By Carolyn Martin (CHEC Director of Government Relations)
Is Leap for Us?
What if a new law in Colorado specifically identified homeschool students as being eligible to serve as a nonvoting board member over a newly created government agency, would you be concerned?
An initiative creating the LEAP (Learning Enrichment and Academic Progress) Program which will be on the ballot this November does just that. It creates the Colorado Learning Authority within the Colorado Department of Education. The impetus for this new program is the failure of the public school system to meet the needs of its students. The latest results from state testing reveals that the third-grade language arts overall scores continue to be dismal — only 39.1% met or exceeded expectations. (Before the pandemic, the results weren’t much better — only 41.3%.) Yet, this decline in scores will be the reason for increasing the growth of government by creating an unaccountable, nontransparent agency.
Read More