Colorado never funded its school safety task force — until now

Months after the lethal capturing at STEM Faculty Highlands Ranch in 2019, a state audit revealed that Colorado’s $100 million, two-decade effort to enhance college security was haphazard and confirmed little proof of creating faculties safer.

What occurred: The subsequent yr, Colorado lawmakers created a brand new activity drive with public security leaders to higher coordinate the state’s response, given its lethal historical past.

• “We’re in a scary time in society proper now, and we’ve to take college security extremely severely … to make sure we do not ever have [a shooting] right here once more,” state Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, a invoice sponsor, advised Axios Denver.

Sure, however: Gov. Jared Polis’ administration by no means spent the cash to create the duty drive — so the group by no means convened, Axios Denver has realized.

• The subsequent yr, the administration advisable eliminating the duty drive altogether.

What’s new: Rising impatient, Colorado lawmakers pushed again earlier this yr and permitted new laws to make the working group everlasting and require a gathering by the tip of the yr.

• The invoice allocates $160,000 to get the hassle underway and will increase spending to $225,000 within the second yr.

What they’re saying: The administration did not launch the preliminary activity drive as a result of it did not have the cash and the mission was redundant to ongoing work, Polis spokesperson Conor Cahill advised Axios Denver.

• Regardless of his view, Polis plans to signal the brand new invoice “to proceed state efforts to cut back gun violence,” Cahill mentioned.

Of be aware: Christine Harms, director of the state’s Faculty Security Useful resource Middle, would not suppose the duty drive is critical. “I really feel like we’re all working very laborious collectively already, so we really feel like that is likely to be a duplication,” she advised us.

The opposite aspect: The invoice’s advocates say it is wanted to higher coordinate high-level discussions and spending.

• “I have a look at what we’ve completed and what we have tried to do over the previous a number of years on the legislature, and all I feel is we have got to maintain working,” Michaelson Jenet (D-Commerce Metropolis) mentioned. “There must be some extent the place we come to say, ‘Our kids’s lives matter most.’”