Salary information for teachers in North Central Colorado schools is collected from 89 data points, including employees, users, and past and present job advertisements on Indeed over the past 36 months. It's important to understand the differences in education funding and teacher compensation that arise at the regional and school district levels in order to have more informed political conversations. In some school districts, voters have approved the cancellation of factory taxes to generate funds for their schools beyond what they obtain through the state's education funding formula. However, this current system of collecting taxpayer revenues is unequal and simply adding more dollars to it will only perpetuate those inequities.
Administrative functions are designed to support schools and students, but the increasing proportion of expenses spent on administrative functions means that fewer dollars are available to pay teacher salaries and classroom support. The TLCC survey also asked teachers what most influences their decision to continue teaching at their school, and more than 62 percent cited school staff or school leadership. Recently, the issue of teacher compensation has been a major topic of discussion in Colorado and across the country. In some cases, this means that wealthy localities, such as the Aspen School District, receive more state dollars than poorer school districts, such as its neighbor, Lake County, even after Lake County receives additional funding for at-risk students. The Pikes Peak region was the next largest region, with 18 percent of public school students, followed by the north-central region, which enrolled 14 percent of students.
Denver public schools experienced their first teachers' strike in 25 years, which focused on teachers' salaries. However, the state average conceals the wide variation in wages that occurs at the regional and school district levels. Colorado school districts receive state and local funding based on a funding formula first established in 1988 and last revised through the Public School Funding Act of 1994. Following the example of the Aspen School District and taking into account all local, state and federal dollars per student (including factory tax waivers), Aspen far outperformed its neighbor, the Lake County School District. Expenses in the Other category are usually not associated with the daily functioning of school activities and are excluded from the analysis in the rest of this section.
