Welcome to Class Notes! Whether you've been here since the start or this is your first Friday with me, thanks for reading.

If you got the note from me Thursday night, you already know the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office released 664 pages of investigative records from the Evergreen High School shooting. That's one story about what the public has been told, and when. If you missed it, read here.

Three things are on my mind this week:

One is what the DA's office was doing while JCSO's investigation ran, which the records show was a lot more than the public was ever told.

One is a Westminster policy change, where records show the teacher consultation the district described in public barely happened.

And one is the rulebook Adams 12 will use to close schools next year. It's been published openly, but written so parents don't weigh in on which schools go on the list before the list is final.

That's the thread this week. What the public gets to see, when, and what it takes to see the rest.

Let's dig in.

When the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office announced Feb. 4 that no charges would be filed in the Evergreen High School shooting, it said investigators had been "unable to speak with the shooter's parents." That characterization, JCSO later acknowledged, "lacked important context."

Internal records obtained by the Colorado Trust for Local News show the shooter's family, through their attorney, former federal prosecutor Douglas Richards, had been offering for months to sit down with investigators under a standard immunity arrangement. Richards first reached out to the First Judicial District Attorney's Office in early November. Twelve days before the investigation closed, he sent a letter offering to bring Morgan Holly and Julia Jones in for a formal proffer.

The interview never happened.

A closer look

Between the lines: The DA's office has said publicly, and in writing, that the sheriff never presented a case for filing, so there was no charging decision to make. The records show DA King was personally aware of Richards' outreach by Nov. 13, attended two interagency meetings about the case in October and November, and her office was involved in discussions about immunity, DNA results and the path to a family interview through January. The records don't establish that anyone acted improperly or that the decision not to charge was wrong. They do show a months-long process the public was never told about.

Why it matters: A shooting in a small mountain community leaves questions that linger. Evergreen residents pushed publicly for answers about why no charges were filed — one parent called the Colorado Attorney General's office to ask. The official account of the investigation is one of the few public documents that will exist about what happened. It deserves to be complete.

The Adams 12 Five Star Schools board got its first look April 15 at the criteria it will use to decide which schools close in fall 2027. The document, along with the enrollment data presented alongside it, lets families assess where their own school stands months before Superintendent Chris Gdowski names specific schools in September or October.

It's also the most information parents will get before that list becomes public. The first formal chance for families to weigh in comes after the recommendation, with about 10 months between the announcement and the move.

Any of more than two dozen elementary and middle schools across Broomfield, Federal Heights, Northglenn, Thornton and Westminster could end up on that list.

🔎 A closer look

The district defines a thriving elementary school as one with three classrooms per grade, a measure it calls "rounds." A three-round school has full-time art, music and P.E. teachers, dedicated interventionists, instructional coaches, a full-time assistant principal, and before- and after-school childcare. A two-round school has those same teachers only part-time, along with limited support staff and often no assistant principal.

Parents can count the classrooms at their child's school to see where it falls. Two-round elementary schools have grown in number since the pandemic, while three- and four-round schools have declined. By the district's projection, two-round schools will outnumber three-round schools by 2027.

At the middle school level, the target is 800 to 1,000 students. As of October 2025, comprehensive middle schools were running at 60% utilization, with about 3,500 empty seats.

Between the lines: Deputy Superintendent Beau Foubert told the board the omission of a community input requirement was deliberate. "There's a really careful line in gathering feedback and gathering perspective that's helpful," he said, "but that can easily be crossed around, 'it should be them, not us.'"

Why it matters: Parents have concrete protections once a school is named. Receiving schools must have an accountability rating at least as strong, new boundaries must keep neighborhoods together, and children from the same closed school can't be scattered. What they won't have is input on which schools make the list.

What's next: The draft returns to the board May 6 and can be revised through May 27. A final vote is expected before summer recess.

📌 Westminster board removes teacher vote on new courses. For years, when a Westminster teacher proposed a new course, the department voted on whether to advance it. The board eliminated that vote April 14 and adopted the revised policy unanimously without discussion. Westminster Education Association President Melissa Duran told the board the only teachers who had reviewed the policy package were an advisory group given "over 200 pages in a couple of hours." Records the district produced in response to an open records request show no consolidated list of teachers consulted on this policy, and no written feedback other than a single email. Read more →

📌 At a mountain-area writing night, kids get treated like published authors. More than 250 kids from seven Jeffco mountain elementary schools brought books they had written to Marshdale Elementary on April 2 for the Young Writers Conference. This year's featured author, Jolene Gutiérrez, said when kids asked for her autograph, she told them they should be signing their own books instead. Read the full story →

Jeffco wants $4,923 to show me 13 consultant contracts

I filed an open records request seeking contracts between Jeffco and 13 outside consultants, including Education Resource Strategies, TNTP, and a dozen others, for the period during the district's ongoing budget crisis. I also asked for the district's procurement policy governing consultant contracts.

The district's response: $4,923.03, required in advance. That figure reflects 120 hours of research and retrieval time at the statutory maximum of $41.37 per hour. The first hour is free by law.

I narrowed the request, cutting invoices, correspondence and deliverables, asking only for the contracts themselves, the procurement policy, and any sole-source justification for one vendor. Three days later, I'm still waiting for a revised estimate.

Colorado law allows districts to charge for research time on records requests. This fee isn't a violation. It's the price of seeing what a district is paying outside consultants during a year it's cutting 141 jobs and telling employees the money isn't there. I'll share what the contracts show when I get them.

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:

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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.

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