Telluride Education Foundation grants save imperiled school services
Funding ensures literacy and behavioral health supports for students in the face of cuts
By Erin Spillane Planet Contribuor – Aug 9, 2025
In recent months, the Telluride School District (TSD) faced funding cuts to literacy and behavioral health services for students.
“We lost federal and state grant funding for behavioral health,” said the school district’s superintendent, John Pandolfo. “Additionally, a four-year state literacy grant that funded the coordinator position expires this Sept. 30 and our application for the new grant cycle was denied, so we lost all that funding.”
Pandolfo explained that the literacy grant funded a coordinator, professional development and materials, while among the imperiled behavioral health services, students would have lost access to direct mental health therapeutic support.
Enter the Telluride Education Foundation (TEF).
TEF, an all-volunteer nonprofit that raises money to support Telluride’s public schools, was able to provide $100,000 in grant funding that will enable the school district to retain these services.
“It’s the first time we have been able to provide an amount like that,” said Hannah Richman, the foundation’s board president.
Richman explained that when TEF heard of the cut in behavioral health funding, it approached Pandolfo about providing the district with a grant of $50,000.
“We asked John if it would help and he said, ‘absolutely,’ ” Richman said.
It wasn’t long before TEF became aware that literacy services were also in jeopardy.
“We were in a position to offer another $50,000 grant, this one to support the literacy coordinator position,” Richman said.
Pandolfo agreed that the TEF funding saved both literacy and behavioral health services for TSD students.
“Without the TEF grant (for literacy services), we likely would have had to cut the literacy coordinator position,” he said. “We had reduced the two behavioral health services positions from two full-time positions to two half-time positions. The (behavioral health) grant allowed us to bring them up to two 0.75 positions.”
The TEF funding was perfectly timed, Pandolfo noted, pointing to a recent tightening of education funding, federal and state.
The State of Colorado, for instance, has changed the funding formula that determines the amount of money it allocates to each school district.
This change “really calls for a long-term negative impact to our funding specifically,” Pandolfo said.
Pandolfo also referred to recent “craziness” at the federal level.
Earlier this summer, the Trump administration announced it was freezing federal grant funding for the upcoming school year — funding that been approved by Congress and which Trump himself had signed into law in the spring.
The announcement took place just hours before funds were due to be dispersed on July 1.
After bipartisan outcry, the administration reversed course, announcing on July 25 that the Department of Education would, after all, release more than $5 billion.
Pandolfo confirmed that the TSD’s share of that grant funding is relatively small, a little more than $36,000.
He added, however, that the freezing of that federal money had the potential to raise some knotty legal issues for the school district.
