Last-minute extension keeps Colorado teacher preparation program open to high school seniors

Lawmakers’ plan to dissolve Colorado’s Teacher Recruitment Education and Preparation program was quickly met with complaints from graduating high school seniors who had planned on joining the program in the fall. The bill sponsors saw it as a necessary contribution to closing a $1.2 billion budget shortfall in the 2026-27 general fund.

Less than a month after proposing its elimination, the Joint Budget Committee unanimously passed a Senate amendment to expand the program for one more year on Thursday, April 24. Now, high school seniors who were admitted to the Teacher Recruitment Education and Preparation program will be able to complete their first year before it is dissolved.

“When we heard this in appropriations, we heard that there were lots of kids still in this program, and that if we could find the money, we could keep the program going,” Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, said during the Senate’s second reading of the bill on April 15.

The Teacher Recruitment Education and Preparation, or TREP, program was created through Senate Bill 185 in 2021 as a way to encourage high school students to pursue careers in education, especially as most rural districts struggled with educator shortages and barriers to hiring.

The program currently offers up to $10,000 in tuition assistance to program participants who remain enrolled in a fifth and sixth year of high school to take postsecondary courses to start a teacher career pathway.

Prior to being amended, House Bill 1357 would have phased out the program over a two-year period to put money back in the State Education Fund, allowing current program participants to finish their second year in 2026-27 while blocking current high school seniors from beginning the program in the fall.

Although current high school seniors wouldn’t be able to complete the full two years of the program, lawmakers see the amendment as a partial solution to the disappointment expressed by students during earlier hearings of the bill who had passed up other post-secondary opportunities in anticipation of joining the program.

The Senate amendment would transfer roughly $800,000 from the Electrifying School Buses Grant Program cash fund into the State Education Fund, providing the necessary funds for the program to accept new students for the 2026-27 academic year.

The bill also reduces per-pupil financial assistance for students completing the program from $10,721 to $7,104. The program’s provisions would officially be repealed on July 1, 2027, opening the doors for the program to completely phase out by the 2028-29 fiscal year, according to the fiscal note.

“There is a question underneath this debate that I do want to name directly,” said Sen. Janice Marchman, a Loveland Democrat, during the hearing. “It’s not about TREP, but it’s more about whether we believe teaching is a profession, or whether we believe anyone can walk off the street and do it. … When we suggest that a community college would’ve been good enough for these students, we say something that we can’t take back. We say the preparations that our teachers invested in, the degree they earned, the educator prep program they completed, the license they carried, it didn’t really matter. But it did. It matters every day in every classroom in Colorado.”

Marchman said the program’s 4.5% credential completion rate had previously been cited as evidence that the program was failing. However, the first cohort of students in the program who can go on to earn a bachelor’s degree won’t graduate until this May. Of the 221 students in the program’s data set, 129 were still actively enrolled last May.

“They’re not dropping out, they’re mid-program. We can’t judge a race by how far the runners have gotten at the halfway mark,” Marchman said. “The pipeline takes years to materialize. That lag is not a failure, it’s how the pipeline works. We are in that lag right now. The first students who could earn a teaching license under this program graduate this may.”

The Colorado Department of Education’s educator shortage survey relieved that 14.12% of all statewide teaching positions remained unfilled at the start of the 2024-25 academic year, translating to roughly 7,792 unfilled teacher positions.

“The shortage has just gotten worse.” Marchman said. “These TREP students are on the path to filling them. There are 193 students enrolled right now in 30 districts across the state, including seven rural (districts).”

The amended bill, included in the Joint Budget Committee’s fiscal year 2026-27 budget package, is headed back to both legislative chambers for a final vote.