Dear Families, It’s hard to believe we only have a few weeks left in the school year and it seems like only yesterday that we began visioning for our district. There is much excitement about all of the current opportunities for students as well as the possibilities for the future. A couple of projects that you may be interested in include the new Miller Middle School construction as well as Impact, the new Career and Innovation Center at DHS.

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 Durango 9-R Board of Education is aware that not all who received the first survey about masking protocols launched on February 11th also received the second survey which was launched on Friday, Feb 18. In an effort to collect reliable data by making the new survey links secure, a previously unknown limitation was discovered. As a result, the second survey was sent only to the first/primary email address in each student’s Infinite Campus record.

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.

Every month the school district strives to compile updates and information for families and the community regarding the impacts of COVID-19 in schools. We are grateful for the continued support of our mitigation efforts, which have allowed schools to remain open. Thank you to all our students, staff and families for their perseverance and diligence.