If 5A fails,Telluride schools will be gutted.

In 2024 Colorado rewrote its school funding formula for the first time in 30 years (HB24-1448), and began phasing it in under the 2025 School Finance Act (HB25-1320). The new formula caps the cost-of-living factor and shortens the enrollment averaging that protected small, remote districts from year-to-year swings. As it phases in, Telluride's school funding falls roughly 17%. Our voters didn't choose it, our board didn't choose it, and our district cannot appeal it.

We are not alone. Telluride is one of 22 Colorado school districts forced to go to their local voters in 2025 and 2026 because of these same changes. No amount of local belt-tightening undoes a state formula. The only tool the legislature left us is a local vote.

Cuts of this size cannot come out of administration alone — there isn't enough of it. They come out of everything that isn't legally required: AP and CTE courses, athletics, ski PE, college counseling and college prep, electives, art, music, drama, photography, theater and band, Dual Immersion Spanish, and the counselors, interventionists and aides who support kids who are struggling.

And the best teachers who remain start looking at districts that can pay them. There is no version of this that doesn't gut our schools and drastically change the quality of education for every kid in Telluride.

School-formula (total program) mill levy — the rate the State sets for every Colorado district

• Douglas County

  Denver metro

  27.0

• Colorado average

  178 districts

  23.3

• Crested Butte

  Gunnison Watershed

  15.7

• Vail

  Eagle County

  12.1

• Breckenridge

  Summit RE-1

  10.7

• Telluride

  7.3

• Aspen*

  Pitkin County

  4.4

5A adds about 1.65 override mills on top of Telluride's 7.281. Even then, 166 of 178 districts still levy more.

*Aspen stepped up. In Nov. 2025 Aspen voters approved their own school override and two school sales taxes — none of which appear in the state formula rate above. Every ski town facing this is choosing to fund its schools. Telluride's turn is Nov. 3.

167 of Colorado's 178 school districts levy a higher school-formula mill rate than Telluride's 7.281 — and 166 still do after 5A. The state average is 23.3 mills; the median district sits at the 27-mill cap. We are not being asked to lead the state. We are being asked to stop falling off the bottom of it.

To fully enjoy living here, a community needs solid infrastructure — the water plant, the roads, the gondola. Schools are a key part of that infrastructure. Our community runs on people who live here, in Telluride, Mountain Village, Ophir, Sawpit and Placerville: teachers, nurses, ski patrol, plumbers, line cooks, the person who plows your street at 5 a.m. Those people have children, and they live where their children can go to a good school. Let the schools slide and that workforce leaves first — and everything we love about living here gets harder to keep.

There is also hard math. A national study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found a 1% change in school spending moves home prices about 1% — and money spent on teachers, about twice that. Our schools face a cut of roughly 17%. Applied literally, a $1 million home loses $170,000. Too strong for a resort community? Cut it by a factor of ten — that's still $17,000 of lost equity, against $117 a year.

$117 a year is not a tax you pay for someone else's kids. It is the cheapest investment available in the infrastructure, the quality of life — and the property values — of the community you chose.