Author: Paula Noonan
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Not-so-public comment in Douglas County | Paula Noonan
Let’s do some high and low history. First, the high history. England’s King George III didn’t like the complaining he heard from the American colonies, so he went to war to shut the people up. President Donald Trump doesn’t like to hear from the U.S. Congress when he can have his own way without their…
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Health care savings combined with public school investment a win-win | NOONAN
Paula Noonan Paula Noonan Since chaos is the new world disorder, it’s a great opportunity to turn messes into solutions. Most agree our nation’s health care system is untidy. In Colorado, funding for public education at all levels has been in a jam for years. The legislature must reconcile the state’s income with its outgo.…
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How Colorado education’s financing problems lead to its trust problems | NOONAN
Paula Noonan Paula Noonan School finance, proposed constitutional amendments on school choice, and bad faith union contract negotiations headline today’s education world in Colorado. Colorado’s kids got the short school-funding straw for 15 years starting with the Great Recession in 2008, and school district employees did too. In 2022, Denver Public Schools’ union, Denver Classroom…
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NOONAN | Women register, rise up for abortion rights
Click your little red shoes together three times and Kansas joins Colorado to secure women’s reproductive rights. Colorado’s anti-women’s-reproductive-rights people failed to get enough signatures to put their anti-abortion initiative on the ballot. Kansas’ women blocked that state’s anti-abortion effort. It’s a Rocky Mountain Empire trend. The polling on women’s reproductive rights is accurate, apparently.…
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NOONAN | The decline of Colorado’s political parties
Political parties are failing in Colorado. Redistricting occurred in February with the first voter registration numbers for new districts. A comparison of those February numbers with June registrations shows both parties losing voters and the Unaffiliated category gaining registrations. The highest percentage of movement to Unaffiliated occurred in two southwest mountain House districts, HD-58 and…
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NOONAN | Charter ‘fix’ will harm Adams 14 students
The state, in its ongoing effort to make effective education as difficult as possible for Adams 14 School District, its students, teachers and administrators, has authorized about $3 million to transport Adams 14 students out of the district for two years. Let’s be direct: would that $3 million go a long way to improving education…
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NOONAN | Adams 14 and the authoritarian state board
A clash is going on between Colorado’s State Board of Education and the idea, embedded in Colorado’s constitution, of local control of our schools. The fracas started in 2009 when then Democratic state Sen. Mike Johnston sold legislators on SB-191 on school “accountability.” The conflict will now play out in court through Adams County 14…
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NOONAN | Ron Hanks was a NO vote — when he wasn’t MIA
Do legislator votes matter in elections? Not enough! It’s a challenge to figure out whether legislators vote on bills the way they say they will, whether they vote with their party, where they fall on a far left to far right scale, or whether they voted on bills at all. State Rep. Ron Hanks, a…
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NOONAN | Ukraine’s precarious geopolitical position
Most of us don’t know much about today’s Ukraine. One point is certain: Ukraine’s story today cannot be disentangled from Ukraine’s history since it became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922 — shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918-1919 between right-wing Freikorps military and left-wing communist and…
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NOONAN | Some advice for the next campaign to tweak TABOR
Proposition CC to allow Colorado to hold onto TABOR tax refunds was finished early when Republicans, who couldn’t get a legislator recall done, found they could pour bad joo joo on the tax initiative. El Paso County went all-in to reject the proposition, with a 40,000-vote emphatic advantage to the No’s. Most of those ballots…