City and County of Denver School District No. 1 in the State of Colorado and City and County of Denver School…

Summary

The court held that the Innovation Schools Act does not prevent a local school board from approving an innovation plan for a new school that has not previously operated as a non-innovation school and has not yet hired teachers. It construed the teacher-consent provision as directory and inapplicable to such schools because reading it as a prerequisite would undermine the Act’s purposes of flexibility, autonomy, and innovation and produce illogical results. Justice Eid, concurring in the judgment, would have reached the same result on the narrower ground that a school with no teachers satisfies the provision with zero consenting teachers; Justice Gabriel, dissenting, would have required pre-submission teacher and school-accountability-committee consent.