Rural school districts on the edges of Colorado, many of which have long struggled to recruit teachers because of their remote locations and low salaries, are increasingly competing for staff against school districts in places like New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma. Educators who call Colorado home can in some cases make thousands of dollars more teaching in a border state than they would in Colorado.
That’s according to a report published Wednesday by the Keystone Policy Center, which analyzed teacher salaries across Colorado, including in rural districts. Salaries vary significantly among teachers across the state, but rural teachers generally earn much less than their counterparts in urban and suburban districts, according to the report, titled Insufficient at Any Altitude: Rural teacher salaries in Colorado.
Drawing teachers and keeping them has become a widely recognized challenge for rural districts in recent years, especially as rising costs of living and a growing housing affordability crisis has put many educators in a pinch and even priced some out of the communities where they teach.
The report puts numbers to the problem — the average teacher salary in some parts of the state is less than $40,000, for instance — and spotlights the toll that higher teacher churn in rural districts takes on kids. Teacher turnover in two rural districts highlighted in the report, Vilas School District RE-5 and Montezuma-Cortez School District RE-1, both outpace the state average. While Colorado’s average teacher turnover rate during the 2023-24 school year was 21%, turnover in Vilas School District that year hit 29% and reached 50% in Montezuma-Cortez School District.
“We know that teachers are the most important factor outside of a household in terms of impacting a students’ learning,” Van Schoales, senior policy director at Keystone Policy Center, told The Colorado Sun. “And so if we want to have a significant impact on how kids are doing, we need to make sure that we have highly qualified committed teachers. And so we have to invest in teachers. That’s a given, and if we’re not able to do that, then it’s going to be very difficult for us, for the state of Colorado, for kids to reach the standards that by law that we’ve said that we need to do. It’s sort of undermining the basic foundation of education to not invest in having great teachers.”
The report, which cites data from the Colorado Department of Education, found that pay is not necessarily the top reason that will sway a teacher to leave a district. Still, Colorado districts experiencing the highest rates of turnover — exceeding 40%— often pay their staff some of the lowest salaries in the state.
Rural Colorado districts, except for those located close to ski resorts, often lack property wealth, reducing the tax base that helps fund schools at the local level. As a result, they tend to rely on a heavier share of state funding, the report notes. And while rural districts tend to pull in more money per student they serve from the state, the fixed costs they face for staples like maintenance, facilities and transportation eat up more of their budgets, meaning they have less money to devote to teacher and staff compensation.
Some rural districts can only set aside 60% to 65% of their general fund budgets for salaries, significantly lower than many urban and suburban districts, which usually designate as much as 90% of their budgets to pay staff, according to the report.
Pricier repairs in far-flung rural districts are a major driver of that discrepancy, the report highlights, pointing to Vilas School District in far southeastern Colorado as an example. The tiny district — 265 miles from Denver, 177 miles from Pueblo and 174 miles north of Amarillo, Texas — must pay more for repairs to roofs and HVAC systems. Without staff or local companies to make those repairs, Vilas School District must find contractors from larger cities willing to make the three-hour drive and pay them for their time and travel.
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4:05 AM MDT on Apr 9, 20257:10 AM MDT on Apr 9, 2025Additionally, smaller districts like Vilas School District, which this year educates 54 students and has a budget of $2.6 billion, often incur much steeper insurance costs and must dole out more for learning materials like textbooks since they often can’t take advantage of discounts for bulk purchases.
After covering all their bills, districts often have little left to distribute to staff in the form of raises, Vilas School District Board President John Wittler told The Sun, explaining, “you’re always behind.”
Housing presents yet another hurdle to recruiting and retaining teachers in districts like Vilas School District, Wittler said, which is why the district has stretched itself to open up housing options for its educators so many of them have a guaranteed place to live.
The district has owned 10 houses for more than 20 years, which it rents out to teachers and staff for between $600 and $700 per month, according to the report. However, those homes are aging and also needing repairs — part of why the district spends an average of $130,000 each year on buildings and utilities, the report states.
Wittler said the benefits to teaching in a small rural district stack up — educators get to know their students on a deeper personal level and see them grow from kindergarten through graduation. Teachers in the district also build relationships with parents and have small class sizes.
But teacher salaries that pale in comparison to other districts, including in other states, continue to make it harder to entice teachers to come to the district and stay. The average teacher salary during the 2023-24 school year was $39,775, nearly $30,000 less than the state’s average teacher salary of $68,647. Meanwhile, in Stanton County, Kansas — less than an hour away — a teacher can earn a base salary of $44,500, according to the report.
“Colorado as a state is not as lucrative of a teaching job,” Wittler said. “If you’re within a few miles of the border, then you’re not just trying to compete with a competitive wage for Colorado. You’re competing with what a different state has to offer.”
Wittler also recognizes that his town of fewer than 90 residents doesn’t suit the lifestyle every teacher wants.
“We are often a first stop early in somebody’s career,” he said, “and they then move on to better paying opportunities.”
How can state leaders boost rural teacher pay?
Montezuma-Cortez School District, a district of just over 2,500 students in southwestern Colorado, battles similar challenges, particularly as districts in neighboring New Mexico lure teachers with more attractive salaries. The district has increased teacher pay over the last five years, with its average teacher salary during the 2023-24 school year at $47,579.
The district, located in Cortez, is continuing to build on that momentum following taxpayer approval of a mill levy override in the fall, which will enable the district to give all teachers a $7,000 raise and increase its salary for beginning teachers to $47,000.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the district can easily compete against other districts. Teachers living in Colorado can drive 45 minutes across the New Mexico border to the town of Shiprock, where they can earn a starting annual salary of $54,000 and, after three years of teaching, see an $11,000 pay hike. After five years, teachers working in that town can make $77,000, according to the report.
Some Cortez teachers look past the salary and stay in the district because of its access to the outdoors, including both mountains and desert vistas, the report notes.
Still, lagging pay in the district remains a major obstacle to building a pipeline of the teacher talent, Superintendent Tom Burris says in the report.
“If I’m a newly graduated education major from Fort Lewis College or Greeley or Boulder, and I want to teach in your district, and you’re starting me at $47,000, it doesn’t matter where I live,” Burris said in the report. “I’m going to be stressed to pay rent, whether I’m out in the county somewhere and having to drive in a long way or I’m in town.”
The Keystone Policy Center urges state leaders to consider a variety of ways they could lend support to bolster rural teacher salaries in districts like Vilas and Montezuma-Cortez. That includes modeling other states, such as New Mexico, where legislators have enforced a minimum teacher salary of $50,000.
Other potential solutions include exploring changes to Colorado’s school funding formula to address low teacher salaries, focusing on creating more housing targeted at teachers and school staff and developing a new state grant program that would allocate dollars to districts to boost teacher pay.
Schoales, of the Keystone Policy Center, said that a state fund of $10 million to $20 million could improve teacher pay across rural Colorado.
Frank Reeves, interim executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, said that as state leaders consider ways to help rural districts, it’s critical that they keep in mind the workload pressures straining nearly every rural educator and staff member.
When lawmakers pass new policies that tack new responsibilities onto teachers and administrators’ workloads without also giving them more funding, that only adds more jobs onto the plates of staff members already pulled between multiple roles.
“We’re years away from catching up,” Reeves told The Sun. “I don’t think we can snap our fingers and say we can fix this.”
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