Colorado in 2012, via state-wide referendum, voted to legalize recreational-use marijuana, becoming (alongside Washington) one the first states to do so. One of the campaign promises of legalization in Colorado was the promise that the excess tax revenue generated by legalization would be used to help fund construction projects in public school districts.
Most of these extra funds are distributed through BEST grants (Building Excellent Schools Today) which are used on these construction projects. While the tax breakdown changed in the initial years following legalization, in 2019 the Colorado House passed House Bill 1055, which demanded that 100% of all funds raised by the excise tax on wholesale retail marijuana was dedicated to BEST grants, to be distributed based on an application program available to all public school districts in the state.
As stated on the Colorado Department of Education website (where a school district will start their application for a grant), “BEST grants are competitive, awarded annually and in most cases must be supplemented with local district matching funds.” In order to be awarded a BEST grant then, it is highly likely that a school district, to be competitive, must be able to help supplement a large chunk of the funding.
An overview of BEST grants awarded from the 2019/2020 to 2024/2025 school years bears this out. For the 2019/20 cycle, money supplied by the districts represented 41.18% of the money used for the projects; for 2020/21 it was 47.11%, in 2021/22 it was 45.36%, in 2022/23 it was 43.85%, in 2023/24 it was 41.42% and in 2024/25 it was 34.86% (a compiled list of excel documents from the Colorado Department of Education website detailing BEST Grants from 2019-2024 that has the raw data referred to throughout this blog post can be found here).
It seems it can be hard for rural districts to put up the money to be competitive for these grants. In every year from 2019 to 2024, districts that would have been awarded grants, but were denied due to lack of supplemental funding, were exclusively rural districts (with two exceptions in 2020-21, when a project in Boulder and a project in Pueblo were unable to raise the funds).
It is worth looking at a specific example of how this system of requiring matching funds can directly impact the rural school districts that need the resources. In the 2024/25 grant cycle, school district North Park R-1 in Jackson County, Colorado requested a $52,713,524.19 BEST grant for replacing the Preschool to 12th grade school in the district that serves 150 students, where about 50% of students come from poverty (according to the school district-not the official census data). The grant requested the state of Colorado to help replace the only school that is in North Park R-1. The building is almost sixty years old and is “challenging to work around [] due to the asbestos that is commonly found in buildings of this age.” North Park R-1 was denied, due to being unable to raise the $19,032,673.00 they needed to raise in supplemental funds. The failure to raise the funds can hardly be shocking, as the median household income in Jackson County (according to the 2020 census) is $41,809 and the yearly revenue of the school district is $4,854,820 (with yearly expenditures of $4,765,740). In order to raise the supplemental money for the BEST grant, there was a $20 million bond placed on the November 2024 ballot. The bond, proposed by the school district, would have involved a small raise in property tax on the residents to pay for the roughly $20 million supplement-the increase would max out to $1.8 million in new taxes raised each year.
Jackson County, who voted for Donald Trump by 55 points, failed to pass the bond measure. The small rural community in Jackson County can hardly be blamed on not wanting to raise property taxes in a community that has many families who live on a small/fixed income, and who are facing shrinking enrollment in their school district.
It is not that the BEST grants alone can be blamed, but in the 2024/25 cycle, all of the denied BEST grants (due to lack of supplemental funding) were projects asking for new schools, or drastic renovations to existing schools, in small rural districts. It helps showcase the broader trend, that these small rural districts are working with outdated buildings and worse resources, and state programs that are meant to help are still leaving them in the dust.
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2 comments:
Until reading this post, I had no idea that excess tax revenue generated by marijuana legalization was used to fund schools. This entire premise seems antithetical to the years spent promoting the D.A.R.E. program in the U.S. As a former English teacher at a rural school abroad, I am intimately familiar with the outdated buildings and resources provided to students within these areas. I am supportive of states like Colorado that are willing to secure necessary funding even if through unconventional means.
This was a very insightful read, and in theory, the BEST grant program seems like a fantastic idea. However, as you detail, it seems that rural school districts are not being helped by the system, rather the system is working against them. After reading this, it does appear that once again the urban has been pitted against the rural in a particular sense. Urban school districts have access to more revenue and can put up the money needed to receive BEST grant money while rural school districts, who lack funding to begin with, cannot compete. Instead, they are forced to make hard decisions, like raising property taxes, which may get rejected by taxpayers. Hopefully, the BEST program can work for rural school districts in the future as they so desperately need the additional funding.
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