Long described attending job fairs as a rural superintendent. Candidates try to walk past the small districts’ tables. Recruiters have to wave them over and sell the lifestyle: fishing, hunting, skiing, the four-day work week, the chance to be a head coach right away.
Ken Haptonstall, co-executive director of the Colorado BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services) Association and a former superintendent, said he used to recruit teachers from midwestern states. “Those kids like to mountain bike, so we’d tell them you have no mountains, and we’d show them pictures of mountains, and we’re on a four-day week, and you’ve got three days to go ride bikes,” he said. “The problem is, after about three or four years, if they didn’t find a significant other, they went home.”
Housing compounds the problem. Ward said North Park owns two trailers behind the school, always occupied by staff. She maintained a list of every available rental in the community, calling landlords each recruitment season. When she finally filled a school counselor position that had been vacant for seven years, she used leftover grant funds to pay for the counselor’s housing in a district-owned trailer and offered a large signing bonus.
“That’s what got her here,” Ward said. “You can’t really do that without grant funding.”
In 2023, when North Park lost a 4th-grade teacher mid-year, Ward taught the class herself rather than accept an unqualified substitute. Her principal took the remaining subjects, and the two of them finished out the semester.
At Idalia, nearly every teacher has a personal connection to the area through marriage, family ties, or upbringing. Minor credits the East Central BOCES alternative licensure program with developing homegrown talent. She herself earned her teaching and administrative credentials through alternative licensure after a first career as a state park ranger.
The financial pressures are simultaneously chronic and acute. Reeves described a fundamental instability in how Colorado funds its schools: The legislature is required by law to pass the school finance act by early April, before the overall state budget.
“They have not done either in probably 20 years,” Reeves said. “It’s always the last week of the session.” That uncertainty makes it nearly impossible for small districts to plan ahead.
LePlatt criticized the state’s growing reliance on competitive grant programs as a funding mechanism. Grants cannot sustain permanent programs, and the capacity to write and administer them is itself a luxury small districts often lack. Reeves said at one point, $420 million in state education funding was allocated through grants rather than the school finance act.
For small districts, the mathematics of enrollment decline is particularly punishing. Long said losing even 10 students represents a significant revenue loss, but the programs those students were enrolled in do not disappear. “You still have to run the same programs, even though you’ve dropped 10 kids,” he said.
The state’s enrollment averaging, which smooths year-to-year fluctuations, is being reduced from a five-year window to a shorter period, a change that could magnify the financial shock of even modest enrollment dips.
Haptonstall said the BOCES system is increasingly filling gaps that individual districts cannot manage alone. Local BOCES handle special education services, alternative licensure, and Career and Technical Education programming. His state association has set up a recruitment specialist to find speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and other hard-to-find specialists, cutting out private staffing companies that were charging districts as much as $180 an hour for virtual providers.
But he said many new superintendents do not even know what their local BOCES offers. “Two-thirds of these people are brand new, and they don’t even know what a BOCES does,” he said.
Haptonstall said he is urging small districts to cooperate before the state forces consolidation on them. “For the first time in my 33, 34 years, I’m actually worried that there is really a fiscal cliff,” he said. “A billion dollars this year, probably a billion dollars next year. I keep trying to tell superintendents, you really need to be proactive in your cooperative thinking.”
