Colorado Public Christian School Hits Funding Wall

The Sentinel, republishing Chalkbeat’s Ann Schimke, reports that Riverstone Academy in Pueblo County, billed by its backers as Colorado’s first “public Christian school,” has shut down after one turbulent school year. The school opened with about 30 students and a big legal theory: create a public school with a Christian foundation, challenge the state’s limits, and maybe take the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Instead, Riverstone ran into the Colorado machinery. New state law changes restricted how education co-ops like ERBOCES can authorize schools, and those changes cut off Riverstone’s path to public funding. The school also had other problems, including safety issues, a move, and a settlement with parents. So no, this is not a clean little martyr story wrapped in a hymn and a lawsuit. It is messier than that.

But the emotional center still matters. Families found a school that fit their values, then watched it close when the legal and funding structure underneath it got yanked. “Public Christian school” is not a bumper sticker. It is a legal grenade with the pin halfway out. And Colorado’s education establishment was more than happy to kick it into a ditch and call that compliance.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Riverstone Academy opened in Pueblo County as a public elementary school offering a Christian foundation. That phrase alone is enough to make education bureaucrats reach for their smelling salts and emergency acronyms.
• The school was authorized by ERBOCES, a public education co-op based in Monument, but state lawmakers changed the rules. One change bars co-ops from starting schools or programs outside their member districts. Another bars districts or co-ops from having brick-and-mortar schools entirely run by contractors.
• Those changes mattered because Riverstone was outside ERBOCES’ two member districts and was run by a contractor. Translation: the school did not have to be banned directly. The funding spigot just got turned off with a nice procedural wrench.
• The story is not all clean hands and choir robes. Chalkbeat reports Riverstone had safety problems, moved locations, settled with parents for $20,000, and was part of a legal strategy pushed by a conservative law firm looking for a Colorado test case. That is relevant. The knife has to stay honest.
• Still, the bigger question remains: were Colorado’s new strings neutral constitutional guardrails, or were they designed to strangle one kind of school because it had a cross on the wall? That is the whole ballgame.

My Bottom Line

Conservatives should champion parental rights, pluralism, and equal treatment for religious families. Parents are trusted with mortgages, rifles, taxes, and raising children. But the minute they want a school that reflects their faith, suddenly they are dangerous radicals who need to be managed by experts with laminated badges. Funny how that works.

At the same time, we should not pretend public money comes with no strings. It does. It always has. If taxpayers are funding a school, there are constitutional questions, accountability questions, and governance questions. That is not anti-Christian. That is basic public finance with lawyers attached.

But Colorado’s education establishment has a long and proud tradition of loving “choice” only when parents choose from the approved secular progressive menu. Charter schools? Maybe, if they behave. Homeschoolers? Suspicious. Religious families? Better call legal. The system does not have to say “faith is banned” when it can regulate faith-adjacent options into the weeds and then shrug like the whole thing was gravity.

Riverstone may not have been the perfect vehicle for this fight. It sounds like it had real operational problems and a legal strategy baked in from the start. But the fight itself is not going away. Colorado families want education outside the government-approved factory model, and the state keeps acting like every alternative is a threat to civilization.

That is the tension here. Public money must follow constitutional rules. Fine. But those rules should be neutral guardrails, not velvet ropes around a secular clubhouse. If Colorado believes in parental choice, then that choice has to mean something even when parents choose a school the education establishment would rather not invite to the potluck.

Source: The Sentinel