spokesperson for House Speaker Julie McCluskie, a sponsor of the legislation.

McCluskie, a Dillon Democrat, said restricting BEST grant funding “was a tough choice” but still the right one in a budget year defined by “a series of tradeoffs.”

McCluskie acknowledged that the cost of school facilities needs far outpaces how much the state has committed to BEST grants.

“It is such a challenge in this state when we do not have the sustainable funding sources that we need to fully fund education, whether you’re looking at the adequacy studies that indicate a $3.5 billion to $4 billion shortfall or you look at the BEST grant application need,” she told The Sun. “While we’ve made progress, we’ve certainly made progress these past few years in driving more dollars to our schools, it’s still not enough.”

“It was literally illegal for us to get our buildings up to code and safety”

Max McCloskey, a longtime architect who specializes in renovating and expanding facilities in rural districts, said he regularly comes across old buildings plagued by structural issues and cracking because of buildings’ tendencies to move over time. That paves the way for what he calls “a building’s worst enemy”: water.

Water jeopardizes indoor air quality and can spur mold, he said, while water damage can destroy interior finishes and wear on building materials, particularly with temperature swings that perpetuate a cycle of water freezing and thawing.

“There is a common thread in our rural districts of failing facilities,” McCloskey, an associate architect at F&M Architects’ Edgewater office, said. “You see pretty consistently a lot of deterioration due to just having to maintain 1950s-eras buildings for 70-plus years.”

McCloskey, who has worked on two projects backed by BEST grants, primarily focuses on revamping and redoing school spaces so that they are safe for kids and can also accommodate their learning needs. He configures classrooms to be flexible for students so that they can seamlessly break out into small learning groups.

But it’s only become more expensive at a time rural districts don’t pull in enough state funding, he said. 

“When you look at that scale of community and that number of students, they just don’t get the funding that they need from the state to fix the scale of building updates and improvements that they need,” he said. “And then compounding that challenge is just the consistent escalation of construction costs. So they’re kind of getting hit from both sides.”

Before the pandemic, McCloskey said new construction for a K-12 school was about $350 per square foot. That price has now jumped to an estimated $700 or more per square foot.

Welsh, a board member of the BEST program and a former superintendent whose career spanned multiple districts, recalls how prior to the state grant program, a district’s ability to tackle facility needs depended on whether it could raise enough taxes locally.

While leading Center Consolidated School District 26JT in the San Luis Valley around 2010, Welsh recalls the district needing about $11 million for facility upgrades — or a new school building to house all grades.

But with a total taxable property value of $25 million, the district was strictly hampered. Under the state law barring districts from pursuing a bond at more than 20% of their taxable property value, his district could only generate about $4.5 million — far short of the $31 million cost of a new building.

“It was literally illegal for us to get our buildings up to code and safety,” he said.

Before the district won a BEST grant for a new building, Welsh said he relied on Band-Aid after Band-Aid to keep facilities operating, including replacing roofs, windows and HVAC systems.

He has seen BEST grant dollars pay off, with benefits rippling far beyond more sound infrastructure.

“Student performance shot through the roof,” Welsh said, once Center Consolidated School District had a new building. The new building filled students with pride, he noted, and gave the district room to redirect its own budget dollars to reading intervention programs, high-quality professional staff development, new instructional materials and technology.

Data from 2004 showed that only 14% of kids in the district graduating high school were pursuing post-secondary learning two years after high school, Welsh said. In 2015, three years after the new building opened, 82% of students in the high-poverty district were on track with post-secondary learning opportunities two years after graduating high school.

“It’s sort of a perfect intersection of being able to actually invest money in programs,” he said, “rather than patch the latest hole in the facility.”

“The quality of your education should not depend on your zip code”

Holyoke School District temporarily closed its elementary school library to repair the near-sinkhole, caused by a 6- to 7-foot wide void of air that emerged after storm drainage pipes under the library disconnected and snow and rain eroded away all the dirt, leading to an unstable foundation. That’s just one of the many problems the 74-year-old school has been riddled with, Superintendent Kyle Stumpf said.

Electrical outlets have caught fire. In November, three gas leaks in the boiler room forced the district to evacuate the school and send 285 students a mile away where parents picked them up. Last May, the school closed for three days due to a water main break under the floor that left the school without water to flush toilets. And earlier this year, the school shut down for a day because of a strong gas odor.

Stumpf said the district could keep sinking money into the aging building, but he believes it is reaching “a breaking even point” when replacing the building makes more sense than continuing fix after fix.

The price tag that would come with that new building: roughly $53 million — well beyond the district’s budget and the $14.4 million bond its community passed to go toward a new building. That’s the maximum amount the district could ask of its local taxpayers. A BEST grant would cover the bulk of construction costs, about $38.7 million, Stumpf said.

“We could never save enough money to get that type of replacement ourselves,” he said. “We could put away $100,000 (each year) for the next 40 years, and we would still never reach it.”

That’s exactly why Andrew Romanoff sponsored a bill that established BEST when he was Colorado House Speaker. Romanoff at the time learned about the severity of school facility problems while on a bike tour in the San Luis Valley with a then-superintendent. He discovered floorboards that were “too rotten to hold up a desk,” a roof that was caving in and a school whose fire safety plan involved “a rickety metal ladder” affixed to the side of the building that kids would cross the roof to reach before climbing down. 

Romanoff told The Sun that almost 150 years after Colorado made a constitutional commitment to provide students a thorough and uniform system of free public schools, “some kids are still waiting for us to make good on that promise.”

“I believed then, I believe now that the quality of your education should not depend on your zip code or the size of your parents’ bank account,” he said. “You either believe that or you don’t and, if you believe that, you’ve got to do something about that.”

In South Routt School District RE-3, south of Steamboat Springs in northwestern Colorado, Superintendent Kirk Henwood has applied for a $26.7 million BEST grant this year in hopes of merging the district’s high school and vocational agriculture building with a renovation and an addition. Middle schoolers would move into the expanded space from the 101-year-old building that currently holds their classes — where two or three space heaters adorn each classroom on winter days and kids sometimes wear coats and hats while learning since the building’s radiators that are also a century old don’t always blast enough heat.

Henwood said that safety is another major concern on his campus in an era of mass shootings. Some high school classrooms have exterior doors — creating more accessibility points into the building — and kids have to walk from one building to another to get to the vocational agriculture shop, including up and down a flight of stairs that constantly have to be cleared of snow and ice.

“The cost to maintain and continue to update is more than we can afford in one year,” Henwood said, “and so I’m looking at what kind of system allows us to make some pretty substantial changes so we can really get caught up.”

The district of 327 students can’t pull off its vision to update and expand its campus without support from both the state and community, he said. If the state selects South Routt School District RE-3 for a grant, the district will also need local taxpayers to approve a mill levy override on the November ballot to raise enough money for a local match that would cover the rest of the nearly $54 million transformation.

Should the state limit funding for BEST, Henwood said, kids will be the ones paying the highest price.

“You’re hurting more than likely less socioeconomically advantaged school districts and more than likely rural school districts.”