Initiative to pay for preschool, full-day kindergarten qualifies

Coloradans are going to decide this November whether they want to give more of their money to fund full-day kindergarten, special education, English proficiency and preschool.

Initiative 93, which supporters call Great School, Thriving Communities, qualified for the ballot Thursday, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. It will appear on the ballot as Amendment 73.

“This will help us address critical needs and offer educational opportunities to all our students,” Buffalo School District Superintendent Rob Sanders said in a statement. “We can address the growing teacher shortage crisis, fund programs for students with special needs, provide career and technical training to make high school graduates career-ready, and keep students safe.”

The proposal is estimated to bring in $1.6 billion for public schools by raising state income taxes on corporations and people who make more than $150,000 a year. And while the initiative specifies where the money would go, it does give districts broad discretion on how to spend it.

Denver Public Schools announced Thursday afternoon that it’s proposing to spend an extra $36 million a year on teachers’ compensation if Amendment 73 passes — on top of pay increases negotiated in 2017. That would raise teachers’ salaries more than 20 percent over three years, according to the proposal to the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. Starting pay would increase to almost $50,000 a year beginning in 2020-21.

Statewide tax increases — even those for education — have traditionally been a tough sell to Colorado voters. This initiative is the third attempt in less than 8 years. The last attempt was in 2013, and that initiative lost 65 to 35 percent.

This year’s education initiative needs 55 percent of the vote to pass.

The measure is the first to meet the new bar for amending Colorado’s constitution by getting signatures from at least 2 percent of voters in all 35 Senate districts. Coloradans voted in 2016 to make it harder to amend the state constitution.

If passed, taxes would increase on a graduated basis — from 0.37 percent to 3.62 percent — for people earning more than $150,000 a year. For instance, individuals who earn $150,000 to $200,000 would pay about $81 more per year, and those who earn $200,001 to $300,000 would pay about $729 more per year, according to the Colorado Legislative Council.

The average corporate taxpayer would see an increase of $11,085 per year.