Facts about Colorado school district names
DEAR READERS >> I’m working on new questions. Here’s another from the archive, appropriate after a week when school districts were in the news during a snowstorm. This column was published originally in 2013.
DEAR JOHNNIE >> Since I moved to Colorado 22 years ago I have wondered what RE-1J means and why it is part of the name of our local school district. Being acronym challenged, I keep thinking “Rural Education.”
— Slow Writer
DEAR SLOW WRITER >> I think that my answer is worth the wait.
School districts weren’t always what they are now. In 1886, the state had 685 school districts. Most of those districts had only one school.
As the state continued to grow, so did the number of schools — and districts. By 1935, there were more than 2,000 districts in Colorado, according to the Colorado Department of Education. The solution was to allow districts to consolidate.
That was formalized in the School District Reorganization Act of 1949. That’s where the district label “C,” for “consolidated,” came from. Other acts came in 1953, when the “R” label was created for “reorganized”; and in 1959*, when the “RE” label was created. That act created a “county process establishing a committee that had to develop a reorganization plan.”
Here’s what all of those letters mean, according to the CDE website.
Re, RE, R — Reorganized. RD — Reorganized/deconsolidated.
C — Consolidated.
J, Jt, (J) — Joint, crosses county lines.
RJ, REJ, JT-R — Reorganized Joint.
“If there is no letter, it means the district was never reorganized or consolidated with other districts,” the CDE says.
That takes us to the RE-1J district. According to documents provided by the district (thanks, John Poynton), the “St. Vrain Valley School District … became a body corporate March 21, 1961.”
RE means that our district was created out of reorganization of other districts (17 smaller districts, and parts of five others). The J means that our district crosses county lines.
But what about the “1”?
The packet of information that Poynton provided included district officials’ correspondence from about 10 years ago regarding the district’s name. Part of the packet was a photocopy of a Denver Post article from May 2001, regarding the mysterious labeling of Colorado school districts.
In that article, reporter George Lane asked district representatives from around the state how their districts got their numbers. The answer: They don’t know.
So, here’s my hypothesis about where the random numbers came from.
The SVVSD was created out of districts numbered 1, HC1, R-2J, AC3, NC4, 6, 8, 12, 17, 23, 35, 42, 45J, 46,
47, 48, 49, 59, 63, 76, 117 and 121. In March 1961, all those numbers went away, likely leaving 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13 and so on, if there were such districts. It could be that the numbers we see on today’s districts are the ones that survived all of the consolidating and reorganizing.
And when it came to
numbering their new district, I’ll guess that the founders of the SVVSD came up with the first number they could think of.
(*The SVVSD documents say the reorganization was done under a 1957 law.)