The House Tuesday defeated House Bill 10-1272, which would have imposed contribution limits in school board and Regional Transportation District races.
The measure died on a standing vote after a sharp partisan debate over the role of teachers unions in school board races.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Beth McCann, D-Denver, was seen as a reaction to last autumn’s heavy spending in Denver and Douglas County school board races. Colorado Education Association lobbyists had taken a “monitoring” position on the bill, meaning they weren’t explicitly supporting or opposing. (In fact, every lobbying organization following the bill was in a “monitoring” position.)
As originally introduced, the bill would have imposed a $2,500 individual contribution limit and a $5,000 limit on contributions from small-donor committees, which regularly are used by teachers unions in political races. The bill also would have changed some contribution reporting deadlines.
There currently are no limits for school board and RTD contributions, and McCann characterized the bill as a way to bring those offices into line with Amendment 27, a voter-approved 2002 measure that established individual and small-donor limits in statewide and legislative races, along with restrictions on corporate and labor union giving. (The Colorado Supreme Court Monday, following an earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision, ruled the corporate and union bans were unconstitutional.)
An attempt to raise the small-donor committee limit in HB 10-1272 failed earlier in committee, and that issue was the focus of floor debate Tuesday. (Individuals can contribute up to $50 to a small-door committee.)
McCann proposed a floor amendment to raise the committee limit to $10,000, an idea promptly attacked by Republicans.
“It creates an unfair advantage for unions,” argued Rep. Mark Waller, R-Colorado Springs. “Unions will be able to control what happens in school board elections. The Colorado Education Association will take control of school board elections.”
A variety of Republican substitute amendments were defeated or, in one case, ruled out of order. McCann then withdraw her amendment in favor of one by Rep. Lois Court, D-Denver.
Court’s language proposed a $1,000 limit to school board candidates running in districts and a $2,500 limit for at-large candidates. The corresponding limits for small-donor committees would have been $10,000 and $25,000.
Waller said it would be “a horrible, horrible thing” to give committees 10 times more contribution power than individuals. He tried another amendment to equalize individual and committee limits, but that also was defeated.
With that bit of parliamentary underbrush cleared away, the House returned to Court’s amendment – which also was defeated on a voice vote.
Nearly an hour after debate started, a standing vote was held on the bill.
After the head counting was done, the announcement “The chair is not in doubt, the bill is lost,” came from Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, who was chairing the House during preliminary consideration of bills.
For the record
In other action, the House Tuesday gave final approval to House Bill 10-1074, which would create a system for notifying schools when students return to school from treatment facilities.
The Senate approved final passage of House Bill 10-1044, which creates a system of voluntary licensing for neighborhood youth clubs. (The bill is seen primarily as a way for the Boys and Girls Clubs to avoid licensing as childcare centers, which have stricter staffing requirements than Boys and Girls considers necessary for youth centers.)
Catching up
The Senate Monday gave final approval to House Bill 10-1054 (notification requirements for college emergency procedures) and House Bill 10-1030 (grant-funded scholarship program for ECE workers).
The House Education Committee Monday afternoon made short work of three minor bills, passing Senate Bill 10-154 (fine tuning of accreditation standards for alternative schools) and Senate Bill 10-062 (technical changes in categorical programs law).
At the request of the sponsor, the committee killed Senate Bill 10-026, which was intended to ease data sharing between the Department of Education and College in Colorado. Rep. Karen Middleton, D-Aurora, said the matter has been taken care of administratively.
The Senate Education Committee last Thursday voted 6-2 to kill House Bill 10-1206, which would have given full voting rights to student members on the CSU board of governors.
It was the second year in a row that the proposal was defeated, but the student-initiated idea got a lot further this year. In 2009 the bill was killed in the House Education Committee, but the full House passed the bill this year.
Senators who opposed the bill expressed reluctance to turn the board into one that includes specific constituencies.
Use the Education Bill Tracker for links to bill texts and status information.
Without spending limitations, candidates such as Mary Seawell, sponsored by the Charter School Industrial Complex, will continue to buy elections, thwarting the will of the people. In North Denver, where I live, charter schools are opposed in favor of magnet schools. Yet, Seawell and her cronies on the board of education, using the tyranny of the majority, have stymied the common good. Charter schools, such as Denver Arts & Technology Academy (DATA), now defunct, have been allowed to fail for nine years (DATA) while magnet schools such as Lake MIddle School IB World Academy are allowed only four years to prove their value. With spending limitations, a candidate such as Seawell might not win and cast the winning vote for a charter school and be able to stand in the way of real reform.
I’ve not mentioned campaign finance reform in previous postings. Thus, the previous comment is a different topic.
Mr. Augden,
Your rants would have more credibility if just once, instead of going off on ideological riffs about charters, you could articulate a specific strategy or set of strategies for “real reform.” Like many Republican senators and congressmen and women on health care, you are eloquent in your opposition to the ideas and efforts of others. But your silence is deafening when it comes to proposing specific solutions. Do you have some specific ideas you would like to share, or do you prefer spewing negatives? Yours is the easier and less productive course. And it’s pretty obvious that your ignorance about Mary Seawell would fill volumes.
I most certainly do and have mentioned one such previously – magnet schools such as Center for International Studies(CIS), Lake Middle School’s IB World program, George Washington High School’s IB program, and others. Speaking of Republican ideas, Mr. Gottleib, you’ve been a spokesperson for one, charter schools. Just how are charter schools representative of reform? Most are administered in a similar, authoritarian fashion as regular schools. How is that reform? How do they contribute to the common good? And, how am I ignorant about Mary Seawell? She’s an advocate for charter schools that, according to various studies (that you continue to ignore), are contributing to the racial and economic re-segregation of public schools. So, please provide me with the “volumes” about Ms. Seawell that I need to be fully informed about her and others who represent her viewpoint that charter schools that serve the few instead of the many in the regular schools represents equity. Finally, as I’ve mentioned many times, your “silence is deafening” on the question of whether or not charter schools are contributing to the racial and economic resegregation of Denver Public Schools. And, to the question of whether or not such segregation is harmful to children.
Mr. Augden,
I will elaborate further in my newsletter this coming Tuesday. But as far as magnet schools in Denver go, you are as careless with the facts as you are with the spelling of my name. GW’s IB (full disclosure, my daughter attended that excellent program) and other magnets have, since the end of busing, tended to exacerbate segregation. As far as charters and segregation, we may actually agree in part here. To the extent that suburban charters make segregation worse, and are used by parents to flee increasingly diverse traditional public schools, I have no use for them. In urban settings, it is a very different story.
By the way, when I worked at Piton, I commissioned and published the Civil Rights Project study of the resegregation of DPS post-busing. This study found that, without factoring in charters, DPS had become more segregated in the post-busing era than it was pre-busing. White and affluent families were decreasing in numbers, but were increasingly concentrated in schools like Bromwell, Steck, Slavens and Cory.