In fairness, this is not a site built entirely on fabrication. Several of its central facts are accurate and independently corroborated. Each item below links to the record that proves it.
What would 5A and 5B cost you?
The district estimates the two measures together at $3.50 a month, or $42 a year, for every $100,000 of your home's actual value. Slide to your home's value for an estimate.
Rate source: Colorado Community Media: What Jeffco's ballot ask means for your tax bill and the district's own 2026 MLO page. For a $650,000 home, the county's median, that works out to about $273 a year.
- Confirmed The ballot measures and dollar amounts are accurate: a $73M override (5A) and a $60M special mill (5B), estimated at $3.50 a month per $100,000 of home value, matching the site's $42-a-year figure. (Chalkbeat, Colorado Community Media)
- Confirmed The 5A pay share, about $55M, matches $15M for already-promised raises plus $39.5M for future raises, per the district's own board presentation. (Jeffco Transcript: Jeffco educators tied their next raise to the ballot)
- Confirmed The four staff misconduct cases are real. Martinez, Castro, Chevrier, and Illanes (40 felony counts of sexual exploitation of a child) are all documented, as is Castro's 20-to-life intensive supervision probation. See Martinez, Chevrier, and Illanes for the misleading framing applied to several of these. (First Judicial DA: Castro sentencing, 9News: 40 felony counts filed against Illanes)
- Confirmed Cherry Creek does cap experience credit for new hires at six years, except in hard-to-fill positions. (Cherry Creek Schools: Certified placement)
- Confirmed The 1999 performance levy existed, though the math describing it is distorted. Full disclosure: the only readily available record of that levy is Coyne's own account, and its existence is not in dispute. See The 1999 Levy Math.
- Confirmed The capital program's budget problems are real, and they held to the end. Moss Adams found 89.3% of school-site budgets exceeded the voters' 2018 Flipbook figures by mid-2021, and our join of the district's published final costs to those same Flipbook budgets shows 89.1% of matched sites ended over, 63.8% by more than $500,000. See "89% over budget" and What the Program Finally Cost. (Moss Adams final report, Colorado Community Media: The numbers)
- Confirmed The 2018 bond's required annual independent audit never happened. This is no longer just plausible: the district's own commissioned evaluation states that the district "has not required the completion of an annual independent financial audit of the Bond Program, which contradicts the requirements set forth in the bond language." See The 2021 Recommendations. (Moss Adams final report, Observation 3)
- Confirmed The change-order and administrative-cost figures are district-record numbers, not inventions: of 921 change orders in the district's own report, 527 carried no stated reason (Observation 14), and roughly $5.0 million in administrative costs was allocated to the bond with no board-approved policy defining what was allowable (Observation 2). (Moss Adams final report, Observations 2 and 14)
- Confirmed The core accountability grievance is real, and it is bigger than the site's own framing. The 2018 5A ballot language promised a "Citizens' Financial Oversight Advisory Committee" to review how the $33M-a-year override was spent. The district never created it, and by its own admission "lost track" of the promise while collecting roughly a quarter-billion dollars in override taxes. A replacement oversight committee was convened only in spring 2026, after press coverage. And when the board referred the 2026 measures, which promise a new citizens' accountability committee, board President Michelle Applegate said of that oversight plan, per the Golden Transcript: "There's no plan as of yet." (Canyon Courier: Jeffco "lost track" of $33 million promise to voters, Chalkbeat: 2018 oversight promises "never kept", Golden Transcript: the 2026 oversight plan)
A correction on our part: an earlier draft of this page repeated a claim that "a separate critic's site" estimated the program at $715 million against a $563 million budget. On review, that estimate traces back to another of Coyne's own articles, not an independent critic, so we have replaced it with the independently reported figures above.