Private Schools, Policy, and Educational Choice

Summary:
In this episode of the Straight-Up 30, host Ross Izard sits down with Weston Kurz, Executive Director of the Colorado Association of Private Schools (CAPS), to discuss how private schools operate, why they need representation in policy conversations, and the challenges facing independent schools in Colorado. Ross and Weston explore the role of private schools, the work of CAPS, and how policies around universal preschool, regulation, and educational choice are shaping the future of independent education in Colorado.

What we cover:
• What CAPS does and why private schools need representation
• How private schools differ from public and charter schools
• Universal Preschool and religious liberty concerns
• The impact of state regulations on independent schools
• Educational choice and the future of school policy in Colorado

About the guest:
Weston Kurz is the Executive Director of the Colorado Association of Private Schools (CAPS) and a longtime private school leader. He works to support and advocate for independent schools across Colorado.

Resources:
• Colorado Association of Private Schools (CAPS)
• Council for American Private Education (CAPE)

Leave a review and stay in touch:
If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review the show. It helps more listeners find us. Have feedback or questions? Email straightup30@xiphosstrategies.com.

Straight facts. Straight talk. Straight to the point.

Transcript

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Welcome to the straight up 30, where we make policy makes sense in 30 minutes or less. I'm your host, Ross Izzard, and today we are here to talk about the power of association, but this time in the context of private schools, which is a whole different universe from the public education system for a whole lot of reasons. And to do that, we have Weston Kerrz, who is the executive director of the Colorado Association of Private Schools, also known as CAPS. Uh Weston wears a couple of hats, including leading a school himself up in Greeley and just generally staying pretty busy. So Weston, thanks for joining us today. Absolutely, Ross. Glad to be here. Maybe you could start by just telling us about your background in the private school universe and how you came to be involved in uh in CAPS and that work. Yeah, I'll try to give you the short version. Um my kids started going to private school back in 2001 when my daughter entered kindergarten. And a couple years later, I ended up joining a school board. Um I was working in the financial service industry, working in banking. And um after about um around 2012, I left my job in banking to become the head of school uh up here in Greeley, Dayspring Christian Academy, and did that for about 13 years. And now I'm um uh the fractional CEO of our foundation, which is on fundraising. But I got involved in kind of political um issues as they related to private schools as I kept on seeing, you know, from the federal level or the state level. Um I think my first issue from the federal level was honestly um the Affordable Care Act and how it was driving up prices um for our nonprofit at the time. We were under 50 employees, but that uh really caught my eye of, oh my goodness, if we're not involved in these spaces, someone else is gonna make rules that are gonna drastically impact how you operate your business. And even if you're a business or a nonprofit, it really actually doesn't matter. And so um through Association of Christian Schools International, I was involved in uh as a field director here in Colorado. And then through the Colorado Association of Private Schools, which we're talking about a little bit today, um, I've been uh kind of the the uh president of that for the last probably three, four years and kind of taking that executive role uh as well on the side of one of the other things I've done. Aaron Powell And CAPS is kind of interesting because there's the state level association, but it's actually part of a larger national network of private schools. And then there are a whole bunch of different state associations scattered around. Yeah. So um CAPS is part of the Council for American Private Education. Uh that's been around, I think, the 70s, maybe even a little longer. And the way I think about that is that's the national organization that's really back in Washington fighting for private school rights back there. Uh a lot of different uh schools make that up in that organization from Catholic schools, Lutheran schools, Jewish schools, independent secular schools as well. Um, and they're really back there doing the hard work in Washington. And then they have affiliates. I believe we have affiliates in 38 states right now, and we're trying to grow that to all 50, um, whereas there's going to be a local representation of uh the national cape so that at the state level we can go to the state and see what things are happening in the state that are impacting us. You know, again, a little small little example of that is when the state raises our minimum wage in Colorado, that impacts all private uh schools. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about what the association does. I mean, there's a lot to be done. And private schools are particularly interesting because they're so different and they're spread around. There's no sort of unifying model of what a private school would look like. And so these are all incredibly different schools, and yet they have sort of a list of stuff that they all have in common, things they care about, things they need. So talk to me a little bit about the role that CAPS fills. Yeah, so representing all private schools, we're made up primarily of faith-based schools here in Colorado, but we technically represent all private schools. Um, and like you said, Ross, and especially I'd say since post-COVID, post-2020, when we have things like micro schools popping up, um, there's all kinds of different varieties of these things. And what people are typically looking for in a private school is something different than they might find in the public or charter school universe. They're typically going to be smaller than the public schools, uh, just based on nature. And most all of us, if not all of us, charge some form of tuition and then rely on some form of fundraising to support our budgets, as we don't get, we don't get any federal funding and uh we don't get any state funding actually either. So um it's really kind of a grassroots effort. Um, and then you got these distinct uh organizations. I would say the the interesting thing is I've studied this over the years, is it's Catholic schools were born out of some of the school movement back in the turn of the 20th century, and they've been fighting for rights uh all that time. And so it's kind of been an outgrowth of that over the years of how do you protect private school rights um from the state, whether at the federal or the state level, going on. And again, who's there advocating for that? That's one of the things uh CAPS does through education of our parents, of our community, uh, all of our stakeholders and things like that. Yeah, I think what you said there is important, which is that private schools, sometimes people get confused about this, and they sort of start merging private schools with charter schools, with homeschool, and it all kind of gets sort of muddy in there. And I think it's important to say that really what makes a private school private is that it doesn't take state money and it doesn't take federal money and really doesn't take public government money of any kind. Now, there are some exceptions to that, right? There's like indirect funding through the federal title programs in some cases. There are certain programs that private schools could choose to participate in, uh homeschool enrichment being one of them, although the legislature's in the process of potentially dismantling that almost as we speak. Uh but in general, these are fully independent schools, and so they're not authorized by school districts, they're not funded in any way through the public education system. They are 100% autonomous, independent schools with their own boards, their own models, their own sort of set of values, and they're out there doing their thing in a pretty interesting variety of ways. And so I know CAPS has a lot of pretty varied membership. And I know a lot of the schools are faith-based, and that means obviously that they are affiliated with a particular belief system. Uh, but even within that, I mean it's it's pretty pretty varied. And I wonder if you could talk about how that plays into sort of the general private school ecosystem in Colorado and also how that sort of folds into the association's work. Because it's got to be kind of a challenge to represent that many different voices in this sort of complicated space. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, a way to compare it would be look at your local school district that might have, say, 15 to 20 schools under one superintendent, under a geography, and they all kind of have an ethos down to that. Well, break that model and go one school, one superintendent, one board of directors for these. You know, there's approximately, depending on how you count it, if you put the preschools in there, which we do in our association, uh, there's anywhere from 200 K-12 schools to about 400 K-12 plus preschools. So about 400 people in the state of Colorado. Those are 400 independent operators of how things are gone, going day to day in the operations of their other work. The ones that where I would say that there's uh some alignment would be in the Catholic schools. They have a diocese, they have a superintendent of the diocese, and they have a loose framework that goes down into the different Catholic schools. Save that example. Everyone else, even the Lutheran schools, um the ACSI Protestant schools, or just that local preschool down the street, they're all operating kind of as independent operators. And we like that as a general rule of thumb because we want to be independent. We want to create our own curriculums, we want to do things our own way. And so for an association, we're trying to come around all of that as an umbrella, saying, hey, here's the value for being part of something bigger than your individual uh one voice out there. Because when you combine multiple voices across the state, and again, most of the time, even um out of sight of a face-bathe thing, 90, 95% of the issues we actually are going to fully agree on because they impact all of our private schools uh in similar ways, usually in terms of what you can or can't do or where you have to might have to pay a fear of our cost. Um inadvertently, like when they raised it, like my example of the raising the minimum wage, um, that puts budgetary pressures on us. And like I said, no federal or state funding, that means I either need to raise tuition or raise my fundraising. And that's an impact to us every single day and the cost of doing business. So the association coming together to protect some of those uh rights, especially on the religious side, obviously the First Amendment and things like that, um, those are that's why caps kind of exists in that ecosystem ecosystem. But in order to try to get all these people at the table, we're dealing with independent contractors. It is truly like herding cats to get everyone at the table uh underneath that. But that's that's actually the challenge of this role. Yeah, and I mean I assume that everybody's sort of coming under the tent for different reasons, right? I mean, there are some people who are there for sort of policy and advocacy purposes. There are a lot of folks who are there for potentially legal support. There are people who are there for networking so they can meet other private school leaders. So if you were to sort of sum up what CAPS does, what the association does, what the value of this association is, how would you describe that? What's the what's the day-to-day for this thing? Yeah, I I I would say the the behind-the-scenes work that you don't have time to do as a head of school or a board out there as a private school operator. We do that work behind the scenes advocating for those things, informational education, again, the tie to our parents, messaging around those sorts of issues. We also do some things like training where we're going to help equip um different school leaders inside their context. Maybe a small school wouldn't have ac access to other things. We do that. We do little webinars where we bring in industry experts so they can talk about a subject. And then ultimately at the end of the day, I don't know all the answers. Um we may not all know all the answers together, but we know how to connect people to the answers. CAPS being part of the bigger CAPE ecosystem. Now we have access to the entire country and what's happening in California or New York or Florida or Arizona, we can get, we have contacts, relationships there that we can bring in some of that data and some of those uh best, best um resources for the schools for them to participate in that. And so I think that's a really uh most people don't think about it that way, but that's that camaraderie around people like-minded doing a hard job, um, whether it's be a preschool director, uh, where you're the only person out there, um, just a place to gather and convene. I I think that's something CAPS also does. And so um one of the things that's interesting in the state of Colorado specifically is all the other school ecosystems have some form of advocacy and group that's representing them. And that's something that we're trying to build out here in our CAPS. Other states have been doing their CAPS, uh, their CAPE for over 50 years, like New York. They're funded by um dues that go to all the schools. There's many more private schools in New York than there is in Colorado. And they also do other work that we do not do in Colorado, just to be clear, accreditation. They do accreditation work, making sure that schools are living up to some level of standard. Most schools in Colorado have an accrediting way to get there through a Catholic process or ACSI or other things like that. That's something we don't do. Um, but um one of our uh one of our friends here in the state, uh in another independent school operator and uh association, they do accreditation for those schools. So that's another piece of the puzzle I see on the national level, uh, they do that accreditation piece as well. What do you think the hardest part is of making this thing work? I mean, it's it's hard in general, right? Private schools exist in sort of a hard universe. They've got to raise their own money, they've got to make their own model work, there's no guaranteed check coming every single school year. And then you've got to sort of make all of this work even outside of that system. What do you think the hardest part is? Uh well, if if you're talking about from the individual operator, it's the leader leadership structure, excuse me, inside the school. Um, you know, head of school to a board or head of school to a diocese to a bishop. Um, there's where I see things get broke inside the private school realm, it's in that leadership funnel from the governing entity down to the head of school, executive director, whatever you want to call it, and down to their staff. And some of these church school models, especially in the Protestant world, they can blow it up. Um so that's the practical side. For an association like us, it's just the hardest part is getting everyone on the same page, understanding the value that CAPS provides, and understands like for me, the way I look at this when I first joined CAPS way back in the day, is like, oh, I do not have financial resources to go do the work at the Capitol. I don't have my time. I can't be at the Capitol, both in DC and in Denver. Someone needs, and my analogy is someone needs to be on the wall. Someone needs to be on that watchtower, someone needs to be listening, paying attention. And so if someone's doing that work and is benefiting all the schools, I should do my fair share and participate in that, at least at a financial level. And then obviously down along the roads, maybe there's a day that you want to be on the CAPS board or what that might look like to advocate and and help protect private school rights in the state. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that side, the policy side of all this, because CAPS is a, it's not a big organization, but it is a heavily involved organization and a whole bunch of different stuff on the policy front. So tell me about what you're working on now when it comes to public policy. Yeah. So the the biggest one that I've been involved with over the last probably, I don't know, maybe we're going on five years now is the universal preschool situation, where we are out there um partnering with the schools that have issues with the way the state of Colorado set that universal preschool care up. Uh, it really um hurts people with some religious freedoms that violate that and their First Amendment right. And we've been part of that through Amika Briefs representing those sorts of schools. Um that's one example. Aaron Powell And this one is sort of just to pause on the UPK thing for a minute. So uh this one is more complicated than it might seem, right? So Colorado several years ago adopted first legislation creating an entirely new state department, the Department of Early Childhood, to run a universal preschool program, UPK. It was sort of Governor Polis' baby. It was funded by a separate ask to voters on the ballot uh for some tax increases. And so that rolled out, and the entire principle behind that was that it was supposed to include both public providers and private providers, because obviously a lot of the providers in the preschool space are private and they have been for a long time historically, because this isn't something that the public system has done or done well for a while. But by extension, because a lot of the private providers are also faith-based private providers, there are quite a few religious preschools out there, or at least schools that are affiliated with a religious institution. And the way the UPK was sold was that it's a sort of all-inclusive thing. Let parents pick it faith-based, non-faith-based, private, public, whatever they want to do. And instead, what happened was there was a series of requirements adopted in the law for certain types of restrictions and regulations that private schools were going to have to follow, particularly faith-based private schools, in order to participate in UPK with no exemptions at all, which for a while meant that almost no private schools were actually participating in this thing. And it became a huge boondoggle. It resulted in two federal lawsuits, both of which are still ongoing, one of which is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. And it's all kind of tied up in this really interesting and kind of complex argument about First Amendment rights, like you said. So the idea of uh free exercise of religion, uh, and whether or not you can have your belief system encroached on in this sort of public universal program. And there's some that's something that's been litigated, I won't say to death because I don't think we're quite there yet, but it's it's not the first time we've talked about it. And Colorado is sort of once again at the center of this really big federal constitutional debate over how this thing is going to work to decide where families are allowed to send their kids to preschool. And CAPS has obviously been heavily involved in that. Absolutely. And I I mean, we could talk for way more than 30 minutes just about this one issue, but this is the power of bringing people together, educating operators. There was operators I was finding out there that they didn't even realize what they signed up for. They didn't realize they were giving up their rights uh on some of the things based on the way the state worded that document. Our school that I represent on the on the daily back uh a couple years ago, Day Spring Christian Academy has a preschool. It is our funnel for our entire organization. Without having that preschool full, it will impact the ongoing existence of our school based on the way our model was there. And the first year we did not get to participate because of the concerns that you brought up. Well, guess what happened to my preschool that year? We've we were full every year up until UPK, that next year we were only 50% full. And why? Because people chose free. They saw the free stuff, um, and we were not gonna, we were not gonna do that. And I knew that was an existential threat to our school. And so after lots of talks with attorneys, you, other people, um, we decided to participate in year two, but we were very clear on where we thought this was gonna land. We're kind of walking a tightrope, honestly, um, for our organization. Um, but that is just the power of what the state has done with UPK, um, meaning they created basically a one website funnel. You go to their website, if my name didn't pop up, Day Spring Christian Academy, on their website, guess what? I don't exist to that new parent that's looking for a preschool in my community. And that's almost like a monopolization of the marketing with through the Universal Prequel, which is kind of an interesting way that they did that. Um, but that's the that's I I proved it literally. We had half the enrollment, nothing changed, no staff changes. One year we are at full, next year we're at half. The third year we went back into it, guess what? We were full. And so that just kind of proved out why it's valuable to be part of it, but there's you've got to have your rights protected as well. So that's just a real life on-the-ground example and why we need to make sure that good policy does not uh discriminate against, honestly, religious schools. Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, and I mean that's only one of the things that you're working on. I mean, so you've got that going on, which is a big deal, and then you've also got, as you mentioned earlier, all of this employment stuff, which you know, usually those conversations get sucked into uh big debate over large employers. So, you know, your targets of the world and Walmarts of the world and Boeing and all the really big employers in the state. And that is part of it. But it also what happens very often is that the legislature uh they like to solve problems with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, right? So they'll write legislation that really is not intended to impact small businesses or private schools or anyone else. It's intended to address some big macro problem with these huge corporations out there, uh, but they'll write it too broadly, right? And they'll forget to throw in an exemption or they'll for they'll forget to sort of only apply it to certain types of employers. And then suddenly you have all these smaller employers, which include private schools, who have all of these new restrictions related to uh wages and time off and a million other things that you know are are much harder to absorb as employers at that scale than they would be if you were a really large company. And I think that's one of the big untold stories in all this. Colorado has a lot of debates and a lot of fights over business policy, but often those fights are concentrated on this big macro level, and they don't get down to the level of what that does for these smaller folks, including you all. And I imagine that's probably a pretty big challenge and it's an ongoing one because we do more of this pretty much every year. Absolutely. I'd say two things. One that makes me think of the advocacy of caps and and through through your organization cutting out some of that little bit of bad that can loop in a whole bunch of other unintended consequences. That's the kind of like the nuanced scalpel work that we try to do on the back end um through you know just advocacy efforts. Um however, all those things do add up to the bottom line and the cost of the school. And and most people don't have time if you're running a school to be thinking about that stuff. And that just kind of just happens. And next thing you know, you get a state of Colorado poster that says you need to do X, Y, or Z. And you're like, what? Where did this come from? It used to not be that way. Well, that increment incrementalization of that over the last 15 years, especially, is killing small businesses as a general rule of thumb. Why do we see so many restaurants going out of business? We've got small, we have small private schools going out of business as well. And I could go back to another issue, which is the state regulation of preschools in general. When they made these some of these changes with preschool rules, um, the hardest license I ever had to get for the school was my preschool license. And because no one was even actually employed at the down at the office in Denver, I had to drive down there myself, park myself on the front bench back in 2013 to get my preschool license approved because no one was even doing the work that they were supposed to be doing at the time down there. And I I couldn't operate until I got that preschool license. And so it's thankfully gotten way better since then. But those are the little details that that just that license to operate impacts so many things. And like I told you on the model of our school, my local school, that's our funnel. Without that funnel, I don't have a first grade, I don't have a kindergarten. People don't exist uh in that space. So that's why it's important to pay attention to all these other little details. But honestly, leaders of schools don't have time to do all that because you're doing the other 30 jobs you had, you know, just starting. By noon and things like that. So well, and this is where the association comes in, right? Because any individual private school would probably not have much of a chance to make a difference here. Number one, they're largely outside the political system on purpose, right? Number two, they're usually not very big. Number three, they almost never have any type of political representation or political teeth. They just don't. It's just not part of what they do. They have tight budgets, and being involved at that scale is hard for them. And so an association is able to sort of aggregate all of those voices, pool resources, pull everybody together into a single tent, and then go advocate for these issues that they all care about, which is if that weren't happening, then these folks would just not be at the table. And I think that's true in the private school community. I think it's true in communities all over the state. They don't have a way on an individual basis to actionize this or get involved. They've got to have some sort of a larger entity or organization or movement to get them out there and to be effective in the space. And it's been cool to watch that grow with caps. I think it's growing alongside and in parallel with a whole bunch of other associations. Folks are waking up. We live in a political era where uh it's hard not to pay attention. And frankly, it's becoming increasingly apparent that if you're not going to engage, you are probably going to wind up getting run over by a freight train at some point. And so it's part of this wider movement to take all these disparate folks who on their own are not big and don't have the capacity to do this, but together do have the ability to make a really big impact. And that's pretty cool. And I imagine it's pretty gratifying for you to do as well. Yeah, absolutely. Bringing all these all the players together, because we do have this, we have a very similar mission. We need to exist and we need to fund our organizations, and we want to do it the freedom that drove us to be a private school in the first place. And when you take away that freedom from us and you make us fit back into the public school box, that is why we, that's what we exited for a reason. And so that's why we fight for this stuff. That's why we do that work. Um, and I know, you know, one of the, you know, we were asking earlier a little bit about the different issues that are coming up. We have one that is right hot off the press from the federal level, and that's the federal tax credit scholarship stuff that's gonna impact K-12 schools, um, both public, private, um, and in different things. And that's gonna be coming out in 2027, a federal thing with the tax credit, federal tax credit. But we saw this year, even at the state legislature, how the states trying to get their hooks into that, make some tweaks to it, make some changes that are gonna would drastically impact um that in Colorado. Colorado was the first blue state, quote unquote, to opt in with Governor Polis opting into this. Um I'm happy to see that New York has now also opted in and there might be a few more blue states jumping in. Um that is something at the end of the day would benefit your child, your kids in the school system, regardless of public or private, um, and allow individual donors to fund their private dollars to private education or private dollars to public education at the donor's discretion. That's a huge deal. But even when something good comes down the pike, something that good thing can be hijacked and we could string speak to detach, that would make it bad for private schools. Yeah, that's right. Well, there's no shortage of stuff to work on, right? I mean, you're not gonna get bored anytime soon. And I think that's one of the interesting things is that this stuff is accelerating, not slowing down. And so there's gonna be more and more of a role for the association going forward. So if somebody wanted to learn more about caps or so to support caps, maybe they run a private school, their kids are in private schools, maybe they just have a general interest in education, where would they go and how do they get involved? Yeah, um simply that they could go to our website. Um, you can Google it, it would be ColoradoPrivateschools.org. Um, you can go type that in. Either way, you'll find us there. And there's ways you can get involved, there's ways you can sign up to be a CAPS member school. Um there's we're also looking for funding and donations uh to fund us. I think one thing that only the people on the board know this is simply that our private school dues um rep represent roughly 10 to 20 percent of our overall budget. We rely on funding from grants and other organizations that are interested in this space to support us as we move forward. And so we're thankful to our donor partners, our grant partners out there that have been very successful in helping us grow to the next level. We do have another level coming where we can get more resources on the ground for more advocacy, more education, and more coordination in the state. I I would say we're just on the very front end of what caps could be in Colorado. That's awesome. Well, Wesson, thanks so much for joining us today. Uh, there's a lot more to talk about with all of these individual issues, so we might have you back on to do that at some point. But in the meantime, keep it up, man. I know you're not bored. Nope, not bored. Appreciate your time, Ross. Thank you so much. That'll do it for today's episode of the straight up 30. We'll see you back here next week for another policy issue that matters.