Welcome to Class Notes! If someone forwarded this to you, I'm glad it landed in your inbox. Subscribe for free at the link below, and I'll show up every Friday.

What's on my mind this week: There's a particular kind of institutional failure that's hard to see until someone young enough to be your kid puts a name on it. Eddie Krug is a high school Freshman. He spoke at a Jeffco board meeting in February and asked a question that remains unanswered. Why do students face consequences for lying when, he says, a staff member faced none?

His story is the lead this week. It involves a concussion, a state law named for a boy who died, a district investigation that never interviewed him, and coaches who remain in their jobs. It also connects to a second Jeffco story, the sentencing of a former school security guard convicted of sexually assaulting a student. Two different cases, two different kinds of harm. But the same question underneath. What does it actually cost a Jeffco adult to fail a child?

In 27J, a different kind of institutional question is playing out over a promised school. And in Adams 12, a superintendent made a choice that's worth noticing.

It was a Monday night lacrosse practice in late September. Eddie Krug, a 14-year-old freshman at Conifer High School, took a chest-to-chest hit during a drill and went down on his back, his head hitting the turf. Both coaches came over, checked on him for a few seconds and turned back to practice.

Three minutes later, head coach Matt Hartmann performed what he called a "basic vestibular ocular motor screening," threw Eddie a ball, and 13 seconds after that, Eddie was back in the drill.

Eddie did have a concussion. That night, his father drove him to the emergency room, where doctors also found severe whiplash. He was not cleared to return to play for 15 weeks.

Under Colorado's Jake Snakenberg Youth Sports Concussion Act, a coach who suspects a head injury must immediately remove the athlete, notify a parent and keep them out of physical activity until a licensed health care provider clears them in writing. Hartmann is not a licensed health care provider. By performing a screening, his own actions indicated he at least suspected a concussion. He sent Eddie back in anyway.

Hartmann later said he saw no symptoms and that Eddie returned voluntarily.

Between the lines: When the Krug family tried to hold the district accountable, they found a moving target. Jeffco first said the September practice wasn't a school event. Then it pointed to a booster organization, Elevations Lobos Lacrosse Club. But the club told the Krugs it does not oversee or supervise practices — that falls to Conifer High School Athletics and Jeffco Public Schools. The facility use form for Fitz Field listed the organization as "Conifer Boys Lacrosse," with Hartmann as the contact, using his Jeffco email and his title as head coach.

The district's own investigative summary concluded that return-to-play protocols "may not have been followed" and that coaches' conduct "warrants corrective action and retraining." Its statement to the Colorado Trust for Local News said the coaching staff "responded in accordance with the protocols they are trained annually to follow."

Neither coach filed a Risk Management Incident Report within 24 hours as district policy requires. Investigators never spoke with Eddie — the investigation closed before he was well enough to return to school, and they never contacted a nearby player who offered to testify under oath.

Five days after the injury, a teammate told the coaches Eddie was out of a game because of a concussion. The teammate said the coaches laughed. Eddie later wrote that "it really hurts me to hear my coaches found my injury something to laugh about."

Why it matters: Colorado's concussion law exists because of Jake Snakenberg, a 14-year-old who collapsed on a Grandview High School football practice field in 2004 and died the next day. He had likely sustained a concussion the week before, returned to play without a diagnosis, and took a second hit before his brain had healed. His mother spent eight years fighting for the law that now bears his name. When Eddie raised that law with school administrators, two of them appeared unaware of it. The district's executive director of athletics said he was "not surprised" the athletic director didn't know the law's name.

Hartmann and the other coach present that night remain employed by Jeffco and are coaching at Conifer this season. Asked whether either faced corrective action, the district said personnel matters are confidential.

What's next: Eddie closed his February board appearance with a proposal. He asked the board to require athletes to learn concussion protocol before they're allowed to practice. "Since the coaches couldn't help me themselves, are we really relying on them to stop me?" he said. "If my teammates had known players are supposed to be cleared by a doctor before returning to practice, they wouldn't have let me in."

The district directed his follow-up questions to the standard complaint process.

When 27J voters approved a $515 million bond in 2021, it included a seventh middle school for Commerce City's fastest-growing neighborhoods near Reunion Ridge — an area adding thousands of homes and pushing the city's population toward 80,000 residents. What the district now plans to open in 2029 is a K-8 campus, without a full-size football field or the facilities of a traditional middle school. The board didn't vote on the change.

The shift is driven by enrollment math that no longer works the way it once did. Families who used to arrive with two kids in tow now arrive with none. Denver has dropped out of the top 25 destination cities for new residents, largely because of affordability. Immigration, which drove enrollment growth across the Front Range for years, has slowed sharply. This year's kindergarten class in 27J is the smallest in district history.

Building a full middle school alongside Rocky Vista High School — which opens in fall 2027 — would split an already-reduced student population across two buildings. District officials say neither school would be viable. A K-8 provides middle school grades without pulling enough students from nearby Stewart Middle School to destabilize it, while freeing up bond savings to finish Rocky Vista at its full planned capacity of 1,800 students.

Between the lines: District officials say bond counsel confirmed the K-8 still meets the bond's legal obligations, and the bond oversight committee was comfortable with the change. Board member Ramon Alvarado said publicly that the district "still fulfills that promise" because the K-8 includes middle school grades. Whether families agree is another question. Families in the affected area have not yet been asked for input. A separate round of community meetings on district boundary changes is in the works, with dates still to be announced.

Why it matters: Voters approved a middle school. What opens in 2029 will include middle school grades, in a K-8, on a smaller footprint. The district says that fulfills the bond's promise. Families and voters will ultimately decide whether they agree — but they haven't been asked yet.

What's next: The board's formal role comes when it passes a resolution requesting that Commerce City release land set aside for the school. Both the K-8 and the Rocky Vista expansion are targeted to open for the 2029-30 school year.

Jeffco's budget cuts promised to protect classrooms. I'm checking the math.

When Jeffco Public Schools unveiled its Budget Reduction Blueprint earlier this year, district leaders said cuts would come "as far from students as possible" and promised a significant reduction in central leadership. I'm reporting on whether the numbers back that up.

To do that, I need records the district hasn't made public — the internal lists, spreadsheets and memos used to identify which positions were actually eliminated under the Blueprint.

I submitted a public records request under the Colorado Open Records Act on March 9.

This week, the district responded with a fee estimate of $413.70 and a claim that its systems cannot distinguish Blueprint cuts from reductions driven by enrollment decline. I pushed back in writing, challenged the fee and narrowed the request to planning documents that should already contain that distinction.

📌 A former Jeffco security guard was sentenced to at least 18 years in prison for sexually assaulting a student: Rubel "Tim" Martinez, 68, worked as a campus security officer at Jefferson Jr./Sr. High School and Lakewood High School from 2006 to 2022. A jury convicted him in January of sexually assaulting a then-16-year-old student repeatedly over two years. The Martinez case is one of seven sexual misconduct-related incidents involving Jeffco staff between late 2023 and early 2026. Read more →

📌 Adams 12 Superintendent Chris Gdowski got a contract extension — and turned down a raise: The board voted 5-0 on March 4 to extend Gdowski's contract through June 2027 at his current base salary of $312,500, unchanged since 2023. Every other administrator in the district has received a raise over the past two years. He never asked for one; instead, he requested 12 additional paid vacation days, which the board approved. Board President Lori Goldstein said she "personally feels that Chris is underpaid, overworked" and that his longevity is what makes the district special. Read more →

📍Jeffco's 2023 promise to investigate barriers to AP, IB and concurrent enrollment access: Two years ago, the district told its school board it would investigate why students, particularly low-income students and students of color, have lower rates of access to college-level coursework in high school. I've obtained the internal records that were supposed to document that investigation. I found no barrier analysis, no findings, no plan.

Instead, the district pointed to existing grant-funded programs as evidence of follow-through. State data newly published this month covering the graduating class of 2022 gives me a fresh benchmark to measure whether the gap the district promised to close has actually narrowed.

📍 A Fairview K-8 CLDE position has been covered by someone without the required endorsement all year — and the district's own records flag it: Public records show a Grade 2 class of English learners at Westminster Public Schools’ Fairview PK-8 was assigned to a long-term substitute last fall, then handed off to a replacement teacher in January. The district's internal monitoring notes, dated Feb. 11, note that the teacher was "not CLDE endorsed" and ask whether she's even using the required CLDE curriculum. I'm trying to find out what this means for the roughly 13 students in that class and whether anyone told their families. If your child receives CLDE services at Fairview or another WPS school, I'd like to hear from you. Send me a tip →

📍 The Chevrier sentencing: Former Jeffco school psychologist James Michael Chevrier is scheduled to be sentenced on April 2 on five felony counts, including sexual assault on a child. I'll be watching that proceeding and what, if anything, the district says publicly in response.

If a story this week made you want to show up and say something, I have a free resource for that.

Get "How to Give Public Comment That Gets Heard" →

It covers what to say, how long you have and what to do when the board doesn't respond — with district-by-district details for Jeffco, Adams 12, Westminster, 27J and Weld RE-8.

Class Notes is free because readers like you share it with people who need it. When you refer friends, you unlock tools I've built from covering five Front Range school districts:

🔓 3 referrals — CORA Request Template Kit (fill-in-the-blank public records requests)

I can't be everywhere, but you are. If something's happening in your district or school that doesn't add up, I want to hear about it. A policy that makes no sense. A budget line that vanished. A question no one will answer.

You can stay anonymous. I protect my sources.

Class Notes is reported and written by Suzie Glassman for the Colorado Trust for Local News.

I do the homework on your schools, so you don't have to.

If you like our work, then there's one easy way to keep it coming: support us with a subscription or a monthly or one-time donation. Hit the button below!