Colorado: School Choice Is Theft of Public Funds

Kevin Bolling is executive director of the Secular Student Alliance, which advocates for schools free of religious ideology. Bolling writes here about the attack on public schools in Colorado.

In Colorado, a quiet revolution is underway, one that threatens the very idea of public education.

The Colorado Schools Fund, launched in 2024 with $50 million in philanthropic support, is not simply financing new charter and microschools. It is reshaping the public narrative about education itself. Through a strategic mix of capital, ideology and political influence, CSF and its allies are advancing a powerful message: that market-driven “choice” is the only remedy for supposedly irredeemable public schools.

Once public schools are cast as broken beyond repair, charters and microschools become steppingstones toward something far more consequential: a broad voucher system that redirects public money to private and religious education. The Daniels Fund, whose donation seeded CSF, has long championed vouchers. Their investment signals the next phase, a push to convince parents that privatization is not only desirable, but inevitable.

The consequences are profound. This approach doesn’t merely siphon resources away from neighborhood schools; it erodes their legitimacy. When foundations and political operatives rebrand public education as a failure, they create the very conditions they claim to solve. And as public confidence collapses, the argument for taxpayer-funded private schooling becomes easier to sell.

That dynamic is already playing out in Pueblo, where Riverstone Academy presents an alarming test case. Operating under Education reEnvisioned BOCES, the school has marketed itself as a public elementary school while pushing a Christian curriculum. Ken Witt, head of the BOCES, even described Riverstone as “Colorado’s first public Christian school” during a board meeting last fall. Yet the school’s official paperwork made no mention of religious instruction. Was the omission accidental or intentional?

The backstory suggests the latter. Emails show Brad Miller, a lawyer for Pueblo County School District 70, requesting permission to establish a new school inside the district’s boundaries but governed by neighboring District 49. The arrangement, he wrote, would allow the group to work with Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal organization known for high-profile religious liberty cases to test “the legalities around the issue of whether a public school may provide religious education.”

Riverstone Academy appears designed as a legal provocation: a taxpayer-funded public school created to force a battle over whether public dollars can support explicitly Christian instruction. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a strategy, one aimed at normalizing religious schools operating with public funds.

This local experiment unfolds alongside a national effort to redefine public education. The Trump administration’s recently passed federal voucher bill casts public schools as a “monopoly” in need of disruption, echoing decades of market rhetoric. But as Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center warns, the supposed “flexibility” states gain under the bill is illusory. Instead, it invites federal overreach, weakens student protections and replicates the academic declines already associated with large-scale voucher expansion.

Those protections matter, especially for LGBTQ+ students and families. Behind the lofty language of empowerment lie schools that quietly, and sometimes openly, exclude them. Across the country, private schools participating in voucher programs deny admission to LGBTQ students or the children of LGBTQ parents. Some embed exclusion in handbooks or “morality clauses”; others teach explicitly anti-LGBTQ doctrine. Yet taxpayer dollars increasingly subsidize these institutions under the banner of choice.

The Douglas County School District’s “Choice Scholarship” program, a voucher initiative struck down in court, would have funneled public funds to religious schools with documented histories of exclusion. As Gregory M. Lipper of Americans United for Separation of Church and State put it, “Taxpayer money can’t be used to fund religious schools or religious education.” Voucher systems blur that principle, and families who accept vouchers lose crucial federal civil rights protections, including those guaranteed by Titles VI and IX, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and even constitutional rights to free expression and due process.

When a Colorado district court ruled in 2011 that Douglas County’s program violated the state constitution it reaffirmed a moral commitment: that public education, however imperfect, rests on the promise that every child, regardless of identity, belongs.

If we abandon that promise in pursuit of “choice,” we are not expanding opportunity. We are narrowing it. And for LGBTQ+ students, the cost of that illusion may be nothing less than their place in America’s classrooms.