Today I drove a Poudre School District bus thanks to Nick Peterson and the Leadership PSD team.

I also learned a lot about the upcoming PSD mill levy. While PSD staff was very balanced with their information, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize the incredible value of voting yes on the mill levy.

Here’s what I know: the average homeowner in Fort Collins will only pay around $11-13/mo more than they currently do to help bolster teacher pay to stay competitive, maintain and improve school buildings (including plumbing, HVAC, and more), and ensure that all neighborhood schools stay open and well-resourced.

Our community has an unfortunate legacy of kicking the maintenance can down the road… well, we saw how well that worked for our Parks, which faced a $60 MILLION maintenance gap by 2030 if the Sustainable Funding Initiative (2A) had not passed. That meant that 51% of our neighborhood parks were falling into disrepair… and we did the right thing to make sure all of our parks will still be there and safe and fun to play on for us in the future.

Compare and contrast to the rather dire situation that PSD finds itself in: a nearly $1 billion maintenance funding gap as of TODAY on an $800K annual budget. Not five or ten years out, but TODAY. And ours is still ranked amongst the best school districts in the state.

In the same way that the Parks + Rec funding was necessary to the vibrancy of every neighborhood (safe, well-resourced parks mean safer, more vibrant neighborhoods by proxy), funding the ongoing maintenance of schools in a debt-free way is critical to the success of EVERY neighbor, not just our youngest neighbors. Well-resourced schools make the entire community more affordable, even if individually, we each pay just a little more ($150ish a year), everybody benefits because the overall cost of living goes down significantly.

Because of the way Colorado education funding works, the more the local property tax goes up, the lower the state funding for education the school district receives. Despite being funded at the lowest levels by the state of Colorado, PSD’s graduation rate has hit 87% for the last 3 years and our “reading at grade level” rate is significantly improved year over year: https://www.psdschools.org/news/video-message-superintendent-success-PSD

In short: if you care about the future of Fort Collins, you can drastically improve it by voting yes on the mill levy to make the schools more sustainable. The future where we fail to pass this mill levy is dark, and we can do better.

Here’s where you can learn more about it, including live sessions to ask more questions: https://www.psdschools.org/community/2024-mill-levy