EN
TABOR might promise a government on a diet and fatter refund checks, but Colorado’s wallet feels the pinch. It’s one of the tightest tax laws in the country, quietly deciding what our state can and can’t afford. If this makes you scratch your head or mutter, “Wait, that’s fishy…” you’re in good company.
April 25, 2025
…we’ve seen huge K-12 funding disparities across the state.
In Colorado, we have a super fun and completely logical system for funding schools, which manages to charge some homeowners way more money while giving their kids way less education money.
We show this by looking at what the same-value home pays into the school K-12 system in various districts. Take Durango and Pueblo. Durango is a wealthier district whose student population is 34 percent minority. The mill rates for property in Durango are 9.6 mills for school total program funding. Then we have Pueblo, a lower-income district whose student population is 77 percent minority. The mill rates in Pueblo are 27 mills for total program funding for schools. So, Pueblo homeowners pay almost 3-to-1 what Durango does.
It gets even worse when you look at the extra “override” mill rates that each district assessed. Override mills in Colorado allow local voters in a district to raise their property taxes to better fund their schools, but all that extra money stays in the district. Pueblo has zero override mills. Durango has 7.6 override mills. This means Durango generates an extra $2,388 per student that all stays in Durango. Pueblo generates an extra $0 per student from overrides.
Look at it in total. An owner of a $500,000 home in Durango pays $513 total, in program and override mills, and their students get an extra $2,388. An owner of the same $500,000 home in Pueblo pays $805, in program mills, and their students get zero extra override dollars.
This is a product of the school finance formula interacting on autopilot with TABOR.
Cost to Families: In Colorado, we charge extra fees for things like AP tests, varsity sports, and even jerseys, which means your kid has to pay just to academically suffer or be tackled in public. When Colorado students hear that, in places like Pennsylvania, those things are free, they react the same way you would react if someone told you water comes out of the faucet without a cover charge.
Long-Term Costs: This underfunding of districts with higher concentrations of students of color and those from low-income backgrounds is exacerbated by TABOR, which has constrained state revenue growth and led to increased reliance on local property taxes, thereby deepening inequities between affluent and less affluent districts. Without a comprehensive state plan to address these disparities, the divide between rich and poor districts will only widen.
