Aug. 15, 2024

Dear DPS Community,

The beginning of the school year brings great opportunity and hope. Next week, our students will enter new classrooms with new teachers, our buses will be dropping off students to clean and safe schools and the 2024-25 year will be in full swing.

I am writing to extend my gratitude to each and every member of DPS Financial Services for their work over the past year. Our teams’ integrity, hard work and commitment have played an important role in making this last year one of achievement and growth. Just a few of those are highlighted below. The Financial Services team has wide-ranging responsibilities across DPS from highly visible roles like enrolling students, annual budgeting and publishing audited financial statements to less visible roles like procuring and paying for goods and services, payroll, risk management, campus planning, internal audit, cash management and student submissions. 

The thread across these teams is the substantial impact on DPS’ current and long-term financial health, the high level of integrity the team displays and the commitment to using data to improve our performance.

Balanced Budget, Clean Audit, and Improved School Funding in Colorado

The DPS Board of Education adopted a balanced budget for the 2024-25 school year. The General Operating Fund totals ~$1.5 billion. Those funds are used to pay our educators, operate our facilities and provide the materials and technology to bring our classrooms to life.  Within those budgeted lines contain the aspirations and plans of nearly 200 schools and their communities. This includes work with the Collaborative School Committees, staff members and leaders at all DPS traditionally-managed, innovation and charter schools, as well as central services. The budget truly reflects the values of Denver Public Schools.

During the past year, DPS also received a “clean” audit from our external auditors. Each year, DPS is required by law to have an external evaluation of our finances, and I am happy to report this past year, we again received positive feedback on the integrity of our financial reports and internal controls. Those conclusions are not just a compliment to our accounting team but are a reflection of the high standards we have across our entire system and among all team members, not just those in finance. 

Additionally, in the 2024 legislative session, the General Assembly made two substantial efforts to improve funding for public school students in Colorado. First, they eliminated the Budget Stabilization Factor, which was a technique used since 2010 to lower funding to Colorado schools. Eliminating the Budget Stabilization Factor brought an additional $18M to the DPS budget for 2024-25. Secondly, the General Assembly committed to a new School Finance Act Formula, investing ~$500 million to schools over the next six years focused on the students who need the funding the most. DPS took a leading role in this work by chairing the Public School Finance Task Force. That committee brought recommendations to the General Assembly on which much of the new funding formula was based. In the coming years, those additional funds will be deployed in our schools to help students learn and thrive.

DPS Capital Program: Keeping Our Promises with the 2020 Bond & Leading the 2024 CPAC

In November 2020, Denver voters, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, generously approved a no-tax-increase $795 million bond measure to support critical maintenance, building new schools in the areas of the city with enrollment growth, technology and other critical capital needs for DPS students. Even with inflation and cost increases, the promises of the 2020 bond election will be kept, and that work continues with construction over this summer. These critical investments add to capital improvements that have been approved by Denver voters without fail going back to 1990.

As we look forward to 2024, DPS commissioned another Community Planning and Advisory Committee (CPAC) to assess the capital needs and plan for a potential 2024 Bond election.  The progress of that committee is now complete, and the Board of Education will consider whether to refer the recommendations of that committee to the ballot for another no-tax increase election in 2024. The recommendations include a no-tax increase investment of $975 million bond measure to be spent over the next four years to ensure each school has air conditioning and to provide critical maintenance in our schools. The average age of DPS buildings are 55 years old, and for the schools without air conditioning, some classrooms can be as hot at 92 degrees.

Enrolling the Class of 2037

Kindergarteners who start school this fall represent the high school graduating class of 2037. Each year, our Enrollment and Campus Planning team takes on one of our most important functions of bringing in new students to DPS across all grades, but bringing in new kindergarteners is especially exciting. Thirteen years later, those students will hopefully be graduating and moving on with their lives prepared for a career, college or another endeavor of their choosing. There has been much focus on the fact that DPS is steadily declining in total enrollment mostly because fewer children are born in Denver in recent years, and appropriately so. However, there has been less focus on the fact that DPS is still the single largest school distinct in Colorado and experienced a net gain of students who live in neighboring school districts but chose to enroll in DPS. The District enrolled its highest number of out-of-district students ever in the 2023-24 school year. The kindergarten class entering DPS next year will be more than 6,000 students, and in most of Colorado’s 179 school districts, the total enrollment across all grades is less than 6,000. The work of our Enrollment and Campus Planning team makes this possible and I am incredibly appreciative and proud of their efforts.

Supporting Students Beyond Federal Stimulus Funds

DPS received over $300 million in additional federal funding for DPS traditional, innovation and charter schools to spend between 2021-22 and 2023-24 to support students through the COVID-19 pandemic. These resources have been instrumental in our ability to manage through the pandemic, including investments in summer programming, recruiting and retention of existing educators, capital and air quality improvements to our facilities, additional student technology and other supports. As part of the annual budgeting process for 2024-25, the District identified $7.1 million in programming previously funded by ESSER that will continue.

Thank you to every member of the finance team and to all the educators districtwide who make DPS a great place to work and learn for all students and adults. Here’s to a great start to 2024-25.

All the best,

Chuck Carpenter

Chief Financial Officer