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Jesse Paul / Colorado Sun When she was a brand-new legislator besieged by lobbyists at the entrance to the Senate floor, state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger felt a tap on the shoulder from a man telling her she was late for her next committee. She rushed to the elevator, and the man accompanied her all the way to the committee room, securing several minutes of one-on-one time to make the case for his client’s bill. When Zenzinger pushed open the door to the committee hearing room, there was no one else there. The meeting wasn’t even close to starting. Now that Zenzinger serves as chair of the S...

Citing fallout from the pandemic, a resolution unanimously passed by the Aspen School District Board of Education on Tuesday supports canceling state spring assessment tests. “Whereas, the mental health of students and staff has been seriously and negatively impacted by stress and concerns related to the pandemic and would be unnecessarily exacerbated by mandatory … state assessments this spring, particularly in light of the academic difficulties teachers and students are already facing due to the pandemic,” said part of the resolution. Aspen joins Denver, Boulder and other Colorado sch...

Alan Petersime/Chalkbeat Whether to give standardized tests in the middle of a pandemic is shaping up to be one of the key education debates of Colorado’s 2021 legislative session, dividing education advocates and elected officials alike. But what do parents want? Advocacy groups have released results from competing polls that come to opposite conclusions to argue that the general public agrees with them. One poll of 600 registered voters commissioned by Democrats for Education Reform, the business-affiliated group Colorado Succeeds, and the conservative education advocacy group Ready Colo...

Many of Colorado's largest education organizations, as well as the Denver Public Schools board, want this spring's Colorado Measures of Academic Success, or CMAS, testing to be canceled so that teachers can focus on making up educational deficits incurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But such a move would be difficult even with the support of Governor Jared Polis — and thus far, he offers no indication that he wants a fight over standardized tests. The Colorado Department of Education describes CMAS as "the state’s common measurement of students’ progress at the end of the sch...

Christy McGee/Fountain-Fort Carson School District This story is part of a group of stories called How do teachers captivate their students? Here, in a feature we call How I Teach, we ask great educators how they approach their jobs. Some parents in Superintendent Keith Owen’s 8,000-student Colorado school district started asking questions about coronavirus even before the pandemic hit the U.S. full force last spring. They worked or lived on the Fort Carson army base served by the district and had heard about the new illness from friends and relatives overseas. They wondered how t...