The Budget
A staffing-cost model built bottom-up from BVSD's actual negotiated salary schedules and published per-pupil spending — not a placeholder, but not final either. One number in here only BVSD's Business Office can give us, and we say exactly which one.
This is a real model, not a guess: every rate below traces to a public BVSD document or state statute. It is not a certified budget — that requires BVSD Business Services and a real per-pupil allocation formula we don't have access to. What we've done instead: built the expense side (staffing) bottom-up from BVSD's own 2026–27 negotiated salary schedules, and shown it against BVSD's own published per-pupil spending as a sanity check — rather than leave the whole thing marked "TBD."
Public data, not assumptions
BVSD is unusually locally-funded: 84% of its $636.66M in annual revenue comes from local property tax (program mills, mill levy overrides, and bond redemption mills combined), versus 12% state and 3% federal — a real structural fact worth knowing before assuming state formula numbers alone predict what BVSD can spend.
27 FTE at full scale (~350 students, year four)
Every base salary below is either a specific point on BVSD's real 2026–27 negotiated schedules (sourced) or an explicit, labeled assumption (assumed) where no BVSD schedule exists yet for a role — "guide" isn't a current BVSD job classification, and a founding administrator's exact pay isn't public. Fully-loaded cost applies a 28% benefits load: Colorado PERA's statutory 20.15% employer contribution, plus an estimated 8% for health insurance and other benefits.
| Role | Count | Base | Loaded (×1.28) | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subject-area teacher BVEA, Step F / MA | 11 | $78,126 | $100,000 | $1,100,000 |
| Guide / facilitator BVEOP-analog, prorated | 7 | $60,068 | $77,000 | $539,000 |
| Special education case manager BVEA + stipend | 2 | $81,126 | $104,000 | $208,000 |
| ELL / CLDE endorsed BVEA + stipend | 1 | $81,126 | $104,000 | $104,000 |
| Counselor BVEA-equivalent | 2 | $81,126 | $104,000 | $208,000 |
| Electives specialist BVEA, Step F / MA | 3 | $78,126 | $100,000 | $300,000 |
| Founding principal / director estimated, not BVSD-sourced | 1 | $135,000 | $173,000 | $173,000 |
| Total — 27 FTE | $2,632,000 |
That's roughly $7,520 per pupil at full scale (350 students) — a real, defensible number, but not directly comparable to BVSD's $20,532 district-wide figure, since that total includes central administration, transportation, food service, and debt-service-adjacent costs a single school doesn't carry on its own site budget. The right comparison is BVSD's school-level per-pupil allocation, which is the number we're asking Business Services for.
Two places real cost is more likely to run higher than this estimate, not lower: every core and elective teacher is priced at the identical Step F/MA point rather than a distribution across the schedule, and a founding staff recruited for an unusual, labor-intensive model plausibly skews toward more experienced hires than that baseline assumes. And the 8% non-PERA benefits estimate is a placeholder for health insurance broadly — it isn't itemized against Medicare match, workers' comp, or unemployment insurance, which typically push a real loaded-compensation figure a few points higher. Read $2,632,000 / $7,520 per pupil as a floor, not a ceiling.
Two real avoided costs
- No new construction. Mesa's building is already built, already staffed by BVSD facilities, and already carries its own maintenance budget as district property — reusing it avoids the capital cost that a from-scratch program would otherwise need.
- No commercial platform license. Adaptive-learning platforms are typically licensed per student per year; building the Mastery Studio software in-house avoids that recurring fee entirely, though it does mean carrying our own engineering cost instead — a tradeoff, not a free win, and one we're not pretending otherwise.
One number matters most, but it isn't the only open question
This model answers "what would staffing cost?" It doesn't answer "what would BVSD actually allocate to this school?" — that requires BVSD's school-level per-pupil funding formula, which determines how much of the district's total per-pupil resources follow an individual student to their school versus staying centralized for shared services. That number is the single most important open question in this entire proposal, and it's explicitly why the board memo asks for a meeting with Choice & Innovation staff rather than presenting this as a finished budget.
Three more things this budget doesn't try to paper over:
- Special education beyond two case managers. At typical incidence rates, a 350-student open-enrollment school will likely have students needing related services (speech, OT/PT), paraprofessional support, or a more restrictive placement than this model can offer on-site — none of which has a line item here yet.
- Transportation. A genuinely district-wide open-enrollment lottery school implies families well beyond walking or short-drive distance of Mesa. Whether BVSD would bus to a single site, the way it does for other choice programs, is unresolved.
- Facility retrofit for a 6–12 program in a K–5 building. The "no new construction" savings above assumes minimal adaptation; a real feasibility review may find otherwise.
Where every number above came from
- Colorado Department of Education, Financial Transparency — Boulder Valley Re 2 (per-pupil expenditure, FY24–25)
- Colorado General Assembly, SB26-023, the 2026 School Finance Act (statewide base per-pupil funding)
- BVSD Human Resources, Negotiated Agreements & Salary Schedules — 2026–27 BVEA Salary Schedule and 2026–27 BVEOP Salary Schedule
- Colorado PERA, Employer Contribution Rates (School Division)