The questions people actually ask.

Yes. A mill levy override is a property tax. There is no version of this where schools get more local operating money and property taxes do not go up.

How much depends on the size of the measure and on your home’s value — and no measure has been referred to the ballot as of this writing. You can still see exactly what one mill would cost you, using Colorado’s 7.05% school-district assessment rate for 2026. When a measure is referred, we will publish the figure for that specific measure before we ask anyone for anything.

In November 2022, D38 asked for a $5.6 million override for staff compensation. It failed narrowly — sources put the margin somewhere between about 360 and 934 votes.

Before that, measures failed in 2018 (roughly two to one), 2013, 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2004. The last successful operating override was in 1999. The full record is on our ballot history page.

Because that is not money. It is a legal ceiling. CDE’s figure describes the maximum a future ballot measure could ask voters to approve — not funds sitting in an account that the district is declining to spend.

Every dollar of it requires an election. The district cannot access any of it without voters saying yes.

The data does not support that. D38’s administrator count has been effectively flat — three separate district documents put it at 33 to 34, spanning 2023 through the FY2026–27 budget.

Note that state and district reporting use two different definitions of “administrator” — one includes principals and assistant principals, one does not. Comparing across the two produces an apparent increase that is a category artifact, not a hire.

No. Per-pupil spending was $13,338 in 2025 — essentially identical to Academy 20’s $13,380, and about $3,500 below the Colorado average of $16,845.

It already has, and most of the savings are gone. D38’s year-end general-fund reserve has fallen from $13.7 million to about $6.0 million in two years — roughly 56%. What is left is on the order of one month of general-fund operations.

Getting there involved a one-time staff payment from reserves after the 2022 defeat, annual capital investment cut from $3 million to $2.5 million with the difference redirected to compensation, and $1.1 million taken through what the district called “strategic personnel reductions, created by attrition.”

Reserves and deferred capital are one-time money. Salaries are a recurring cost. Using the first to pay the second works exactly once, and D38 has already spent that move.

It has, and the drop is bigger than the district-wide figure suggests. Enrollment at district-run schools has fallen roughly 880 students — nearly 15% — from the 2018–19 peak of 5,895, to about 5,015 projected for 2026–27. Counting the Monument Academy charter, which has held steady or grown, total district enrollment fell from about 6,766 in October 2019 to roughly 6,318, or 6.6%. Both numbers are real; they measure different things.

Two things are also true. Colorado funds districts largely per pupil, so falling enrollment means falling state revenue at the same time costs rise. And most school costs do not scale down smoothly — you do not save a teacher’s salary when a class drops from 24 students to 22.

You can see both effects in the 2026–27 budget: total program funding falls $1.7 million, per-pupil revenue rises by two dollars, and the district cuts about 35 positions to close the gap. The honest framing is that declining enrollment makes the local funding question more urgent, not less — and it is also a fair reason to insist that any measure be sized to actual need and specific about what it buys.

It does score well — 59.2% met or exceeded in English and 51.9% in math in 2025, against state averages of 44.8% and 35.9%, with a 93.2% four-year graduation rate.

The argument here isn’t that D38 is failing. It is that the district lost its “Accredited with Distinction” rating in 2025 on academic growth, that its teachers are the lowest paid of its peer group, and that they are leaving at the highest rate. Results follow the people who produce them, with a lag.

No, and the district said so at the time. Its own March 2023 compensation document warned that the increase “will not come close to eliminating” the gap with area districts.

After the raise, D38 was still roughly $5,600 behind Academy 20 and $11,800 behind Cheyenne Mountain. Part of the raise was funded by “strategic personnel reductions, created by attrition,” in the district’s words — which is to say, by not replacing people.

We can’t say that, and we won’t. Turnover hit 27.6% in the year that followed, 13.1 points above peers — but leadership churn, frozen salary steps, workload and morale all moved at the same time.

What we can say is what departing employees wrote down: on 86 licensed separation forms in 2023, the most-cited reasons were better pay (39.5%) and a position in another district (37.2%).

No. This is an independent, community-run site. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, sponsored by, or endorsed by Lewis-Palmer School District 38, its Board of Education, or any of its schools.

Colorado law also prohibits school districts from spending public money to campaign for or against a ballot measure. The district could not run a site like this even if it wanted to. Its official site is lewispalmer.org.

Not yet. As of publication no measure has been referred to the ballot. This site is currently informational.

If that changes, we will say so plainly on the front page, register as required under Colorado campaign finance law, and carry the disclosures that go with advocacy.

Right now, nobody — it is a static website built by volunteers. Under Colorado law, once a group accepts contributions or makes expenditures above the statutory threshold to support or oppose a ballot issue, it must register as an issue committee with the Secretary of State and report its donors publicly.

When that applies to us, the committee name and registration will appear in the footer of every page, and our donors will be a matter of public record.

Good — tell us. Every figure here has a source attached specifically so it can be checked. If we got something wrong we will correct it in public and note what changed and when.