A Durango School District finance director painted a bleak picture of the budget outlook for local and Colorado schools during a Board of Education work session at Park Elementary this month.
Durango School District faces a $1.8 million deficit and has lost 365 students in the past five years, said Kira Horenn, executive director of finance. Of those, 160 left this year, and enrollment declined from 4,409 students in 2015-16 to 3,900 in 2025-26, she said.
Horenn said the district projects it will lose an additional 82 students by the end of this school year.
Statewide, enrollment in K-12 public schools has declined by 42,440 students since 2020, she said.
Horenn said the state budget deficit is “significant and severe.” The state’s general fund reserve could be depleted by the 2029-30 school year, she said, and a moderate recession could exhaust it as soon as next year.
School districts – including Durango’s – are funded on a per-pupil basis. The state uses a school finance formula to set the per-student funding amount, then multiplies it by the district’s funded enrollment to calculate total program funding, Horenn said.
Local property and ownership taxes are collected by county governments and applied to the district’s funding. The state then provides the remaining money needed to reach the total program amount through backfilling, she said.
Over time, the state’s allocation for K-12 education funding has decreased, which can affect local taxpayers’s contribution, Horenn said.
The state allocates 29% of its budget to K-12 education as of 2026, compared with 42% 15 years ago, she said.
The district’s program budget has also shifted in balance between taxpayer and state contributions over that time.
Fifteen years ago, the district was funded 60% by state equalization and 40% by local property taxes, Horenn said. Today, it's funded 53% by state equalization and 47% by local property taxes.
She said it’s a common misconception that when property taxes increase, the school district receives more funding. When property taxes go up, the district does not receive additional funding. Instead, the state reduces its contribution accordingly, leaving the district’s total roughly unchanged.
Voters have approved two measures to support the district financially: the 2024 Investing in Our Schools bond and a 2016 mill levy override, which is also distributed to local charter schools Mountain Middle School, Animas High School and the Juniper School based on enrollment.
Horenn said the $150 million school bond can be used only for buildings and infrastructure – not salaries or staffing.
The mill levy override can be used for teacher salaries, staffing and operations, but Colorado law caps it at 25% of the district’s total program funding, a limit the district has already reached.
Mill levy override funding is also tied to enrollment, meaning total funding has declined alongside enrollment.
The Board of Education’s 2026 agenda includes a goal of raising the mill levy override cap to support staff recruitment and retention.
The district began last year with a $4 million budget deficit, Horenn said, which was reduced to $1.8 million with help from a budget committee formed in fall 2025.
The committee includes teachers, support staff members and administrators, and is divided into three subcommittees: staffing structures, class sizes, and district and student fees.
The committee will meet again after spring break to “focus on looking at (the district’s) salary schedules as well as school consolidations,” Horenn said.
Student losses are partially because of families moving out of the area and partly because of students switching to online programs or charter schools, she said.
The district loses about 550 students to Mountain Middle School and Animas High School each year, and about 330 to virtual schooling, she said.
“Think about it this way: If those two schools didn’t exist, we would assume that most of those students would enroll to Durango School District,” she said.
In the 2026-27 school year, the district projects a decline of 100 students across Needham, Park and Riverview elementary schools, she said.
“Like all of our elementary schools, we see a large shift in students between third and fourth grade, and we see students leave to Mountain Middle School,” she said. “That has a large impact on our enrollment at the elementary school, especially in that grade area.”
In contrast, enrollment at Miller Middle and Escalante Middle schools is expected to grow next year because of large graduating elementary school classes, Horenn said.
In addition to cutting department budgets by 10% and school budgets by 5%, the district has been reducing staff members as a cost-saving measure.
Reassignments, layoffs, attrition and contract nonrenewals have affected staff members across the district in recent weeks. District spokeswoman Karla Sluis told The Durango Herald earlier this month that a range of roles have been affected, including 25 administrative positions.
epond@durangoherald.com
