Senator Chris Kolker had just finished thanking everyone — the stakeholders, his co-sponsor, the Joint Budget Committee members who fought to protect K-12 funding in a brutal budget year. The mood in the Senate Education Committee room was warm, collegial, almost celebratory. Then he dropped the warning.
"The LCS projections from earlier this year confirm what many of us have already known," Kolker said. "The phase in the new formula is not sustainable." He cited a February 2026 memo from nonpartisan Legislative Council Services, warning that under current economic conditions, "the state's general fund reserve will be negative by fiscal year 2930" — that's 2029-30. A recession, he added, would accelerate the collapse.
The room didn't erupt. There was no shouted rebuttal, no dramatic walkout. But his co-sponsor, Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, made clear she had heard enough.
Two Sponsors, One Bill, Two Very Different Visions
SB26-023 is, on its face, a routine piece of annual machinery — the School Finance Act sets per-pupil funding and total K-12 spending for the coming school year. This year's version implements a 30% phase-in of the new school finance formula Colorado adopted in 2024, replacing a system that had been in place since the 1990s. School districts are held harmless, meaning no district will receive less than it got in fiscal year 2024-25. The bill increases the statewide base per-pupil funding for the 2026-27 budget year and sets the total program funding at $10.2 billion for fiscal year 2026-27.
But behind the tidy numbers sits a real ideological fault line, and it runs directly between the bill's two sponsors.
Kolker, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, used his closing remarks to call explicitly for new revenue. The formula's phase-in, he argued, can't be sustained on the existing tax base. Kirkmeyer, his Republican co-prime and a Joint Budget Committee member, pushed back without flinching. She argued the problem isn't a lack of revenue — it's approximately 15 years of the state failing to honor a constitutional obligation to fund education in line with inflation.
"While my co-prime's favorite word is shenanigans, mine I think is bamboozled," Kirkmeyer said, "because we kind of bamboozled people where we did the negative factor." The "negative factor" — a maneuver Colorado used for years to hold back school funding below constitutionally required levels — is widely considered one of the most controversial chapters in the state's education finance history. Kirkmeyer's point was pointed: the money was always there, as long as the state chose to prioritize it. The Kids Matter Fund, a dedicated revenue stream she and Kolker worked to establish last year, is proof of that.
The Stakes Are $10.2 Billion
To understand why this debate matters, you need to understand how Colorado funds its schools. Each district's allocation is split between a local share — derived from property taxes — and a state share, paid from the general fund, the State Education Fund, and the State Public School Fund. The state share for 2026-27 totals $5.6 billion; the local share accounts for $4.6 billion of the remaining total.
The 2024 formula overhaul was designed to make that state share more equitable — directing more money toward districts with high concentrations of students living in poverty, English learners, and students with disabilities. But moving from the old formula to the new one can't happen overnight. Districts that benefited from the old system would face sudden, destabilizing cuts. So the legislature built in a multi-year phase-in, with districts held harmless during the transition.
This year is the first year of that phase-in at 30%. The formula uses a three-year student average under the new system and a five-year average under the old, then gives each district whichever produces a higher number. It's a protection mechanism — but as Kolker acknowledged, it's an expensive one.
"Some Students Don't Even Have a Desk"
While senators debated the long-term architecture of school finance, a student walked up to the microphone and made it concrete.
Samira Yusupov, affiliated with the Colorado Gifted and Talented Student Board and a student in Aurora Public Schools, didn't come with a policy brief. She came with what she sees every day.
"Classrooms are so crowded that some students don't even have a desk on the first day of school," she told the committee. "This isn't about physical space, but it's about opportunity as well. Last semester, several of my peers were borrowed from higher level English classes because the class hit its capacity limit and the school lacked funding to add more sections."
Her testimony landed quietly but visibly. Senator Marchman, the committee's vice chair who was presiding, paused after the vote to acknowledge Yusupov directly — noting her own background as a gifted and talented teacher. No other senator asked Yusupov a question, but her image — a student at a Colorado high school without enough desks — hung over the rest of the hearing.
A Working Group, a Formula, and a Looming Amendment
One of the hearing's most technically substantive moments came not from a senator but from Janice Sizener, CFO of Douglas County School District and co-chair of the Smoothing Factor Working Group — a group of district finance officials assembled to solve one of the formula transition's thorniest problems.
As districts shift from the old formula to the new, those losing enrollment face a brutal math problem: funding drops faster than they can shed fixed costs like buildings, bus routes, and teacher contracts. The old "declining enrollment" provision in state law offered some cushion, but it's being phased out. The Working Group's solution is a 50-30-20 weighted average smoothing factor — a mechanism that would give districts a gentler glide path to adjust.
"Our goal with this proposal is to find a reasonable middle ground," Sizener told the committee, "one that acknowledges the state's fiscal constraints while providing districts with a predictable glide path to right size operations."
The amendment incorporating this smoothing factor wasn't ready in time for the committee hearing. Kolker noted it — along with a handful of other technical changes — would be introduced in the Appropriations Committee. The Smoothing Factor Working Group said it looks forward to bringing full details to the committee soon.
Seven Amendments, Zero Objections
The committee moved through seven amendments with unusual efficiency. Most were technical fixes requested by the Colorado Department of Education: replacing the word "reimbursement" with "funding" throughout the statute; cleaning up inconsistencies in the School Transformation Grant Program's allowable uses; extending flexibility for small and rural districts struggling to find qualified auditors (a problem, Kirkmeyer noted, that has only grown since COVID-era provisions were first enacted); and updating total program funding figures to reflect the most recent Legislative Council Services forecast.
Senator Kirkmeyer moved one amendment herself — clarifying that assistant principals and assistant superintendents may be included under a particular staffing provision — at the request of the Rural Schools Alliance.
Not a single amendment drew an objection. Not a single vote was close.
The Witnesses Who Came to Be Heard
The hearing's witness list read like a who's-who of Colorado education advocacy, and every one of them said yes.
Matt Cook of the Colorado Association of School Boards emphasized something that gets lost in the policy weeds: school boards must adopt their fiscal year budgets by July 1, and they've historically been forced to finalize those budgets without knowing the final School Finance Act numbers. "It's always a race," he said, urging early passage as a matter of basic operational sanity.
Scott Smith of Cherry Creek Schools — also serving as the current president of the Colorado Association of School Executives — praised the bill's timing and the sponsors' commitment to honoring last year's funding deal. But he used his closing moment to make a specific request that drew no response from the committee: that the 0.5 full-time-equivalent funding for homeschool enrichment programs be maintained. "Whether it's a cut to school finance or a cut to funding for enrichment programs or other shuffling of the deck chairs, the result is all the same," Smith said. "It's a cut to schools."
Jonathan Levesque of Littleton Public Schools testified remotely — still at his district, he noted, working through budget cuts. He acknowledged openly that two years earlier he had testified against the new formula because it negatively impacted Littleton. Now he supports its continued implementation as the best available mechanism for stable K-12 funding.
Danielle La Platte of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance made the rural case plainly: "Rural districts are not like their urban counterparts. We don't have the enrollment cushion of thousands of students." Multi-year enrollment averaging and the smoothing factor, she argued, are the difference between keeping a teacher and losing one.
A Unanimous Vote and an Unanswered Question
The final vote was 7-0. Senators Bridges, Bright, Frizell, Kipp, Rich, Kolker, and Chair Marchman all voted aye. No dissent, no abstentions.
But the disagreement between Kolker and Kirkmeyer — polite, collegial, and unresolved — is the real story underneath the unanimous tally. Kolker's position, backed by the LCS memo's sobering math, is that the state will eventually have to raise revenue to sustain K-12 funding at constitutionally required levels. Kirkmeyer's position is that the money is already there in constitutional earmarks and dedicated funds — the state just needs the political will to prioritize education over everything else.
Neither of them is entirely wrong. And neither of them convinced the other.
What Happens Next
SB26-023 now moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee with a favorable recommendation. Kolker has indicated additional amendments — including the smoothing factor and other technical changes — are planned for introduction there. After Appropriations, the bill heads to the full Senate floor, and if it passes the Senate, it goes to the House before it can reach the governor's desk.
If this bill passes and is signed into law, Colorado's school districts will have their 2026-27 funding levels locked in: a $10.2 billion total program, with no district receiving less than it did in 2024-25. For students like Samira Yusupov in Aurora Public Schools — where some kids start the year without a desk — it won't fix everything. But it keeps the floor from dropping.
If the bill stalls or is amended to cut funding in Appropriations, school boards racing toward their July 1 budget deadline will be left scrambling. And the larger question Kolker raised — whether Colorado's school finance formula is structurally sustainable past 2029 — will still be waiting, unanswered, when the next session begins.