Leaders in Colorado school districts are trying to solve a big problem: They want to attract and retain teachers, bus drivers and other educators, but the state’s high cost of living keeps outpacing employees’ wages even after administrators dole out raises.

So now they’re entering the housing market themselves.

Districts are building tiny homes, becoming landlords and partnering with developers so that they can find ways to either lease housing to their employees at below-market rates or make homeownership possible for workers who otherwise would be priced out of buying property.

School districts in Colorado’s pricey high country are leading such efforts, but at least one metro Denver district — the Douglas County School District — is eyeing a partnership with developers to turn district land into housing for its employees.

Superintendents in Douglas, Summit and Pitkin counties said they are having to jump into the housing market because simply raising salaries no longer works, not when Colorado doesn’t fund K-12 education enough to allow wages to increase at the same rate as housing.

“We’re solving for an issue that is much more systematic,” Summit School District Superintendent Tony Byrd said. “Frankly, the cost of living vs. wages makes it such that if we are going to staff our schools… for many districts we have to jump in and do it.”

Colorado has some of the most expensive noncoastal housing markets in the nation and the state is also short more than 100,000 housing units for its population. The median price of a single-family home sold in metro Denver in October was $649,000 — a 3.8% increase from the year before. The sales price for condos and townhomes was $425,000, up almost 5% from 2022.

Housing costs are even more expensive in the mountains. The median prices of single-family homes in Pitkin and Summit counties in October were $6.9 million and $1.7 million respectively, according to the Colorado Association of Realtors.

Rents also remain high, with median rent in Aspen a whopping $35,000 a month, according to Zillow. In Frisco, the median rent is $5,500 and in Breckenridge it’s about $6,000. By comparison, the median rent in Denver is $2,169, according to Zillow.

Even though school districts have increased employees’ wages in recent years, they have not kept pace with soaring home costs or persistent inflation. Educators have said they are still priced out of buying homes and even renting has become more difficult.

For example, Douglas County voters in November approved a $66 million increase in property taxes that the school district will use to raise salaries, including an average 9.2% raise for licensed employees.

“Even then, our starting salary will be about $50,000 and you just can’t live in Douglas County for $50,000,” Douglas County School District Superintendent Erin Kane said.

So the district is “looking at using some of our district land and partnering with developers to potentially do housing that would be inexpensive for our teachers and staff to access,” she said, adding that the district is still in the very early stages of planning.

“If you can’t provide housing, it’s hard to provide teachers”

The Aspen School District first waded into the housing business in the 1980s. The district now offers more than 100 different subsidized housing units to its employees after voters passed a bond measure two years ago that allowed it to spend about $45 million to add 50 new housing units to its portfolio, Superintendent David Baugh said.

The rental units range from one-bedroom condos to housing units with four to five bedrooms. Rent for the district’s most expensive property, a five-bedroom unit in downtown Aspen that has been fully renovated, is $3,000 a month, Baugh said.

The district tries to keep rent capped at 25% of employees’ salaries and has used the rent revenue to hire a housing manager and to pay for repairs on its units, he said.

If an educator’s employment is terminated, then they have 30 days to leave if they are leasing from the district, according to the Aspen School District’s housing policy.

The district also will soon add a tiny home to its portfolio. High school students in Aspen are building the home, which the district hoped would be ready by Dec. 1.

The house is about 200 square feet and will be rented to an employee at a rate between $600 and $1,200 a month, utilities included, depending on where the district decides to place the home. The tiny home, Baugh said, likely will be best suited for someone in their first year or two of teaching.

“We want to get some feedback from staff members who are living in them before we go too far down this road,” Baugh said. “We don’t see it as a long-term solution.”

The Aspen School District expects that it will need to provide enough housing for all of its more than 270 full-time employees within the next 10 to 15 years, he said.

“Ski towns are going to be unaffordable for people who are making middle-class wages,” Baugh said.

Salaries in the district range from about $50,000 to $100,000. But even someone who makes $100,000 and is married to someone who also makes that much can’t afford to buy a home in Aspen, he said.

If the district didn’t get into the housing business, then class sizes would balloon and bus routes would become longer as staffing shortages would be exacerbated, he said.

“You’ve got mountain commutes, mountain weather and kids whose teachers aren’t living in the community unless you are doing something with housing,” Baugh said, adding, “If you can’t provide housing, it’s hard to provide teachers.”

Likewise, the Summit School District, which has about 600 employees, projects it will need to provide nearly 200 housing units to employees by 2028 and will potentially use land it already owns to meet that goal, Byrd said.

More than half of the future units will be available to employees to rent, while the rest will be for them to own, he said, adding that the district already has two condos that it leases through a lottery.

“We will be moving on the housing front pretty assertively over the next three to five years,” he said.

“An opportunity to attract and retain our educators”

The state’s two largest districts — Denver Public Schools and Jeffco Public Schools — said they are not yet developing housing. But union representatives for both districts said there is a need for solutions as educators are being priced out of homeownership in metro Denver.

Denver Public Schools once considered turning an empty elementary school into rental housing for teachers. But the district abandoned its plans for the old Rosedale Elementary building in 2018 after pushback from the neighborhood.

Teachers also were skeptical of the idea because the plans discussed at the time included making the housing units similar to dorms with shared amenities, said Alex Nelson, a fourth-grade teacher at Bryant-Webster Dual Language School.

Instead of refurbishing old buildings, DPS should look at using the land it has available to create teacher housing, he said.

“People feel a little less like it’s a long-term housing solution and it might be something that just works temporarily,” Nelson said, adding, “If we’re going to do that why don’t we go big and make sure we have new housing for teachers and make sure that land cost is diminished so it can be available at a more affordable rate?”

Jeffco’s teachers union has asked the district to consider using schools that recently were closed because of declining enrollment to create new housing.

“Educators deserve an opportunity to live in a community in which they work,” said Brooke Williams, president of the Jefferson County Education Association. “They deserve to be able to stay in the profession and our students do better when we can retain our educators.”

Jeffco Public Schools voted last year to close 16 elementary schools because of low enrollment. The school board voted earlier this year to close two K-8 schools as well.

Of the schools that already have closed, only three properties so far are considered to be “surplus,” meaning the district has determined that it doesn’t need them anymore. One of those buildings has reverted back to the city of Westminster, which means only two properties are available, district spokeswoman Kimberly Mahugh said.

Other buildings are still getting cleared out and the board has not yet taken steps to declare them to be in “surplus,” she said, adding that the process can take another two to three years.

The district has not yet received any proposals that would turn the two available buildings into some type of housing, she said.

Williams said the union mostly wants the empty school buildings to continue to serve the community even if they aren’t turned into housing. But she also said she wants to explore other opportunities, such as building homes on district land.

However, Williams also said she’s leery of districts becoming employees’ landlords, because if an educator’s contract isn’t renewed it would mean they lose both their job and their home. A rent-to-own solution would be a great option for school districts, she said.

“I don’t want it to be an excuse not to pay our educators,” she said. “I want it to be an opportunity to attract and retain our educators.”

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