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 bar 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 in context, concluding that treating it as a mandatory prerequisite would undermine the Act's purposes of flexibility and local autonomy and produce an illogical statutory scheme. The court therefore reversed the judgment concerning all eleven schools and remanded for further proceedings. Justice Eid concurred in the judgment on the narrower ground that the statute requires no teacher consent when a new school has no teachers, while Justice Gabriel, joined by Justices Márquez and Hood, would have required pre-submission teacher and school-accountability-committee consent.