Tiffany Miera, 5th Grade Math Teacher at Needham Elementary School, was awarded the prestigious Milken Educator Award on Tuesday at an assembly at Needham Elementary School. The award was a surprise and Tiffany didn’t know until her name was announced.

Students and teachers have a reason to celebrate this fall: Cumulative test scores from all schools show Durango School District 9-R is ranked in the top 20 percent of all school districts in Colorado.

As we begin the 2022-23 school year, Dr. Karen Cheser shares her Top 10 list of great things to expect this year, across Durango School District 9-R.

Notice is hereby given that a proposed budget has been submitted to, and adopted by, the Board of Education of Durango School District 9-R for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2022, and has been filed in the district finance department where it is available for public inspection.

Dear Durango School District 9-R community,
Thank you for your continued support and flexibility as we strive to create meaningful learning opportunities for our students throughout the most recent wave of COVID-19. As cases and transmission in our community lessen, there is an opportunity for our district to adjust our COVID-19 response.

The 9-R School District has decided to end our stakeholder survey regarding masking in our schools after having been shown compelling evidence of an effort within the greater community to skew the results.

The Durango 9-R Board of Education unanimously passed a Resolution in Support of Paying Off the Budget Stabilization Factor in 2022. The resolution was presented as a request from the Durango Education Association and the Durango Education Support Professionals Association. The Budget Stabilization Factor, also known as the Negative Factor, was created when the state borrowed $1 billion from public education funding to help with economic recovery from the Great Recession. Eleven years later the state has failed to pay back public education to the tune of nearly $10 billion, owing Durango 9-R alone more than $60 million.

Thank you for a wonderful first week back with your children. Our staff remains committed to providing high quality learning experiences for students, which has been evident throughout this week in our schools.
COVID-19 continues to present opportunities for problem solving and resolve among our community. At this time La Plata County is seeing a dramatic increase in daily positive cases, at a rate approximately five times higher than before the holidays. As such, there are more cases within our schools that are being driven by increased community spread.

Durango School District 9-R and La Plata Electric Association (LPEA) will today launch the area’s first electric – and Colorado’s first vehicle-to-grid (V2G) enabled – school bus. In February 2021, District 9-R was awarded a grant of $328,803 through the Regional Air Quality Council’s (RAQC) ALT Fuels Colorado program. Augmented with $120,000 from LPEA to cover electric charging infrastructure, the project is groundbreaking.

November was a whirlwind with the push to the holiday break. We hope our families enjoyed a little reprieve as we head into the two-week home stretch to the winter break. As families may be aware, our goal this year has remained the same, as we want to optimize student access to in-person learning while simultaneously promoting health and safety by minimizing the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Here are some COVID-19 updates from 9-R for the month of November.