D38’s Board Sets June Deadlines on Pay and Retention

Lewis-Palmer’s school board adopted seventeen dated goals for 2026-27 on Monday. Two of them give the board until June 2027 to identify continuing revenue for employee compensation and to plan its way to a staff retention rate matching the districts around it. The document commits to examining spending, exploring new revenue streams and reviewing how the district uses its assets. From the table, two directors said what they believe all of it is for: D38 pays its teachers less than its neighbors and loses them every year. The same meeting raised secondary meal prices, admitted a farm to the homeschool program, and pulled a $38,500 school-security design off the consent agenda.

What the Board Wrote Down

The focus-areas document runs to a single page and seventeen items, each with a date. Most are unremarkable governance: complete a physical security or safety innovation annually, publish an enrollment forecasting report, reinstate an artificial-intelligence task force by January 2027, put a cell phone policy in place from August 2026.

Two items concern money and staff.

Each carries a date, and the retention goal carries a target. Both are also narrower than the conversation around them. The document does not use the word “teacher,” referring throughout to employees. It names no funding mechanism — no override, no bond, no ballot question — and the three levers it does name are internal: spending, incremental revenue, asset use. A separate focus area, dated to June 2027, asks the board to “define priorities for use of the district’s downtown property in collaboration with community partners.” Another, beginning September 2026, asks it to “add in-demand learning opportunities to our portfolio of schools to generate additional per pupil revenue.”

Read together, they describe a board planning to fund compensation from its own balance sheet and its own programs.

What the Directors Said It Was For

Board Vice President Patti Shank read her comments from a page rather than speak off the cuff, which she said at a certain age is dangerous. Most of what she read was praise — for families, for students, for principals, for a morning spent skipping down a hallway at Palmer Lake Elementary with a group of sixth-grade girls. Then she turned to what she called one significant challenge.

“As a board, we have not yet figured out how to pay and, by extension, how to properly value our teachers,” she said. “This is causing a problem we cannot afford to have.”

“We haven’t figured out how to pay our teachers what surrounding districts pay theirs, and we are losing teachers to those districts every year,” she went on. “The result is turnover above what comparable districts experience. And high turnover is a serious problem for any organization. No organization can afford to lose its most effective people and neither can we.”

The board had agreed unanimously at its Aug. 11 work session to make the problem one of its most critical goals, Shank said. “You will hear about this a lot. What we’ve tried so far just hasn’t been enough. This problem requires real solutions… We intend to solve this.”

Board President Ron Schwarz followed her. “As a board president, I’m exceedingly proud of you and us as a team for stepping up and taking on something difficult head-on, and that’s figuring out a way to innovate our way through our teacher pay gap. We have been discussing this since I’ve been on the board, which is pushing seven years. And there’s no more kicking the can down the road. There’s no more idle conversation, just meaningful action.”

He said the board would spend the next two semesters “working with various constituencies around the area” on an approach that is “meaningful, sustainable, and lasting.”

Superintendent Amber Whetstine told the board the version in front of them added timelines and benchmarks throughout, added the artificial-intelligence focus area under Priority 1, safe and healthy schools, and significantly revised the goals under Priority 3, which D38 titles “valuing our people.” Directors read the document at the table for a minute before voting; several said the contents held no surprises.

“One of the things I like about this document is we hold ourselves accountable just like we hold the staff accountable,” Schwarz said. “So we don’t hold ourselves to a lower standard than those who work for us.”

Whetstine said the September regular meeting would include an update on Priority 3, with retention data attached.

The Independent’s own reporting supports the directors’ description of the underlying position. On the non-charter basis Colorado uses for comparison, D38’s average teacher salary trails Academy 20 and Cheyenne Mountain, and its teacher turnover has run above both in every year the Independent has examined, though it fell to 18.8 percent in 2025-26 from a peak of 27.6 percent.

A Resident Does the Arithmetic

Two residents signed up to speak. The first told the board that at its last work session, Schwarz had estimated it would take about $5 million a year to make D38’s teacher compensation competitive with other districts.

That figure, the speaker said, is slightly less than what he calculates D38 would receive if Colorado voters approve a graduated state income tax in November — about $5.2 million a year, “enough to address teacher compensation with a little leftover.” He put the statewide figure at about $2.7 billion, said the change would cut state income taxes for district residents earning $500,000 or less, and asked the board to pass a resolution in support.

Some of that checks out precisely. The measure is Initiative 195, and Legislative Council Staff’s fiscal impact statement lists the new brackets: 3.7 percent on the first $25,000 of taxable income, 4.2 percent to $100,000, an unchanged 4.4 percent to $500,000, then 7.4, 7.9 and 8.4 percent above that. Run the median Tri-Lakes household income of $160,525 through those brackets and the saving is $325 — the figure the speaker gave the board, to the dollar. The measure’s stated purposes include “increasing teacher pay.”

Two qualifications matter. Legislative Council Staff projects the measure would raise $1.98 billion in FY 2027-28; the $2.7 billion figure is its estimate of the maximum the change could produce allowing for forecast error, not its central projection. And on what any of it would mean for a given district, the statement is explicit: “The exact amount distributed to school districts will depend on decision made by the General Assembly when allocating money from the Colorado Future’s Account.” The $5.2 million is the speaker’s arithmetic, not an allocation D38 has been promised.

The measure had not qualified for the ballot at the time of the meeting. Its backers submitted signatures on Aug. 3 and the Secretary of State had until Sept. 2 to validate them. A competing measure, Initiative 232, would cap the state income tax rate at its current 4.4 percent.

Under policy BEDH the board hears public comment without replying to it. It took no action on either request.

The second speaker described a training run by the Human Trafficking Task Force of Southern Colorado, said a search of D38’s policies turned up nothing specifically referencing human trafficking, and asked the board and district leadership to consider making prevention a focus area, with training for teachers, counselors, staff, students and parents. She read out the state and national hotline numbers.

The Item That Came Off the Consent Agenda

The consent agenda ran to eight items and would ordinarily have passed in a single motion. One director asked to take up item E5 first: a $38,500 proposal from CRP Architects to design a safety and security remodel at Prairie Winds Elementary School, adding walls and lockable doors to the classrooms in the building’s five open “neighborhoods.”

His concern was the route the question had taken. There had been a great deal of discussion the previous year about Prairie Winds and the remodel options, he said, and “some of our constituents kind of got the wrong idea that we don’t value safety. And I think the bigger issue that we want to discuss is I think there was just a failure in how that made it to the point of us voting on it without having a good discussion on whether we had taken the right approach and whether it was the right answer.”

He said he thought individual classroom doors were probably the strongest option, because they minimize exposure to one classroom rather than a pod that might hold a hundred students, and that the design preserves the open feel of the building better than the alternatives. He wanted the board to see more than one option before paying for a design. “We got a freebie from architect on the first option. This is the second option that we’ll be paying them to design.”

He was asking for something the proposal in front of him did not include. CRP’s Aug. 5 letter to facilities director Melissa Andrews lists “3D renderings or project visualizations,” “multiple or iterative concept plans or Schematic Designs,” and “Building Design Advisory Group (DAG) meetings or other extensive input from user groups” among the services excluded from the $38,500 — available, the firm says, but only under a further proposal. What the fee buys is a single design worked up to construction documents.

Chief Business Officer Brett Ridgway explained why the proposal existed at all. After hearing the spring feedback about individual classroom doors, the district asked the architects what such a scheme would take, because staff were “feeling less confident about making an internal estimate” — depending on how the doors were configured, there could be secondary effects on ventilation. The letter bears him out: it anticipates modifying the HVAC system, adding return-air diffusers to meet code, relocating fire sprinkler heads, and moving electrical outlets, light fixtures and exit signage.

Cost was the other open question, and the document leaves it open. “To our knowledge, a construction budget has not been established at this time,” CRP writes. “This could be a $2 million project that needs an MLO,” one director said. “We don’t know yet until we get the pricing back.”

Ridgway agreed there was time. The letter assumes design in the fall of 2026 and construction over the summer break in 2027, so the money would fall in a later budget cycle.

Shank moved to remove item E5 and approve the remainder of the consent agenda, and the board did so. No vote on the contract itself was taken or failed. The design question goes to the Sept. 1 work session, with the architect invited to walk directors through what is structurally possible and to discuss alternatives. If the board is satisfied, the proposal returns to the consent agenda on Sept. 21.

Schwarz was explicit about how he wanted the delay understood: the board has “taken short-term action to enhance our coverage and provide an alternate form of security while we make sure that when we do something that’s permanent, it’s a quality decision.” That short-term action, taken earlier, was an increase in armed security staffing at the school.

“The last thing I want to do is make the community or the teachers or staff feel like we’re stalling or delaying this,” the director who raised the item said. “I just want to make sure we get it right.”

Secondary Meal Prices Rise 30 Cents

Directors approved higher meal prices for full-paying students in grades 7 through 12. The increase does not reach the families least able to absorb it: reduced-price lunch at the secondary schools stays at 40 cents, and reduced-price breakfast remains free.

Lunch remains free for every student at D38’s five elementary schools and at both Monument Academy campuses, which are in the National School Lunch Program and Colorado’s Healthy School Meals for All. Breakfast is free at the three sites that serve it. D38’s own middle and high schools sit outside the lunch program and run the federal special milk program instead; Monument Academy’s secondary campus remains in the lunch program, and served 28,012 lunches last year.

Nutrition Services Director Stacey Baker explained the reasoning, and the board’s own briefing document put it more bluntly than she did: “It is very clear that neither the Federal or State Free & Reduced supports for Student Meals should subsidize full pay customers. Therefore, it is appropriate and necessary that the full-pay rates be at least as high as the reimbursement rates. As a result, these price changes are formulaic in nature.” Federal reimbursement rates are not published until late July, which is why the item could not come to the board in June.

One director asked what the increase costs a family. Worked out aloud between the table and staff, the answer came to about $48 a year for a full-pay student who buys lunch every day, on roughly 160 school days. Another observed that grocery prices had risen faster.

The participation figures were the larger numbers. The first year of Healthy School Meals for All produced a 600 percent increase in breakfast participation and 175 percent in lunch. Across the participating sites the district served 85,277 breakfasts and 268,665 lunches last year — 353,942 meals in total.

That volume is pressing on the buildings. The district has priced a second entrée but is not selling one, because the kitchens are, in Baker’s words, “pretty maxed out” and the first free meal for every student takes priority. Schwarz asked whether the facilities were being worn down; Baker said yes. He asked whether the state was discussing any funding for the physical infrastructure the increased volumes require. Ridgway answered that there is no such discussion at the state level: “that all is a local responsibility.”

A Farm Joins the Homeschool Academy, on a Formula

The board approved a vendor agreement with Farm Roots Enrichment, a farm and forest program operating on 40 acres in Monument, making it a pathway within D38’s Home School Enrichment Academy. The term runs from Aug. 18, 2026 — the day after the vote — to June 30, 2027.

The contract has no fixed price. It sets a formula built on average daily attendance through October, then on the official October count, covering administration, curriculum planning, teaching, paraprofessional support, student supplies, facility rental at $100 a day off site, and other costs, invoiced monthly at a tenth of the annual total. Three illustrations are attached.

Chief Academic Officer Alicia Welch said two of the program’s founders approached the district in late June asking to come under the D38 umbrella. Ridgway told the board that recent legislation has changed how homeschool enrichment must be delivered, and that programs now need to operate in partnership with the district where they are housed. The contract is more precise than the summary: it names Senate Bill 26-023 and commits both parties to cooperate on “authorization, reporting, operational, compliance, or funding requirements” concerning services delivered “within or outside the geographic boundaries of a student’s funding district.” Farm Roots sits inside D38’s boundaries.

Several homeschool enrichment groups approached the district over the summer, Whetstine said; this one was brought forward because its values matched the district’s. The academy now has named pathways — Ridgway referred to “HSA classic,” “HSA Farm Roots” and “HSA lab” — that families choose between.

Two provisions are worth families knowing. The contractor does not assign grades, issue transcript grades or confer academic credit; the district retains all of that. And while D38 remains responsible for any Section 504 accommodations needed to access the program, the agreement records that under Colorado law special education services are not required to be provided as part of homeschool enrichment.

Four Farm Roots students spoke. Atlas Kaufman described learning which plants are edible and a stone-soup celebration at the end of each year, made from what the children grew. Luna described building a greenhouse, weaving a willow teepee, and learning that “good things take time.” May, 11, explained the badge program. Hazel, 13, described the leadership program students enter at that age. One of the visiting Palmer Ridge students, hearing all this, said he would rather go there than take AP calculus.

Buildings, Buses and a Trail Eight Years in the Making

Melissa Andrews, director of planning, facilities and grounds, gave the board its Priority 4 update. The district has spent just under $9 million over three years on capital work and anything else it could fund from grants and other sources, and is in year three of a cycle that covered building interiors, then exteriors, and now replacement schedules. The aim, she said, is to move from reactive to proactive — to have heat working on the bridge at Palmer Ridge before pipes break, rather than after.

The item she was most pleased with is a Safe Routes to School award: $800,000 for a trail and bridge in Woodmoor connecting Lewis-Palmer Elementary, Lewis-Palmer Middle School and Palmer Ridge High School. She put it at eight years in the making. The RFP has closed, a tentative award has been made, and a contract was expected within about a week, with completion anticipated by the end of the year.

Schwarz, who said he drives the route often and sees children walking it with backpacks where there is no sidewalk, tied it back to the department’s framing. “There’s a significant cost for us to do nothing. And I don’t want to look some parent in the eye and tell them we could have fixed this, but we chose not to and now something happened.”

Modular buildings for the Home School Enrichment Academy were due to arrive within days and to be set on foundations in the Grace Best parking lot by the end of the month. Students start Sept. 9 and move into the new facility in October. Andrews also listed a new work order system, ADA work on door hardware and field access, in-house HVAC repairs at Palmer Ridge, and the Higby Road roundabout, which adds a crosswalk, lighting and school-zone signage near Lewis-Palmer High School.

She named every member of her maintenance and grounds teams from the slides. One director said afterward that learning who they were had meant a lot to her.

Recognitions

The meeting opened with three Elevate 38 awards.

Lewis-Palmer High School senior Suzannah “Lilly” Lundy was honored for representing the United States at the U17 World Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan, having earned the spot at the national qualifying tournament in Spokane, Washington, on April 12. She was one of ten American women on the team. In Baku she finished 14th of 17 at 43 kilograms, losing to the eventual champion, Uzbekistan’s Mukhlisa Masharipova, and then to Japan’s Sera Furuichi in repechage. The United States won the women’s team title with 167 points.

Coach Cole Jackson described a draw that put her in the same quarter of the bracket as the champion and the Asian champion. “There was a time in the summer where she was going to nine different practices,” he said. “She’s a hard worker, selfless, amazing young lady, and more so than any accomplishment on the mat, she’s even a better person.”

Nathan Strycker, multimedia and design teacher at Lewis-Palmer Middle School, received the Making It Happen award from the International Society for Transforming Education, presented at the InnEdCO conference in Breckenridge in June. Principal Courtney Harrell described him setting his advanced graphic design students to produce options for the school’s theme logo, one of which now appears on the school’s t-shirts and materials. Strycker, who has worked in the district more than 20 years and lives in Palmer Lake, treated the moment as an Academy Awards speech and thanked roughly a dozen colleagues by name.

The Monument Hill Kiwanis Club was recognized as a community partner, and its renewed memorandum of agreement passed on the consent agenda. Club President Jim Wolf reported 17 grants to faculty and staff this year totaling $23,950, more than $300,000 given to D38 by the club and the Monument Hill Foundation over ten years, and a Service Leadership Program running in every school with 325 students taking part, on more than 830 recorded member hours in the past year.

Also Before the Board

Superintendent’s spotlight. Whetstine announced that D38 has been notified it will receive a Colorado CHIPS grant, funding phase two of a computer science, cybersecurity and artificial-intelligence classroom at the Career & Innovation Center. The award also requires the district to expand adult learning, which will mean programming after school hours. Career and Innovation Center program director Amy Sinowski was credited with the application; Whetstine said a fuller celebration would wait until the award is in hand. The center has roughly doubled its student population year over year. Chief Business Officer Brett Ridgway received the Pinnacle Achievement Award from the Association of School Business Officials International. Whetstine also noted the ACCO fabrication company welcome at the center in late July — the company is expected to create 135 jobs and has announced a $36 million capital investment — and KRDO’s first-day broadcast from Lewis-Palmer High School, where 50 students turned up at 5 a.m.

Student representatives. Palmer Ridge students now rotate through board meetings alongside students from Lewis-Palmer High School, Lewis-Palmer Middle School and Monument Academy. Mikayla Bielanski and Ashton Fletcher presented on assemblies and the Navy and Gold tailgate, and reported that Palmer Ridge raised $30,000 for Make-A-Wish last year. Asked what students say about the Career & Innovation Center, one said she had heard only good things and was considering it for her senior year; the other said he had not heard much either way — “just like it’s there. It’s growing.”

Policy first readings. Ridgway, Transportation Operations Manager Julie Abeyta and Baker presented minor edits to seven E-series support-services policies covering hazardous materials, energy conservation, student transportation, bus safety, transportation in private vehicles, food services and nutritious food choices. Abeyta noted that all buses ordered in the last seven years have both retarders and seat belts, that all three district mechanics are state inspectors, and that the district was audited by the Colorado Department of Education this year. The private-vehicle policy, she said, is one D38 does not use in practice. Final revisions come back for approval on Sept. 21.

The rest of the consent agenda, approved without item E5: minutes from the June 22 regular meeting, the July 21 special meeting and the Aug. 11 work session; the Kiwanis memorandum of agreement; purchase of a wheelchair-accessible bus for $146,800, paid from Medicaid reimbursement funds; personnel items; and five contracts above the $50,000 threshold that policy DJ requires the board to approve — $250,000 to Pikes Peak BOCES for five School of Excellence places, $140,365 and $97,544 to Performance Recreation for preschool playgrounds at Ray Kilmer and Lewis-Palmer elementaries, $104,103.18 to Western Mechanical Solutions for heat pumps at Palmer Ridge, and $99,600 to GoTo for the district phone system.

What Comes Next

The board’s work session is Tuesday, Sept. 1. Its agenda will include the Prairie Winds design question, state assessment results, the planning work of the district’s financial transparency committee, and a briefing on the coming CASB conference.

The next regular meeting is Monday, Sept. 21. Lewis-Palmer High School students attend; the board casts its annual vote to accredit district schools; the E-policy revisions return for approval; and Priority 3 comes back with retention data attached. The compensation-revenue goal carries its own checkpoint in December.

Schwarz closed by thanking the audience for staying the extra hour, and promising to shave it off next time.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Four Million Dollars, Frozen · the $4 million override voters approved in 1999, frozen without an escalator, and the turnover year that followed — the background to the goals the board dated this week · Safety Does Not Set Teacher Pay in El Paso County · why D38’s pay position tracks its override rather than its schools · A Quiet Downgrade: How D38 Lost Its “Distinction” · School Starts Aug. 12 in D38, Aug. 11 at Monument Academy · bus fees and meal prices for the year · Who We Are, by the Numbers · the source of the $160,525 median household income

Meeting record: Board Focus Areas 2026-27 · CRP Architects remodel proposal · Farm Roots contractor agreement · Nutrition services program prices · agenda and attachments · meeting video

District: D38 Board of Education · Board members

Ballot measure: Initiative 195 fiscal impact statement, Legislative Council Staff, March 9, 2026 · Backers race to collect final signatures, Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun

Other: Lewis-Palmer D38 Board of Education, Dec. 2 and 15, Harriet Halbig, Our Community News, for the board’s composition · U17 World Championships final book, United World Wrestling · CRP Architects

Methodology

This account is drawn from the district’s published agenda for the Aug. 17 regular meeting; from the four attachments that carry the meeting’s substantive decisions — the board focus areas, the CRP Architects proposal, the Farm Roots contractor agreement and the nutrition services pricing slides — each read in full; and from the automatic captions on the district’s recording of the meeting, about two hours and twenty-six minutes, read in full from the call to order to adjournment. Those captions are generated by automatic speech recognition rather than written by a person. Machine transcription misrenders names, garbles figures and carries no speaker labels, so names in this article were checked against the agenda or the district’s own published record rather than taken from the transcript, and figures come from the meeting documents wherever the documents carry them.

Those captions carry no speaker labels, and the recording does not show the board table. Where this article names a speaker, the attribution rests on the presiding officer addressing that person by name immediately before or after they spoke, on the speaker identifying themselves at the podium, or on the agenda naming who would present an item. Two director identities are withheld: the member who asked to pull the Prairie Winds design proposal from the consent agenda, and the member who asked what the meal-price increase would cost a family. Both are audible on the recording; neither is named on it.

Roll-call votes are recorded here as approvals rather than as tallies. The caption track renders individual “aye” responses inconsistently and does not reliably capture every member’s vote, and a vote count is too specific a claim to rest on that. Quotations from the meeting are transcribed from those captions and lightly repunctuated; filler words and false starts are omitted where they do not change meaning. Quotations from documents are verbatim.

The characterization of Colorado’s homeschool enrichment law is the chief business officer’s, as delivered to the board, together with what the signed agreement itself states about Senate Bill 26-023. The Independent has not read the Colorado Department of Education’s guidance on that bill and makes no independent claim about its requirements.

Initiative 195 figures are from Legislative Council Staff’s initial fiscal impact statement of March 9, 2026, which is the estimate prepared for petition circulation and may be revised if the measure reaches the ballot. The $325 saving at the Tri-Lakes median household income is the Independent’s own calculation from the statement’s bracket table. The wrestling placement, the technical-point total and the United States team score are from United World Wrestling’s official final book; the claim that a particular athlete’s performance contributed points to the team title is her coach’s and is not reported here as fact. Pikes Peak BOCES appears in the agenda as “$250,00.00,” which is malformed; it is reported as $250,000, the only reading consistent with an item listed under a heading reserved for purchases above $50,000.