Gov. Jared Polis joined lawmakers on the steps of the Colorado Capitol earlier this year to herald what they called the “fully funded era” for schools, pledging to eliminate a Great Recession-era maneuver that for years has diverted billions of education dollars to other budget priorities.

But despite Colorado now set to funnel more money into K-12 schools, Denver Public Schools officials say that won’t be enough to fully fund teacher raises for the 2024-25 academic year — prompting a contract dispute between the state’s largest school district and its teachers union.

On Monday, more than 100 educators and members of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association protested in front of DPS headquarters downtown. They carried signs that said “Keep your promises” and “Our students deserve teachers who can afford to live here.” Their chants could be heard inside the building, where the Board of Education was meeting to take public comment.

“Denver Public Schools is backtracking on the agreement we fought to secure,” union president Rob Gould said during the rally, adding, “We’re calling on Denver Public Schools to uphold our financial agreement.”

The union also filed a grievance with DPS over the matter in April and has a hearing set for Tuesday, Gould said in an interview.

“We love our teachers. They do an amazing job for our students,” DPS spokesman Bill Good said. “This is a contract dispute. This has nothing to do with our feelings to our teachers, who are amazing.”

The crux of the dispute is whether DPS will receive enough money from the elimination of what’s known as the budget stabilization factor — which withheld funds from schools — to trigger the maximum 8.34% increase in teacher pay detailed in the 2022 contract. That would include a 5.2% cost-of-living increase.

But DPS officials said the full raise won’t be triggered because the district will receive about $11 million from the “buy down” of the budget stabilization factor for the 2024-25 school year, which is less than the $16.9 million it will cost for the district to fully fund an increase in “steps and lane” compensation, which is pay based on teachers’ experience and education level.

As a result, DPS officials said teachers will get an overall raise of 5.2%, which includes an increase in “steps and lane” pay, but a smaller cost-of-living raise, at 2.06%. The district will also pay teachers a $1,000 bonus as is required in the 2022 contract if DPS doesn’t pay the full cost-of-living raise.

But Gould argued that the actual cost of the “steps and lane” salary cost is smaller than $16.9 million — and less than the $11 million needed to trigger the full raise — because each year the district receives what is called “turnover savings,” which include the savings the district gets when teachers, especially those with more experience and education, leave DPS.

For example, the “turnover savings” between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years was $10.8 million and the “steps and lanes” salary costs were $16.3 million, Gould said. This means the actual expense was $5.5 million because the “turnover savings” offset the “steps and lanes” cost, he said.

DPS officials dispute that.

“That’s not what the contract says and that’s never been discussed in the contract. That was not part of the calculation when teachers got the full (raise) amount,” DPS Chief Financial Officer Chuck Carpenter said when asked about “turnover savings.”

The clash between DPS and its teacher union over the raise amount comes as school districts across metro Denver have sought to increase educators’ pay in recent years to combat persistent staffing shortages and rising home prices.

“Housing costs have gone up,” Gould said. “Food costs have gone up and we’re just trying to stay on top of it just like everybody else.”

Joshua Duran, a teacher at Skinner Middle School, said during the rally that property taxes on his home have increased as have other bills in recent years — leading him to work a second job.

“It’s not crazy to want to live in the communities you serve,” he said.

Mollie Siweck, a kindergarten teacher at Escalante-Biggs Academy, said she’s worried teachers will leave DPS if the district doesn’t pay the full raise detailed in the contract because other metro Denver districts have higher wages.

“This is not about educator greed,” said Dez Baldonado, a math and science teacher at West High School. “This is about quality of life. This is about equity.”

DPS teachers have on average seen their pay jump more than 26% as a result of the union’s 2022 contract, Carpenter said.

The district announced Friday that it has reached a tentative 3-year contract with the Denver School Leaders Association, which includes a 4.5% cost-of-living raise in the first year for principals and other school administrators.

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SAN DIEGO — The Rockies walked the high-wire Monday night at Petco Park.

Their pitchers teetered and tottered. They walked 11 Padres batters. Count ’em, 11.

But somehow, someway, the Rockies held on to win 5-4, notching their fifth consecutive victory.

The Padres loaded the bases in the ninth against Jalen Beeks on three walks, but Beeks got Manny Machado to ground into a 5-4-3 double play to end the game.

“That was exhilarating, for sure,”  a frazzled but happy Rockies manager Bud Black said. “The term ‘hang on tight’ came into play. We had to hang on tight, for sure. But it felt good. The guys in the dugout and the guys on the field erupted. But you don’t draw them up like that.”

No, you don’t.

Monday marked just the third time in franchise history that Colorado walked 11 or more and managed to win the game. In a May 12, 1995 game at Florida, Rockies pitchers walked 12 but beat the Marlins. On June 5, 1999, they walked 12 Brewers at Coors Field but managed a victory.

Black took a risk in the ninth. He visited the mound and instructed the infield to play back, looking for the double play. The strategy paid off.

“We thought there was a double-play chance with Manny, and I thought that was our best chance to win the game,” Black explained. “Even though Beeks is a high-fastball pitcher, he has a chance to get a grounder by choking off a swing with a good fastball, and that’s what he did.”

Perhaps lost in the moras of walks was an outstanding play by veteran right fielder Jake Cave. He raced in on Luis Arraez’s dying line drive and made a diving catch for the first out of the ninth.

“I was just trying to cover as much ground as possible,” Cave said. “Then I saw that I was ‘closing in, closing in,’ so then, I thought, ‘Now I’ve got try for it.’  When I’m healthy, and I’m out on the field, I’m going to go as hard as I can.”

In the final 3 1/3 innings, the Rockies relievers gave up eight walks: three by Beeks, three by Justin Lawrence and two by Jake Bird.

“Bird, Lawrence and Beeks will tell you that’s not good,” Black said.

San Diego crept to within one run, at 5-4, in the seventh on Jackson Merrill’s leadoff homer off Bird. When Bird issued back-to-back walks to Luis Campusano and Ha-Seong Kim, Colorado’s lead appeared to be disintegrating until Justin Lawrence relieved Bird and got Arraez to ground into a 6-4-3 double play. Then Lawrence got the dangerous Fernando Tatis to ground out to third baseman Ryan McMahon.

But the Rockies’ walk-fest continued in the eighth inning when Lawrence walked three to jam the bases but pulled a Houdini escape act when Campusano popped out to center.

Elehuris Montero powered Colorado to an early lead. The first baseman drove in Brenton Doyle with a single up the middle in the second. Doyle reached on a walk, stole second and advanced to third on Cave’s groundout to first.

Montero’s two-run double to left-center off starter Randy Vasquez sparked the Rockies’ four-run fourth. Back-to-back bloop singles by Charlie Blackmon and Ezequiel Tovar drove in the other two runs to put Colorado ahead, 5-1.

Rockies starter Dakota Hudson pitched his best game in a Rockies uniform, got the win and snapped a streak of eight consecutive losing decisions dating back to Sept. 11 of last season when he pitched for St. Louis.

“I felt like we had a good plan going in,” Hudson said. ‘It felt good to get than win.”

The right-hander mowed down the Padres with his bowling ball sinker for 5 2/3 innings until he threw a few gutterballs in the sixth. He issued a two-out walk to Machado and then served up a two-run homer to Jurickson Profar, who crushed his seventh bomb of the season to cut Colorado’s lead to 5-3. The switch-hitting Profar, who played with Colorado last season, hit Hudson’s first-pitch changeup deep into the right-field seats. Profar has already driven in 29 runs.

Hudson, who also mixed in an effective curveball, induced 10 outs via groundballs, struck out three, walked three and gave up just three hits. However, two of the three hits were homers, including Xander Bogaerts’ two-out solo shot in the second.

“I thought the fastball played tonight, and he had a good breaking ball,” Black said. “He threw more curveballs than he had in previous starts, so there was a little more separation of velocity. I thought that was key.”

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As the spring semester comes to a close, protests demanding an end to the Israel-Hamas war continue to spread at Colorado colleges, with a new encampment at the University of Denver and disturbances reported at graduation ceremonies last weekend for the University of Colorado Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver.

A group called DU for Palestine set up a Gaza solidarity encampment at DU’s Carnegie Green on Thursday, mirroring the efforts of the Denver Students for a Democratic Society and Colorado Palestine Coalition, who began an encampment at the Auraria Campus on April 25.

DU administrators shared a new interim policy on protests and demonstrations that day, creating guidelines for acceptable demonstrations and prohibiting those that disrupt meetings or events, impede other DU community members from engaging in free expression, or harm people or property. The policy states the university can relocate and reschedule a protest and perform ticket or identification checks, as well as enforce other safety measures.

“We are focused on maintaining the safety of 12,000 students who are trying to finish out their academic year, while approximately 50 students are trying to make their voices heard,” university officials said in a statement to The Denver Post on Monday. “It’s a balance and one we evaluate and re-evaluate by the hour.”

On Firday, DU for Palestine shared its demands for the school on Instagram, calling for financial divestment from “companies and institutions that profit from or support the illegal Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation of Palestine,” as well as the severing of all academic ties with “weapons manufacturers” and Israeli universities, according to the post.

On Saturday, DU for Palestine alleged the university’s administration planned to sweep the encampment and had requested that encampment participants present DU student identification, according to another Instagram post. DU officials denied it had threatened to “sweep” the camp or have anyone arrested.

“We have seen various instances of noncompliance from encampment participants, including refusal to show university-issued ID upon request.” DU stated in a Sunday news release, reminding students that noncompliance could result in a referral to the Student Rights and Responsibilities or the Office of Equal Opportunity and Title IX.

The Post could not reach protest organizers for comment Monday.

DU for Palestine met with the university’s administration for the first time on Friday and again on Sunday, according to a DU news release.

“We went into that meeting really wanting to talk about disclosure. That’s really the first step to all of our demands is disclosing what investments the University of Denver has with the state of Israel and companies that operate within the state of Israel,” Jojo Carranza, a DU graduate student and DU for Palestine member, said during a news conference on Sunday. “In that meeting, our demands were not met to disclose those investments. What was given was a verbal agreement that they would continue meeting with DU for Palestine on topics of disclosure.”

The protests at DU follow on the heels of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Tivoli Quad on the Auraria Campus, where students are calling for the UC system and MSU Denver to divest from all funding and activities related to Israel. Police arrested more than 40 students and dismantled the camp on April 26, with officials citing the campus’s policy against camping. The encampment, now 18 days old, was rebuilt later that day.

Anti-war protesters also disrupted CU Denver’s commencement ceremony at the Denver Coliseum on Saturday by yelling and chanting, according to reporting by Denver 7. Demonstrators also interrupted the MSU graduation ceremony with chants of “free Palestine,” accompanied by raised hands dipped in red paint, according to a post by SDS Denver.

Demonstrations at other Colorado universities at the beginning of May, including the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University, University of Northern Colorado and Colorado College, called for a ceasefire and for campus leaders to divest from activities and funding related to Israel.

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