As anticipated, bipartisan legislation has resurfaced to spread education dollars around a little more uniformly between traditional neighborhood schools and Colorado’s proliferating charter schools. A similar effort failed in the legislature last year.

Senate Bill 61, introduced in the upper chamber Friday just before the long holiday weekend, would require a school district to distribute revenue it receives from “local property tax mill levies equally, on a per-student basis, to the school district charter schools.” Currently, local school boards decide how to divvy up those tax dollars.

Charter supporters say the autonomous public schools are being shortchanged in many school districts. According to the Colorado League of Charter Schools, only 11 of the state’s 178 districts equitably share revenue from voter-approved property-tax increases with charters, which receive state funding but are run outside of the traditional school district system.

Cash-strapped school districts – many, though not all, lobbied against last year’s version of the bill – say they need to be able to control their own purse strings because they know best how to equitably apportion limited revenue among the schools they must fund.

Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, and the Douglas County School District are among those that currently split their property-tax-hike proceeds evenly with charters. They supported last year’s bill.

On Tuesday, the state’s largest teachers union weighed in once again in opposition to the proposal. The Colorado Education Association, long a critic of charter schools and a legislative obstacle to their expansion, released a public statement contending in part:

…Senate Bill 17-061 would force districts to hand over money raised in local mill levy elections to charter schools with little oversight that those funds would be used as the voters intended. SB-61 would further take away millions of dollars from schools that stretch every penny of local mill levy funding and throw district budgets into turmoil at a time of chronic underfunding for all Colorado public schools.

“SB-61 is a direct attack on a community’s power to raise and spend money for its students as the people desire. The lack of accountability in this bill fails taxpayers and parents, but most importantly, fails more than 750,000 students who attend traditional schools,” said Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association. “Legislators who agree that local residents know the needs of their students and can make the best decisions for their kids will vote against this harmful legislation.”

The public statement reiterated the basic premise of the union’s opposition:

Dallman agrees all students should have access to a high quality education, no matter the ZIP code in which they live. She observes all students are getting shortchanged on school funding, not just those attending charters.

Charter-school politics are complicated in the legislature. Though the union and other charter-school adversaries command the allegiance of many Democrats, some members of the party’s education-reform wing back the proposed policy change. One of them, state Sen. Angela Williams, of Denver, is one of SB 61’s two prime sponsors. The other prime sponsor is Republican Senate Education Committee Chair Owen Hill, of Colorado Springs.

Charters – first made possible in Colorado under legislation signed into law in 1992 – have caught on with a lot of parents. The programs have leeway over curriculum and teacher recruitment not found at neighborhood schools. As of the 2015-16 school year, there were 226 charter schools in Colorado serving over 108,000, according to the league.

Battle lines are drawn. Let the head-butting begin.