Between the state’s staffing counts of December 2022 and December 2023, Lewis-Palmer School District 38 turned over 27.6% of its teachers — more than one in four, and the highest rate in at least six years. Over the same interval Academy District 20, the neighboring district to its south, turned over 16.0%; Cheyenne Mountain District 12, the closest of the region’s districts to D38 in size and profile, 13.1%. This newspaper has spent three articles asking why D38’s performance slipped. The answer, it turns out, was written into a ballot measure in 1999 and has been compounding quietly ever since.
Start with a paradox. In the autumn of 2023 D38 commissioned an outside firm to survey the people who use its schools and the people who work in them — the same instrument, the same season, 540 parents and 469 employees. Parents were enthusiastic: their net promoter score, a standard measure of whether someone would recommend an institution, came back at +37. The district’s own employees returned −2.1, with almost a third classed as detractors.
A community delighted with its schools; the staff delivering them, not. That gap is the subject of this article, and its origins are financial.
The Override That Never Grew
Colorado districts fund themselves largely through a state formula, topped up by a voter-approved local levy called a mill levy override. D38’s voters approved one in 1999. It raises $4m a year — the figure the district’s own superintendent still cited in 2022, and which its chief business officer describes as arriving “in perpetuity.” It generated roughly $4.1m in 2005, and has sat at almost exactly $4m every year since 2007.
That is not a rounding convenience. It is the measure’s design: voters authorized a fixed sum, not a fixed tax rate, and attached no escalator. As the district’s taxable property base tripled — from $345m in 2005 to $1.09bn in 2025 — the tax rate required to collect that same $4m fell by more than two-thirds, from 11.934 mills in tax year 2005 to 3.685 in tax year 2025.
Twenty-seven years of inflation have done the rest. The override buys a fraction of what it once did, and no one ever voted to shrink it.
Not Poor, Under-Authorized
Throughout this series we have measured D38 against two districts. Academy District 20 is the obvious geographic comparison, sharing a boundary and a labor market. Cheyenne Mountain District 12 is the closer match on scale and demography — smaller than D38, but far nearer to it than D20, which enrolls roughly four times as many students.
The obvious explanation for D38’s position — that Monument is a modest tax base doing its best — is wrong, and demonstrably so.
Divide each district’s assessed valuation by its students and the picture inverts. One mill of tax in D38 raises roughly $109 per pupil. In Academy 20 the same mill raises about $85. D38’s property base is roughly a quarter more productive per student than its larger neighbor’s.
What differs is how many mills the voters have authorized. For the 2024-25 school year D38 levied 4.294 override mills. Academy 20 levied 9.621. Cheyenne Mountain levied 18.698 — more than four times D38’s rate.
State law caps what a district’s voters may approve. By the Colorado Department of Education’s own calculation, D38 collects about 20% of its statutory ceiling; Academy 20 collects about 33%. D38 is not scraping the limit of what its residents are permitted to fund. It is nowhere near it.
Seven Times Asked, Seven Times No
Nor is this for want of asking. Since the override passed in 1999, D38 has put seven further operating overrides to its voters. Every one of them failed. In twenty-three years the district has won a single ballot measure of any kind: the 2006 bond that built Palmer Ridge High School.
The pattern is older than the problem this article describes, and its costs were visible early. After the $2.7m override failed in 2008, Superintendent Ray Blanch told the community what the 54% “no” meant in practice: personnel reductions of 26 full-time equivalents, including 17 teachers, and larger classes. That was fifteen years before the exodus of 2023.
The Enrollment Growth That Did Not Arrive
A fair objection arises here, and it deserves an answer rather than a footnote.
Two of those measures — the bonds of 2018 and 2019 — would have built elementary capacity, and in hindsight the district did not need it. D38’s enrollment peaked at 6,756 students in the autumn of 2019, the very season of the second vote, and has not touched that mark since. This year it stands at 6,318, down 6.5%, and the district’s own budget now plans for a smaller district.
It is tempting to read that as prescience on the voters’ part. It was not. D38 had grown in every one of the ten years before those votes, and was still growing as the ballots were counted. Nobody in Monument was forecasting a pandemic, and nobody needed to: Colorado’s public schools had expanded more or less continuously for three decades. Then the state shed more than 30,000 students — 3.3% — in the single year of 2020-21, and enrollment today stands at roughly 871,000, its lowest in at least a decade, held down by a sustained decline in birth rates.
D38 fell further than its neighbor. Academy 20 has since recovered to 26,471 students, within half a percent of its own peak and above where it stood in 2019. Where D38’s missing students went is only partly documented. Its district-run schools have contracted faster than the headline number, because Monument Academy, D38’s charter, has grown as a share of the district — a composition shift this newspaper examined in the first article of this series.
The bond votes, in short, look wise now for reasons that had little to do with the arguments made at the time.
That argument, however, does not travel. Colorado keeps the two instruments legally separate: bond proceeds buy buildings, buses and roofs, and may not be spent on salaries. Rejecting a school the district turned out not to need avoided the associated bond taxes without removing a dollar of salary revenue, because bond proceeds could not have paid recurring compensation in any case.
The measures that bear on pay are the other three, all of them operating overrides — money that may be spent on people. The 2013 measure sought $4.5m for teaching positions, class sizes and safety. The 2018 override sought $1m a year, with a seven-year sunset, for safety and security staffing. And in 2022 the district asked for $5.6m, capped at 7.45 mills, directed “expressly and solely” to teacher and non-administrative staff compensation.
That last one failed narrowly. Ten weeks later, at the board’s January meeting, a D38 teacher named Chris Thomas stood up in public comment and urged the board to try again with an override — precisely, the minutes record, because of “staff retention and recruitment.”
What That Bought
Roughly 80% of D38’s general fund — the money that pays for the day-to-day running of the schools, as distinct from construction or debt — goes to compensating its employees. When local revenue stalls, pay is where it shows.
A comparison here has to be made carefully. The state’s salary file reports each district three ways — charter schools, non-charter schools, and the two combined — and the combined figure is a trap. Charter teachers are paid far less: in D38’s case $44,561 last year against $63,724 in its own schools. A district with a large charter therefore looks cheaper than it is, and a district that loses one looks as though it has given everybody a raise. Cheyenne Mountain carried 115.8 charter teaching posts in 2019-20 and none by 2022-23. The like-for-like comparison is the non-charter column: the teachers in each district’s own schools.
On that basis D38 has been the lowest-paying of the three in every year the state publishes the split — and between 2019-20 and 2022-23 its pay fell, not in inflation-adjusted terms but in cash, from $52,447 to $50,543, a drop of 3.6%. Over the same three years Academy 20 rose 9.0%, to $59,834, and Cheyenne Mountain rose 11.1%, to $64,659. A gap of $2,430 behind its nearer neighbour had become one of $9,291.
The district was blunt about it. “Due to significantly lower revenue,” a March 2023 board document reads, “D38 has historically lagged far behind other area school districts in terms of gross pay.”
Nor was this the familiar story of money diverted to administrators. The combined number of administrators and principals in D38 held roughly flat across the period, at about 33 by the district’s own count — a figure that appears in its compensation and budget documents alike. That does not vindicate every spending decision D38 made, and headcount is not the same as cost — salaries, benefits and contracted services could all have moved. But it provides no evidence of the expansion in administrative posts that is reached for most often.
Why They Left
Districts rarely publish why staff quit. D38 did. In August 2023 its human-resources department presented the board with the reasons recorded on separation forms for 86 departing licensed employees — a broader group than the classroom teachers CDE counts, and drawn from district records rather than the state’s snapshots, but covering the same period. Staff could select more than one reason, so the shares exceed 100%.
Better pay was the reason chosen most often, by 34 of the 86. Thirty-two said they had taken a position in another district, though the form does not record how many of those moves were driven by pay. Among 49 departing classified staff, better pay again ranked near the top, at 35%.
The district hired 102 people that year and lost 135. The teachers it recruited came in below the districtwide average — $52,629 against $56,783. By the autumn of 2023, 26% of D38’s licensed staff had a year or less of service.
Too Little, Too Late
To D38’s credit, it did not sit still. After the 2022 measure failed the district issued a one-time payment from reserves — 1.75% of salary plus $500, capped at $1,500. It then went considerably further. In March its chief business officer, Brett Ridgway, presented a draft giving teachers an average increase of 8.82%, which he called “a significant improvement, though still short of parity with neighboring districts.” Then Colorado’s school finance act came in at 10.2% rather than the 9% the district had assumed, and on May 22 the board approved revised schedules worth an average 12% across the district — against the 8 to 9% Ridgway said nearby districts were planning.
Part of the money came from cutting posts. The $1.1m redirected to pay, the March board document notes, would be “generated through strategic personnel reductions, created by attrition, which will have varied impacts on our services and operations.”
It was a larger increase than the district said its neighbours were planning, and on the state’s own figures it was larger still than the district claimed: pay in D38’s own schools rose 18.7% in a single year, from $50,543 to $60,001. It was also not enough to close the gap. Academy 20 finished that year at $64,816 and Cheyenne Mountain at $68,220, leaving D38 $4,815 and $8,219 behind. The new schedules took effect during the same reporting interval in which the state recorded 27.6% turnover, so the aggregate figures cannot show how many teachers left before the raise arrived and how many after. What is clear is that it came only after three consecutive years of decline in cash.
A district cannot erase years of widening disparity in a single budget cycle, and D38 said as much at the time: the changes would “slightly tighten the compensation gap, but it will not come close to eliminating it.”
And Then, Partly, It Worked
Which raises the obvious question, and the state has just published the answer. In the two years since the raise, D38’s teacher turnover has fallen sharply: 27.6% in 2023-24, 24.4% in 2024-25, and 18.8% in 2025-26. For the first time in the series the district’s teaching headcount grew rather than shrank, from 382 to 393.
That is the strongest single piece of evidence in this article, and it points the way the rest of it points. The district raised pay by the largest margin in the region, and the departures it had been suffering fell by a third over two years. It is not proof — the same two years brought a cooler labour market everywhere, and Academy 20’s turnover fell too, from 19.6% to 14.1%. But a mechanism argued from separation forms and national research has now been tested in Monument, on the district’s own staff, and it behaved as the argument said it would.
Two things temper it. D38 remains the highest-turnover district of the three, as it has been in every year of the series. And the improvement did not reach the people who run the buildings.
More Than Money
The district’s own staff survey suggests the problem was never only the paycheck. Asked in early 2023 to rank 25 ideas for improving working life, more than 320 employees produced a top ten that ranged across pay, calendar and recognition: longevity bonuses first, then restore past frozen steps — a reference to salary progression halted in 2021-22, which the district subsequently recorded as already complete — then more flexible leave, compensation for work done off contract, and credit for years of service the district had not previously honored.
That last item had a number attached that says more than any average. Until 2023, D38 credited a newly hired teacher with a maximum of nine years of prior classroom experience. A teacher arriving from another district with twenty years behind her was placed on the salary schedule as though she had nine; the rest simply did not count. The 2023 package raised that cap to 15 years, with a plan to reach 20 over the following few years, and promised “re-stepping” for existing staff whose experience had been, in the district’s own word, “truncated” at their hire date. For a decade before that, D38 was asking experienced teachers to accept not merely lower pay, but a lower place in the queue.
The internal candor is striking. One slide records that teams “are empowered to get good work done, even if pay hampers hiring.” Another, summarizing the leadership team’s conclusions, is blunter still: “When compensation changes are constrained, increased opportunities for calendar and leave flexibility help ‘soften the blow.'”
That is a district looking for things to offer instead of money. It went as far as commissioning a task force on a four-day school week, which it made its first priority before concluding the idea would require both longer days and a longer year.
The staff survey that followed pointed the same way as the exit forms. Employees rated their own sense of purpose highly — 4.45 out of 5 on whether their work matters. They rated the statement that “organization level resources are allocated to maximize effectiveness” at 3.29, the lowest score on the instrument.
The Other Revolving Door
One finding sits outside this sequence but belongs in the picture. D38 has struggled to keep building leaders too, and for longer.
In CDE’s principal category, which covers principals and assistant principals, D38’s turnover has run between 18.2% and 36.4% in every year since 2019-20. Averaged across the seven years to 2025-26 it comes to 26.2%, against 14.2% at Academy 20 and 15.3% at Cheyenne Mountain — close to double its larger neighbour’s rate on average, though not in every single year. And unlike the teacher exodus it has not eased. In 2025-26 it reached 30.4%, the highest of the seven years, while Academy 20 sat at 17.9% and Cheyenne Mountain at 7.7%.
It is a chronic condition rather than an episode, and one that bears no obvious relationship to the levy votes — the rate was near its highest in 2019-20 and at its lowest in the very year teacher departures peaked. It also matters more than the churn at the top of the district, which this newspaper examined earlier in this series: one research synthesis estimates that replacing a below-average principal with an above-average one is associated with nearly three additional months of learning a year, while a separate two-state study found that differences among superintendents accounted for roughly 0.3% of the variation in student achievement.
The Last Explanation Standing
Across three articles this newspaper has worked through the explanations offered for D38’s decline, and discarded almost all of them.
It was not the apartments. Monument contains a few hundred apartments in total, and the only large complex to open since 2019 took its first residents in 2024 — too late to have sat any test that mattered. Had apartments been filling the schools, enrollment would have risen; it fell. And as we reported in the first article of this series, the lowest-scoring part of D38 is not an apartment block at all, but the district’s own charter school.
It was not opt-outs — and here the numbers run firmly the wrong way for the objection. Colorado publishes two participation figures. The accountability rate, which the state’s 95% rule is built on, treats a formally excused student as though they had tested. The total rate counts only the children who actually sat the exam. In D38 the two diverge sharply, and the gap between them is, in effect, the share of families opting out. Both moved during the decline — in the direction that undercuts the theory.
The aggregate trend gives no support to an explanation built on rising opt-outs: the decline deepened while opting out receded. It was not the total spend or the class size: D38 matches Academy 20 almost to the dollar and to the seat, and Academy 20 kept its Distinction. Equal totals can of course be spent differently, and that is precisely the point — what separates these two districts is not how much money arrives but what it buys. It was not the churn of superintendents — the research is unusually clear that they account for a fraction of a percent of the variation in student achievement. And it was not a growing administration: the headcount held flat at about 33 posts while teacher pay fell.
What survives is the chain set out here, documented at nearly every link and mostly by D38 itself. A fixed-dollar override and seven rejected operating overrides left the district with less locally approved operating money per student than either comparison district. D38 itself, in its own board papers, identifies that revenue gap as the reason its pay lagged. The pay gap is plain in state salary files. Teachers left at the highest rate of the three districts. And on the way out, departing licensed staff selected better pay more often than any other reason on the district’s own separation forms.
Be plain about the standard of proof. Our tests of year-to-year movement found no statistically significant relationship — but that finding carries almost no weight. Three districts across six years cannot detect an effect of this size, and a test too small to find something is not evidence that the something is absent. No dataset available to a local newspaper, or for that matter to the district, could settle this to a statistician’s satisfaction. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling certainty that does not exist.
Judged by the standard actually available — what the records show, what the people involved said at the time, and what the national research finds — the evidence points consistently in one direction. Colorado’s growth measure is designed to capture what a district itself contributes, as distinct from the advantages its students arrive with. It is precisely the measure you would expect to fall when a district loses a quarter of the adults who do the teaching. It is the measure that fell.
Our conclusion is this. D38 did not lose its “Accredited with Distinction” rating because of apartments, or opt-outs, or the families who live here. The explanation that survives every test we could put to it is a district that could not pay competitively, whose staff said in survey after survey that they did not feel adequately valued, and which could not hold on to its teachers. We cannot prove that chain caused the downgrade, and we will not pretend otherwise. We can say that it is the only account left standing, that D38 documented most of it itself, and that when the district finally acted on pay, the departures fell by a third. The classroom is where that arrives, and student growth is where the state measures it.
That is not a verdict on how anyone voted. Seven times in twenty-three years the residents of this district were asked to raise operating money for their schools, and seven times they declined. Two further refusals, both of them bonds, were made to look shrewd by events nobody voting in 2018 or 2019 could have foreseen. The overrides were a different matter. A levy refused is not a cost avoided, only a cost deferred — and D38 has been settling it in the one currency a school district cannot borrow: the people who stand in front of its classrooms.
The Independent conducted this analysis independently of the district, using public records only.
Methodology and Sources
Comparison districts. Academy District 20 and Cheyenne Mountain District 12 are used throughout this series. D20 shares a boundary with D38 and competes in the same labor market; Cheyenne Mountain is the closer match on scale and student profile. D20 enrolls roughly four times as many students as D38; Cheyenne Mountain rather fewer.
Mill levies and overrides. Override revenue, override mills, assessed valuation and statutory maximums are from the Colorado Department of Education’s Mill Levy Tables and Mill Levy Override Revenues files, and cross-checked against D38’s own mill levy certification history; the two agree to the dollar in every year tested. Override ceilings are set in statute under C.R.S. 22-54-108 and were amended by HB24-1448 for elections held between July 2024 and June 2030; rather than apply a formula, we use the maximum CDE itself calculates for each district in its fiscal-year override workbook. Any increase requires voter approval. Per-mill and per-pupil figures are our calculation from assessed valuation and funded pupil counts. D38’s own mill levy certification chart labels the measure the “1998 Mill Levy Override,” while its superintendent, chief business officer and recent board papers all call it the 1999 override; we have used 1999 throughout, and the discrepancy most likely reflects an election held in one year and first collected in the next.
Participation. Colorado publishes two figures, and they measure different things. The total participation rate is the share of eligible students who actually sat the assessment. The accountability participation rate, against which the state’s 95% requirement is applied, counts formally excused students as participating. D38’s total rate was 84.2% in 2025 for both English and math; its accountability rate was 99.7%. The opt-out shares shown above are derived from the gap between the two and are approximate. An earlier article in this series described the accountability figure as a “tested-participation rate,” which was imprecise; that article has been corrected.
Ballot history, and what we can and cannot show. Measures were identified from Our Community News, the Tri-Lakes monthly, which has covered every one of these elections. Vote splits are printed above only where a source states them for that specific measure. The 2006 figures (49.05/50.95 on the override; 50.72/49.28 on the bond), the 2008 figure (54% against), the 2018 figures (35.53/64.47 and 33.89/66.11) and the 2019 figure (45.06/54.94) are all reported by OCN. For 2004, OCN reports only that all four D38 measures were defeated “by majorities that varied from 62 percent to 70 percent”; no source we could find breaks that down by measure, so no split is shown. For 2007, the failure is documented but no vote count was published, and the county listed two D38-certified measures that year under a single name, so we cannot say which split belongs to the district’s own override. For 2013, the measure and its failure are confirmed by the nonpartisan Colorado School Finance Project, but the only margin in circulation — 75% against — comes from the press release of DIRECTION 38!, the group that campaigned against it, and we have not verified it against an official count; the table says only that the measure failed heavily. For 2022, D38’s own post-election article implies a 934-vote margin while OCN quotes a board member putting it at 360, and The Gazette reported about 52% against on election night. All three support “failed narrowly,” which is what the table says. El Paso County’s historical canvasses for these years are no longer published online, and we have a records request outstanding. Monument Academy’s separate charter measures are excluded from the count of seven operating overrides — the district was required to place them on the ballot. The 2004 charter measure is shown in the table, greyed, for completeness; Colorado law requires tax questions to precede debt questions on a ballot, which is why it appeared at the top of D38’s list that year.
Bonds versus overrides. The two are distinct instruments. General obligation bond proceeds fund capital — construction, buildings, equipment — are repaid through a separate Bond Redemption Fund, and may not be spent on salaries. Mill levy overrides fund operations and may. Of the five measures D38’s voters rejected between 2013 and 2022, two were bonds and three were overrides; only the overrides bear on compensation.
Enrollment. October pupil counts from CDE. D38’s enrollment peaked at 6,756 in October 2019 and stood at 6,318 in October 2025, a decline of 6.5%; the district had grown in each of the ten preceding years. Academy 20 peaked later, at 26,607 in 2022, and stood at 26,471 in 2025, down 0.5%. We have not used Cheyenne Mountain as an enrollment comparison: its count falls by roughly 1,600 between 2020 and 2021 because an online program left the district, which is a structural change rather than a demographic one. Statewide figures — the 3.3% loss in 2020-21 and the current total of about 871,000 — are from CDE and contemporaneous reporting. As reported earlier in this series, D38’s district-run schools have contracted further than the headline figure suggests, because Monument Academy, its charter school, has grown as a share of the district.
Salaries. Average teacher salary is from CDE’s average teacher salary files, job codes 201-206, calculated as total salary divided by total full-time equivalents. We use the non-charter column — the teachers in each district’s own schools. CDE reports each district three ways, and the combined charter-and-district figure is not comparable across districts: charter teachers are paid substantially less, and the three districts carry very different charter loads. Cheyenne Mountain reported 115.8 charter teaching posts at $34,073 in 2019-20 and none by 2022-23; comparing combined figures across that break would manufacture a pay rise that did not happen. CDE published 2020-21 and 2021-22 without the split, so those two years are absent from our series. Average salary reflects workforce composition — experience, education and turnover — and is not the same as a salary schedule.
Turnover. From CDE’s Personnel Turnover Rate by District and Position Categories. CDE compares staff present at the December 1 snapshot in consecutive years and does not record when or why an individual left; rates are people who left divided by prior-year headcount. Years are labelled as CDE labels the file — the 2025-26 file compares the December 2024 and December 2025 counts. Cheyenne Mountain’s 2021-22 teacher figure is distorted by the departure of an online program. One limitation the state’s data cannot resolve: the turnover file is published at district level with no charter split, so every D38 turnover rate here covers Lewis-Palmer’s own schools and Monument Academy together. The salary figures can be separated, and are; the turnover figures cannot be. They therefore describe slightly different populations, as do D38’s separation forms, which are records of district employees.
Reasons for leaving. From D38’s Fall Human Resources Update presented to the Board of Education, August 21, 2023. These are reasons recorded on separation forms, not exit interviews, which the district listed as a future step. Employees could select multiple reasons.
Staff sentiment. The ranking exercise was conducted with D38’s Staff Collaboration Committee in early 2023; district minutes record approximately 550 staff engaging and more than 320 completing it. The 2023 Employee Experience Survey was administered by Huron Studer Education, with 469 employee participants. Both measure ranked preferences and rated statements, not a diagnosis of dissatisfaction. We have requested the full set of 25 ranked ideas and the underlying responses.
Compensation figures. Several percentages attach to the 2023 pay changes and they are not interchangeable. 8.82% was the March draft increase for teachers. 12% is the district’s own characterization of the average across all staff under the revised May schedules. 18.7% is the change in the state’s reported average salary for teachers in D38’s own schools between 2022-23 and 2023-24, which also reflects re-stepping, departures and replacements, and the experience mix of who stayed — it is not a raise any individual received. None of these is a uniform increase; D38 directed larger percentage rises to lower-paid employees. The nine-year cap on prior experience credit, and its increase to 15 years, are as reported to the board on May 22, 2023.
On causation. This article argues a conclusion it cannot prove to a statistical standard, and says so. Our tests of year-over-year change across the three districts returned no significant relationship; with three districts and six years, such a test has too little power to detect an effect of the size in question, and a null result from an underpowered test is not evidence of absence. The conclusion rests instead on convergent evidence: the elimination of competing explanations across three articles, a documented chain in which the district describes its own revenue constraint and its own pay gap, the stated reasons of departing staff, and a large body of national research finding that teacher turnover depresses student achievement — including for the students of teachers who remain. Readers should weigh it as that, and no more.
What we did not do. We did not seek comment from D38 before publication. That was deliberate, and it is the design of the series: three articles built from public records on their own terms, without district framing, and then a fourth that puts the findings to D38 and weighs what it says against them. Several questions we would otherwise have had to ask — whether charter staff sit inside the state’s turnover count, what basis the salary figures use, whether the pay rise held — the state’s own files answered. The district will have every opportunity to answer the rest, and we will report it.
Sources and Further Reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Blame the buildings? What D38’s test scores actually show · A quiet downgrade: how D38 lost its “Distinction” · Right-sizing the rolls: D38’s 2026-27 budget braces for a smaller district · our School Spotlight profiles of Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge.
Ballot history: Our Community News on the 2004 ballot questions and their defeat · the 2006 results · 2007 · 2008, and Superintendent Blanch on the consequences · 2018 · 2019 · the 2022 ballot language and the board’s response to its defeat · Colorado School Finance Project, 2013 school district election results · The Gazette, on the 2022 result.
State data: CDE mill levies and overrides · CDE school and district staff statistics · CDE staff data calculations and definitions · CDE pupil membership · CDE performance frameworks · CDE financial transparency · C.R.S. 22-54-108.
District records: D38 financial transparency hub · Fall human resources update, August 2023 · 2023-24 compensation strategy overview · Staff-generated priorities and rankings · Survey data share-out, December 2023 · Priority 3 deep dive, October 2021 · Calendar task force update, August 2023 · the one-time payment after the 2022 defeat · “Pay schedules approved with raises for all staff,” May 2023 · “For the record: questions answered on D38’s potential ballot initiative,” August 2022 · D38 BoardDocs.
Board coverage: Our Community News on the March 20, 2023 board meeting and the May 22, 2023 meeting at which the pay schedule was approved.
On teacher pay, turnover and school leadership: Ronfeldt, Loeb & Wyckoff, “How teacher turnover harms student achievement” · Sorensen & Ladd, “The hidden costs of teacher turnover” · Biasi, “The labor market for teachers under different pay schemes” · Learning Policy Institute, on the cost of teacher turnover · Grissom, Egalite & Lindsay, “How principals affect students and schools” · Bartanen, Grissom & Rogers, on the impacts of principal turnover · Brookings, “School superintendents: vital or irrelevant?”.
Statistics reflect the most recent year published per source. Spotted an error, or have a D38 story we should know? Email [email protected].