August 11, 2011 10:09 PM UTC

Lobato vs. Colorado Testimony Continues

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• by: Colorado Pols

Heart-wrenching stuff from the Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel:

The plaintiffs, who include Montezuma-Cortez school district, want the courts to declare that Colorado is violating its own constitution by depriving students of a quality education – a verdict that could require billions of dollars more to be spent on schools…

Textbooks are outdated, and [Cortez Middle School teacher Justine] Bayles can’t assign science homework because there aren’t enough books to go around, she said.

Keefauver, a fourth-grade teacher at Kemper Elementary School, pays for field trips out of his own pocket. He also buys basic supplies such as paper and pencils.

“My kids deserve the same opportunities as any kids in the state of Colorado, any kids in the country,” Keefauver said. “It’s unfair that they have to do without some of the things I had as a student growing up, things that we even had five, six or seven years ago.”

The testimony from teachers in rural school districts who are party to this suit, building a case about the difficulty meeting the most basic educational needs, seeks to prove that minimum constitutional guarantees of a “thorough and uniform” public education system throughout the state of Colorado are being violated. Opponents, including Gov. John Hickenlooper who we’re inclined to believe does value quality public education, argue that the constitution doesn’t address funding levels and that this is a question for the legislature. Other, more conservative opponents assert that funding alone won’t help school districts meet the standard.

It’s for Judge Sheila Rappaport to decide, but we’ll say this: we know what teachers make, and we find the notion of them paying out of pocket for their students’ paper and pencils to be somewhere between reprehensible and criminal. And if that doesn’t underscore the point about “minimum standards” plaintiffs are trying to make, we honestly don’t know what could.