Photo: Archuleta School District Superintendent Rick Holt speaks to the Master Plan Advisory Committee and School Board on November 17, 2025, about plans to apply for a state of Colorado BEST grant.
The Colorado Department of Education BEST grant program (“Building Excellent Schools Today”) has released its list of projects recommended for grant funding during the 2026-2027 fiscal year. The BEST committee recommended spending about $173 million on school renovations, upgrades and replacement projects. The 17 school districts on the list would need to match their grant with between $104,000 and $13 million in local funding — in some cases, with voter approved bon issues.
The analysis, announced yesterday, placed Archuleta County School district’s proposed $126 million PreK-8 facility at Number 18, the top project on the waitlist — to be granted funding (potentially?) “in the event an awarded project fails to secure matching funds.”
Grants for two of the awarded projects are contingent on local voters approving bond issues in the coming November 2026 election.
From the BEST website:
On May 21, 2026 the Capital Construction Assistance Board Voted to approve its FY2026-27 prioritized list of projects to receive financial assistance. The list of recommended grants will be presented to the State Board of Education for review and approval during their June meeting.
You can download the List of Recommended Projects here.
The most recent large facility project built by the Archuleta School District (ASD) was the Pagosa Springs High School, constructed in 1997 for about $12 million, a decade before the creation of the BEST program. That project was funded through voter-approved bonds that have now been paid off, at a total cost — including interest payments to bond holders — of about $26 million.
ASD has been tentatively planning to ask the voters to approve, this coming November, about $75.7 million in property-tax-funded bonding, to match a requested BEST grant of about $50.5 million. If the BEST grant were approved.
Now that ASD has been waitlisted, the Board of Education will need to decide whether — and how — to approach the voters. They could potentially ask the voters to ‘pre-approve’ a $76 million bond contingent on moving off the waitlist or on getting BEST funding in a future fiscal year.
The Board could also decide to simply renovate and upgrade its existing buildings, at a much lower cost to the community.