A student named Samira Yusupov walked into a Colorado Senate committee room and described something that would be unthinkable in a wealthy suburb: "Classrooms are so crowded that some students don't even have a desk on the first day of school. This isn't about physical space, but it's about opportunity as well."
The same week, in Dover, Delaware, a high school senior named Noel Lewis — a Delaware State Thespian officer at Cape High — testified virtually in support of a bill that would give students like him a formal credential for years of artistic achievement that colleges and employers otherwise overlook. Two states. Two students. Two completely different definitions of what schools owe children.
But zoom out across both state capitols in mid-April 2026, and a sharper picture emerges: legislatures everywhere are scrambling to patch a K-12 system stretched past its limits — by money, by staffing, by an unresolved argument about what schools are even for.
The Money Problem Nobody Wants to Own
In Colorado, the foundational fight is fiscal. SB 26-023, the state's annual School Finance Act, sailed through the Senate Education Committee on April 20 with a unanimous 7-0 vote — but not before the bill's own sponsors went after each other.
Senator Chris Kolker, one of the bill's architects, issued a warning that cut through the usual committee optimism. "The LCS projections from earlier this year confirm what many of us have already known," he said. "The phase in the new formula is not sustainable. In their memo from LCS memo from February of this year nonpartisan staff note it modeling by the JBC staff director shows that under current budget economic expectations and incorporating the current law scenario for school finance, the state's general fund reserve will be negative by fiscal year 2930."
His co-sponsor, Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, pushed back — hard. She didn't dispute the numbers. She disputed the framing. "While my code prime's favorite word is shenanigans, mine I think is bamboozled," she said, "because we kind of bamboozled people where we did the negative factor." Her argument: Colorado didn't have a revenue problem so much as a broken promise problem, having failed for roughly 15 years — by her account — to meet its constitutional obligation to fund education at the pace of inflation.
The two legislators agreed on the bill. They disagreed on what comes next. Kolker wants new revenue. Kirkmeyer wants accountability for old failures. That argument will almost certainly resurface when SB 26-023 moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where Kolker has flagged that additional amendments are waiting.
The bill increases the statewide base per pupil funding for the 2026-27 budget year and sets the total program funding, implementing the agreed-upon 30% phase-in of the new school finance formula adopted in 2024, with school districts held harmless to fiscal year 2024-25 total program funding levels. Janice Sizener, CFO of Douglas County School District and co-chair of a working group on the formula's smoothing factor, described a methodology designed to ease the transition: "We have developed a smoothing factor methodology, specifically a 50, 30, 20 weighted average. Our goal with this proposal is to find a reasonable middle ground, one that acknowledges the state's fiscal constraints while providing districts with a predictable glide path to right size operations."
Delaware is facing its own version of this reckoning — but more quietly. Governor Matt Meyer has declared a literacy emergency in the state, and HB 267, the Reading Competency Reporting bill, is the legislature's response. Delaware's Secretary of Education testified bluntly about why annual test scores aren't enough: "You can't wait for end of the year tests that are annual or every two year tests that are naep. You have to know in an ongoing way, which is what the original bill was intended to do."
The bill, sponsored by House Education Committee Chair K. Williams, passed unanimously out of committee on April 15. It requires pre- and post-year reading data collection — a simple fix to a reporting gap Chair Williams discovered after reviewing what prior legislation actually required. Sometimes the most important reforms are the most unglamorous ones.
The Counselor Wars
If there's one issue that captures the philosophical fault lines in American education right now, it's school counselors. In Colorado, the fight has become a proxy war over whether government belongs in children's emotional lives at all.
In February 2026, Colorado's State Board of Education eliminated the credit hour requirement for school counseling licensure — effectively allowing anyone with a master's degree but minimal training to counsel students through crises, college applications, and trauma. SB 26-153 would restore a 48-credit-hour minimum. On April 15, it passed the House Education Committee 10-1.
The case for the bill was made by educators who have watched the profession's demands explode. A school counseling program chair — whose name was garbled in the transcript — laid out the central irony: "CDE recently increased the number of school counseling preparation standards from 7 to 19. This clearly reflects the recognition that the profession has grown in complexity. It is therefore concerning and ironic that while the standards have nearly tripled, the proposed credit minimum was left undefined, allowing for out of state schools with inadequate standards to prepare students for licensure."
Katie Brown, an elementary school counselor in Pueblo West and a leader of the Colorado School Counselor Association, made it personal. The breadth of her job — crisis response, classroom lessons, individual counseling, trauma-informed support — requires preparation that a stripped-down credential can't provide. According to Brown's testimony citing state data, 14.5 counselor positions remained vacant in Colorado last year, six of them in rural communities.
Representative Lori Garcia Sander, usually a skeptic of unfunded mandates and an outspoken defender of rural districts, voted yes — and explained why. "I don't think I ever hired a school counselor in the 20 some years that I was a school principal," she said. "I started at a school that had a counselor, a school counselor who was licensed as a school counselor. And after that I didn't have school counselor applicants plentifully so I was hiring social workers."
One witness opposed the bill on grounds that revealed how politically charged school counseling has become, arguing it is not the role of government to administer mental health programs in schools. No legislator rebutted her on the record. The bill's 10-1 margin suggests the argument didn't land — but it's a preview of what awaits on the floor.
Delaware didn't debate counselors directly this cycle, but its Senate Education Committee quietly advanced HB 256, which would require critical safety hotline numbers to be printed on student ID cards for grades 7 through 12 and college students. Senator Lockman's presentation was procedurally dry — clarifying which hotlines move from optional to mandatory — but the bill's existence reflects a shared recognition across both states: that students in crisis need faster pathways to help than any counselor shortage can provide.
What Delaware Is Building That Colorado Isn't
If Colorado's education hearings were dominated by funding fights and staffing crises, Delaware's were quieter — and in some ways, more forward-looking.
The standout bill was SB 260, the Delaware Certificate of Arts Excellence, which would create a formal credential for high school students who demonstrate sustained achievement in music, theater, dance, media arts, or visual arts. The bill passed the House Education Committee unanimously.
Senator Cruce, the bill's sponsor, made the workforce case directly: "The arts are not extracurricular. They are foundational to a well rounded education and it's also about workforce development."
But Kate Huffman, Director of Learning and Engagement at the Biggs Museum, made the equity case — and it was more powerful. "By formally recognizing artistic achievement at the high school level, we create more equitable opportunities for students to pursue their passions with confidence and credibility," she testified. "This bill matters because without institutional support, students are left with far more to prove and far less room to fail."
That sentence cuts to something real. A student with a 4.0 GPA has a transcript. A student who has spent four years performing in theater, composing music, or building a visual arts portfolio has — until now, in Delaware — nothing official to show for it. The certificate changes that.
Colorado, meanwhile, was debating whether to require colleges to stock abortion medication and whether a student safety bill duplicated existing law. Both states are doing important work. But Delaware's arts certificate is the kind of low-cost, high-dignity reform that tends to get lost in the noise of bigger budget battles.
The Rural Divide That Keeps Showing Up
In both states, the same fault line runs through nearly every education debate: the gap between what urban school systems can absorb and what rural ones can survive.
In Colorado's House Education Committee on April 16, SB 26-103 — which would require every district to adopt a formal policy directing supports to at-risk students — passed 8-5. But Representative Lori Garcia Sander, who represents rural Colorado, announced her no vote with unusual specificity. "I don't know that posting plans online is going to guarantee better outcomes," she said. "And it doesn't. This doesn't really help support additional funding or staffing or flexibility for our rural schools."
Her concern wasn't about at-risk students. It was about rural administrators who are already running on empty, and whether one more compliance requirement — however well-intentioned — does anything except add to their burden.
In Delaware, the same tension surfaced around HB 347, which would remove the birth certificate requirement from school enrollment. Chair K. Williams argued the change helps families facing documentation barriers — especially students experiencing homelessness, who under federal law must be immediately enrolled even without documents. But Dr. Steve Lucas of the Delaware Chief School Officers Association testified that the birth certificate serves "countless legitimate purposes" including confirming guardianship and age eligibility, and that it is his organization's position that it is in the best interest of both families and schools to obtain it.
Nobody in either chamber resolved this tension. They voted yes and moved on.
Kendall Masset of the Delaware Charter Schools Network used nearly every bill he testified on to raise a broader alarm that nobody directly addressed: "The level of reporting requirements for our LEAs is insane. We are asking our schools to do reports, many of which they've been required to do for decades, that don't give any information that's helpful for moving the needle for students."
The Bigger Picture
Across Colorado and Delaware in April 2026, the pattern is unmistakable: state legislatures are being asked to do more for schools at precisely the moment when the money to do it is running out.
Colorado is staring down a general fund reserve that nonpartisan analysts warn could go negative by the end of the decade if school finance trends continue. Delaware is operating under a declared literacy emergency. Both states are passing bills by unanimous or near-unanimous margins — and then quietly acknowledging in committee that they have no idea how to pay for what comes next.
For the roughly 900,000 students enrolled in Colorado's K-12 system and the roughly 140,000 in Delaware's public schools, these aren't abstract debates. If SB 26-023 passes and Colorado finds the revenue to sustain the new formula, students like Samira Yusupov might someday walk into a classroom where every child has a desk. If SB 26-153 clears the Colorado Senate and is signed into law, the next generation of school counselors will arrive in buildings prepared for crises — not just credentialed for them. And if Delaware's SB 260 passes the full General Assembly, a theater kid at Cape High will graduate with something on paper that finally matches what they've spent four years building.
The harder question — the one neither state answered this week — is what happens if the money doesn't materialize. Senator Kirkmeyer's word for it was "bamboozled." That might be the most honest thing said in either chamber.