The following speech was delivered by Dustin Flesher to the school board during the public comments section of the board meeting on May 7th, 2026.
Greetings to the board. Greetings to the administration. And happy almost-summer to everyone.
My name is Dustin Flesher, and I’m the president of the Widefield Education Association. Tonight I will make a few comments about school finance and the EIP process.
Recently I’ve made a study of the research on school finance. You can find some of my notes on the Widefieldea.org website.
Many studies over the last three decades have been published on school finance. Some of the earlier studies focus on school expenditures. They identified a strong correlation between Instruction expenditures and student outcomes. Schools that spent more on Instruction had better student outcomes.
When we look at where Widefield is today, it is at the bottom for Instruction of the mid-sized and large Colorado school districts. Widefield spent 54.5% of its General Fund on Instruction in 2024-2025. The district at the top, Boulder Valley, spent 70.6% of its General Fund on Instruction.
One concern that has been presented about this data, and about the underlying research, is that districts don’t have completely consistent account systems. They may account for their expenditures differently. One district may account for an expense as Instruction whereas another district may account for the same expense as Student Services. However, even when we add in Student Services and Instructional Staff, the other expenditure categories that involve direct student-facing services, we see a similar picture. Widefield spent 68.7% of its General Fund on Instruction, Students Services, and Instructional Staff, placing our district close to the bottom of the list. On the other hand, Boulder Valley spent 80.9% of its General Fund on those categories.
Now perhaps Widefield is hiding some instructional expenses in Transportation. Perhaps it is hiding instructional expenses in Business Services. Perhaps it is hiding them in Central Services. Frankly, I doubt it. If we were to trace every single expense of these districts in the same way, I doubt that we would find the story substantially changed. Widefield would still be at our near the bottom.
There have been more recent studies that have done the hard work of making those comparisons – in California, for example. One study drilled down to specific comparisons like teacher salaries, class sizes, and staff turnover. They found that there is a huge correlation between increased expenditure on those specific classroom inputs and on student outcomes. They found that “84% of the variation in school spending effectiveness can be explained by instructional expenditures. These are predominantly driven by … class size reductions, teacher salary increases, and reductions in teacher turnover.” 84% of the variation is explained by how much those schools spent directly on the classroom.
I haven’t done that level of analysis on Widefield or other Colorado districts. I’ve only, as I said, worked up numbers on the expenditure categories. But I think those numbers give us reasonable grounds to re-evaluate what we’re doing in Widefield. The district should take a hard look at its budget. Just as we demand that teachers use research-based practices in the classroom every day, we should also have the same expectations of the district administration. We should put more money into Instruction, a lot more money.
And while you’re at it, please consider looking at the EIP process. Every year EIP produces agreement between the administration and the employees, but every year the administration shoots down the input of the employees. They agree on some marginal issues, but the administration denies input on the most pressing issues. The process seems designed to obtain agreement on pre-ordained decisions.
Based on my experience, the employees agree because they are afraid. When administrators use heated language and rhetoric, employees fear retribution. They also fear the school board. They fear what might happen if they don’t agree and the school board gets more involved.
EIP is not an input process based on good-faith discussions. It is a facade of input, the appearance that the employees have been involved in the Blue Sheet issues.
Thank you for your time, and have a great summer.
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