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My guest for today's conversation was Bob Schaefer, headmaster of the Liberty Commons School in Fort Collins and chairman of leadership program of the Rockies. Bob presented to my Rotary Club a couple months back and was kind enough to share time with me on the Loco Experience podcast. Long before his focus on education, because he yet had no children, Bob got into politics, mostly as a writer.
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His first real job was an intern slash speechwriter for the Republican caucus in Ohio, and he was good at it, and it translated well to a similar role for the then-majority Republican Party in Colorado when he and his wife moved here. One thing we agree on is that writing is thinking, and Bob's good at both, which is why he was appointed at the age of 25 to finish a departing state senator's term,
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the youngest in Colorado history to serve in the role. And it's also why, after his own little started arriving, that he turned his focus toward education, first in the Colorado Senate, then in the US House of Representatives. And that's where Wikipedia notes he also sponsored a balanced budget resolution and amendment to the Constitution, which unfortunately for all of us was unsuccessful. But since our country is broke, we're gonna need smart kids to dig us out. And that's where Liberty Common School comes in.
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Bob shares widely about how they're different and why, and how everyday moms and dads and grandparents can be involved in their children's education. Bob's the kind of guy I could enjoy a six hour conversation with, so consider this hopefully a part one, and please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Bob Schaefer. Welcome to the Loco Experience Podcast. On this show, you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, and through it all, you'll be inspired and entertained.
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These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Okay.
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Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. My guest today is Bob Schaefer. Bob is the headmaster of the Liberty Commons School. He's also the chairman of the leadership program of the Rockies, devoted husband and father, and my latest guest on the Loco Experience Podcast. Well, thanks for having me. I got to say, you came in saying that you had checked out a couple of my previous podcasts before coming in. So I really appreciate that. Sometimes people come in cold and...
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Curious about the setup and how you do. Did you enjoy either of them more than the others, or who were the guests that you tuned in for? I knew you were going to ask me now who I watched. I don't recall. Nobody you knew before. Sorry about that, but I was more interested in the setup and what exactly you do here.
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Yeah, I'd like to say in the podcast world, there's a couple of pretty famous podcasts. How I Built This is an NPR podcast. They interview big tycoons and such. And then the Joe Rogan experience is kind of a wide-ranging comedian conversation and whatever. So I kind of hybridize that, plus a northern Colorado audience. Right, good. So life and business journey, plus we might chase squirrels for 25 minutes. OK. Get you in all kinds of trouble.
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You have the board at Liberty Common being like, Bob, can't be saying those kind of things. We'll see. I doubt it. I doubt it. So I guess let's just set the stage a little bit for listeners that, especially if you're not in northern Colorado or adjacent, tell me about Liberty Common School. I was surprised how much it had grown and how many campuses are going on and stuff now.
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Yeah. Well, Liberty Common School is one of the first charter schools in the state. It's not the first, but it was in that first wave of charter schools way back in the 1990s. So 1997 is when we applied for our charter, had it approved. And the...
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Colorado Charter School Act passed the legislature and became law in 1994. So there were some initial charters that were initiated right away. And we were in that wave of early charter schools. For Liberty, it was a two-year, two-cycle process.
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The first charter effort in 1996 was defeated. Well, there was a lot of school district opposition, right? It was enormous back in those days. Well, there was some – way back then, the whole idea of charter schools was new, but
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I was a state senator in those days and was one of the sponsors of the Charter School Act. And Colorado was the third state in the country to adopt charter schools. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So when we proposed, I did that as a legislator. But in the meantime, my wife and I were parents of three kids and interested in high quality education here in northern Colorado. We live in the Poudre School District and always have.
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And so just the idea of a charter school was brand new. Nobody had heard of it. There was a lot of fear associated with charter schools. And it was just a different age. Now there's more comfort with them. Somewhere around it's approaching 20% of Colorado school children are educated in charter schools. So there's no mystery behind them anymore. All of the fears about...
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Yeah, all kind of bizarre things that we had to deal with. The kids didn't all get up on cocaine or anything like that. So what was the fears around? Just like they would put too much pressure on the regular schools kind of thing? Well, there is a competitive fear. Well, that's what I like. Yeah.
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Yeah, the competition was new. Public schools are still, even to this day, substantially government-owned, unionized, bureaucratized monopolies. And heavily subsidized in comparison. And it was even more the case where your zip code or your address was the determinant of what school you were going to receive.
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Those days are long gone, and I credit charter schools with changing the dynamics of public education in Colorado. Even that school choice element and stuff like that is driven by that. Yeah, intra-district choice, intra-district choice were things that were not heard of before the charter school movement came along. But once charters did, then those sorts of options within an education marketplace became a little broader and more.
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We moved what is called the Overton window, where something that seemed pretty radical now is very mainstream. So, all right, all that to say, way back then, the opposition was just the existence of competition. There were some other things that seemed odd and strange. One was, for example, under the Charter School Act, charter schools are not obligated to...
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to limit their hiring pool just to licensed teachers. So that scared many people. Oh, so quality concern, I suppose. Yeah, because many people think that license has something to do with quality, and that's just not true. Can we go back one step? Sure. What's that base difference between a charter school and a traditional public school? Sure.
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Well, a charter school is a public school. That's the first thing. But it is a public school that is one step removed from direct control by a local school board. There is some control by a local school board and by the state, where charter schools are still obligated under state law to meet certain expectations and have some testing, for example. But if you want to have a thematic one or like, I remember that –
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Polaris Expeditionary School was a charter school, right? Because it had a special intentional focus on adventurous things or whatever. Right. So the management of the school itself becomes local. Like a spin-off, almost. Which we call site-based management. Okay. The board...
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So whereas a headmaster or – they don't call them that – but a principal of a regular public school is under the jurisdiction of the superintendent and the local school board, my boss is seven parents who serve on the Liberty Common School board. Yeah. And so there's – it is local control, localized control, site-based management in that regard. Yeah.
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But along with that, we have flexibility in who we can hire, the terms under which we hire them. We're not unionized, for example, so we can hire each employee based on their contribution to the organization. And fire them without an act of Congress. We are all hired at will, meaning if our board doesn't even need a strong reason. I've heard horror stories about teachers being terrible, and it's just too hard to fire them so you promote them to admin or something.
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I brought a flow chart on how hard it is to remove a teacher from a regular public school who is... Now, if they're dangerous, I don't want to scare anybody. If they're dangerous, if they are doing inappropriate things, personal relationships with the students, even a regular public school can remove that individual right away.
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But if you have a teacher who is, let's just say a science teacher who turns out to be mediocre at teaching science, it's really, really difficult in regular public education to move that person out of the classroom. And you can't do it quickly, that's for sure. So it's just a lot more localized control. In my school, we can do it more quickly. Now, we don't race to go fire people at my school. Our teachers stick around for a long time.
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And so retention for us is something we can be really proud of. However, it has occurred in my 16 years since I've been working there that we brought somebody in to be a teacher that wasn't meeting the high expectations that we have. And so we coach and we try to assist and we try to guide them towards success. But in a few occasions, it has not worked out. And so we either get...
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to the middle of the year or sometimes just middle of the week. And we just decide, uh, today's your last day. And we're sorry, we've done all the things that we should be doing to, yeah, for prudent coaching. It didn't work out. So today's your last day. Yeah. Trying to really eliminate the bureaucracy of education as best you can is what I think I'm, is it the core thing I'm hearing? Now, if I did that willy nilly and for light and transient causes, nobody would want to work there anymore, but we don't, we do that for reasonable purposes.
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for proper reasons. And then our board wants to, my board has questions about those things. Why did you get rid of Mrs. Jones? And what were the circumstances? And so on. And if I don't have a good answer, well, then they'll fire me. Sure. Not to interject, but I came to Fort Collins actually working for a bank organization called Community First National Bank. And they eventually grew up to somewhere around 130 banks
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buying banks that the big U.S. banks and stuff like that, First Bank, didn't want. And then they set up little systems where there was a decent amount of management just vested in the local branch, and then they would bind together four to six regional branches and then give them a lot more lending authority and really outsource a lot of the decision-making on how to run the bank, because it's different to run a bank in Fargo than it is in western Nebraska than it is in Iowa. Right.
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And so they really had that same kind of mentality and a certain significant portion of their budget for community engagement, sponsoring the school sports teams and doing stuff like that and really being a community citizen of sorts. Of course. Rather than just, you know, Wells Fargo, 1-800, here's your banker. And so what you're talking about is kind of the same kind of elimination of bureaucracy from letting the local people on the ground make more decisions.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, so, all right, personnel is one thing. The other is the pay scale. So let's face it, hiring a really good physics instructor...
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In any state for high school is very difficult. Okay. If you aspire to- If you want a mediocre physical instructor, then that's easier. Well, I'm just thinking about it. If you aspire to achieve a physics degree, you're probably a pretty smart person whose value out in the marketplace is much higher than what a public school will pay.
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In a general public school setting, that physics teacher in year one coming out of college, let's say, will get paid the same amount of money based on their lane and their steps, as they're called, the number of years that they've been in the district and their degree.
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as let's say a third or fourth grade teacher. Now they're valuable too, but the value is different. Well, the specialization of skill. Well, and they're rare. The physics instructor. Yeah. So if, if scarcity is a reality about a certain, certain skill set, um,
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Well, that professional employee ought to be able to command more in a legitimate marketplace. And at my school, that's true. We wheel and deal with new teachers or teachers who have taught somewhere else until we arrive at a handshake agreement where they win and we win and in the door they come. And that dollar amount is going to be different than someone else.
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Do you have to pay less for your third and fourth grade teachers then to balance it on the overall, or there's just less administrators in your system? No, it's a K through 12 school, and so the distinction is not really a function of grade level. Now, it's true. A physics instructor, a very good physics instructor, a chemistry instructor is harder to find.
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We – just depending on the experience at that point in time, I mean, look, if I've got 10 applicants who want to teach high school chemistry, then I'm not going to pay top dollar. Right, right. I'm going to pay a lot. I'm going to pay a reasonable amount to get a very good chemistry instructor, but I'm not beholden to a marketplace of scarcity. You don't have that one unicorn you need to hire. Yeah. And so –
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So it is probably fair to say when it comes to elementary instructors, I can find more of them. Now, I want the highest quality I can find. So if in the interview process we find a teacher that has a third grade, fourth grade teacher that...
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meets a certain set of needs that we have, whether it's leadership, whether it's special education applications, whether it is just really dialing in the curriculum that we utilize, the core knowledge sequence, yeah, we'll pay premium dollar for that instructor.
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Now, time matters for us, too. There are those who have taught a lot out in public education. And we do place a higher value on instructors that have taught for a number of years in our school, our curriculum, in our setting. And we have a pay-for-performance plan. So, yeah.
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In a nutshell. Like if the kids get better grades. Those who are new. No, it's not a function of grades. Okay.
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It'd be easy to crank the grades up a little bit. Well, that's another difference between us and regular public schools. There's a state law that requires a teacher evaluation in regular public schools to be a factor of a child's performance on state standardized scores. We think that's malpractice, frankly. And so we have other metrics that we use and state standardized scores we look at, but we don't teach to those state standards. We teach to a...
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a different curriculum, hence another advantage of charter schools. So, all right, getting back, getting back to this, if you're in the school for a number of years and you keep adding value and adding value that gets rewarded. And everyone in our organization knows that. So a very good teacher at Liberty common school makes more than they would in almost any other public school setting anywhere, newer teachers, new,
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Not yet. Yeah. They know that there's a trajectory. They know it's for real. They know they want to be there. And they're in an environment where they see after – sometimes it takes a year or two to prove that to a new teacher. Sure. That, no, value added is rewarded here. And then once –
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You build that culture. I got to tell you, people get into it. They love it. They are motivated by it. They want to get their kids in that school. And they stay for a long time. How do you know how much value people are adding? Is it like creating new curricula content? Is it like just having the kids at the end of the year say, Mrs. Schaefer or Mrs. Smith was the best teacher ever? How do you actually gather that data? No, the opinions of the kids...
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That's, it's interesting. And I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it is not the, it's not the, the essence of the metrics that we use. The nice lady that doesn't teach them anything doesn't really qualify. And, um,
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So it, it, uh, all right. So the, um, how do you know? Well, it's, it, it is, it is a moving target in a moving mark in a dynamic marketplace. Let's say the amount of funds we receive from the state, cause we're a, we're a public school. Sure. Um, the per pupil operating revenue changes. For example, we're, we're receiving somewhere between three and 4% increase year over year.
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in total funding. Sure. So there's some reasonable, rational constraints on what we have to work with within a year. Yeah, your gross budget is the budget and stuff. And to the extent that everyone in the school understands that, nobody's expecting gigantic pay raises year to year. However, some are going to receive 7% pay raises and some are going to receive maybe one. And that's going to get redistributed. But how do you know who's doing a really good job and who's not? Sure. It's an elaborate... Okay. It's a very elaborate...
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set of data points that we collect in informal and formal evaluations. Now, I say test score, we don't predicate someone's pay or their evaluation on test scores, but we do predicate it on their ability to utilize test scores. So we have to take the state exam, the CMASS test,
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We take a glance at it. We don't teach to the state standards. We teach to the core knowledge curriculum, K-8, and a college preparatory classically oriented curriculum that continues on through high school. So the curriculum is not as impacted by the testing as...
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The state testing. Now we do use another different metrics. We use and it's called the NWEA test that aligns more closely with our core knowledge curriculum for juniors and at the high school level.
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All juniors in the state of Colorado take the SAT. That's a pretty good predictor of college success, which is what it's designed to be. But we also take the classical learning exam, a classic learning exam, CLE, which we take both. And so we have a number, and there's just their preparation to be ready to go to college.
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So we look at all of those metrics. The standard of measure of sorts is how well are you preparing kids to go enter the world more? Well, at our school. Into the world, for us, it's, yes, into the world. But we are distinctly a college preparatory institution. Yeah, gotcha.
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And to the extent we have a college target, it is selective university. So it's a high level that we are aimed at. And so we can see year over year, students in the English department are how well prepared they are on that particular battery of subject matter in their college pursuits. And whether history, math, English, science, foreign language, we're able to –
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assess college preparation on a departmental level. And then within the department, we can see. So that's one of those measures that you can measure teachers by. Yes. I'm going to pull this even back up to a higher view. How many, as you said, all the way K through 12. Right. How many students? How many campuses? Is it just Larimer County that you're serving? So any campus?
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Any child of a Colorado resident is eligible to attend Liberty Commons School. So they can be in another county. They can be in another school district. We give enrollment priority to those who live in our constituents in our Poudre School District. Okay. Because we're a Poudre School District school. So therefore, we have an obligation to serve Poudre School District students first. Yep. And if there is an opening after we've exhausted that part of the lottery, then students from –
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Other districts can come into the school. So that happens sometimes. It's happening with greater frequency just because of, from a demographic standpoint, what's called the big shrink up and down the front range and throughout the country. And that is the birth rate has dropped years ago. And so that cohort is getting smaller.
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Yeah. I just wrote about that last month in my blog about the best thing you can do for the northern Colorado workforce is make more babies because we're not importing them like we used to. That's exactly right. We try to speak that suggestion over the children to the parents. We don't want our high school juniors and seniors thinking that that applies to them. After college.
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Yeah. And due time. They get that message. But, um, but so we, uh, there, there is a lottery. You go to our website and, uh, you can, there's an enrollment button. And so you have to get on a lottery first. We draw down the lottery and it is a lottery. So it's, you could get on the lottery tomorrow. You could get on the lottery years ago. It doesn't matter when we get to the certain part in the year, when we draw down our lottery, it really is a legitimate lottery. And, um,
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And then it's like you're qualified or you're not qualified. Well, there's no qualification. Really? There's no entrance exam or anything like that. Once you're in, we test a student to ensure that the curriculum we offer is going to match that child's readiness.
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If they're behind in one subject matter or another, then we will make some accommodations to close those gaps as quickly as we can. If they're behind in more than a couple, then we might have a conversation about the wisdom of repeating a grade. Parents don't try to send their kids necessarily like, my kid's really struggling. I'm going to go ahead and send them to the really college preparatory community.
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Oh, no, they do. They do? Yeah. Okay, so you get the rehab projects as well as the smart kids that are looking for a little more challenge. Some would call them that. You wouldn't use that terminology, but that's what I said, not you. Yeah, I would say they might have just been in a school that was a mismatch for what those parents' expectations was. And so, yeah, we get a lot of families who get to some point of realizing that their children are in a place they did not anticipate.
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It's sometimes behind. Yeah. And they come to Liberty because they know, frankly, we're very, very good at closing those achievement gaps very quickly. That's cool. Sorry to tease you on that a little bit. The projects. Well, so I had my former marriage counselor on years ago. And I asked him, what are your favorite kind of clients to work with? And whatever. He's like, well, people that are actually motivated to change. I'm like, oh.
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Well, duh. Like, who doesn't want? You know, and so same for you. It's like, hey, we want those really super. But it's cool that you – I didn't realize that it was not a competitive thing to get in. It's really just a lottery, and then you do your best that you can with them. Yeah, we do the assessments after they're already in the school. And as I say, then we make sure that we manage –
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their curricular goals in a way that is going to give them the greatest chance of success, grade level to grade level. I have a story I need to share with you, just in light of our meeting at the Rotary Club and your talk there. But I met with a gal recently, and she has a fractional HR consulting business here in town.
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And she and her husband moved here about eight months ago with their two kids. And I asked her, you know, up from Centennial. They lived in Centennial area, Denver Metro. I was like, you know, what brought you up here anyway? And she said, well, our oldest daughter got into Ridgeview Classical School. Oh, good. So we had to move up. And I was like, oh, that's...
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That's a cool story. That is a great story. Well, we're big fans of – I'm a big fan of Ridgeview. Right. You guys are budsies, right? Well, we helped start Ridgeview. As I thought, yeah. And so we – you'd say friendly competitors. I'd call us sibling rivals because there was a point in around 2000 – yeah, it was around 2000 –
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Liberty's waiting list was just enormous and continued to grow, and many families just wanted us to make Liberty bigger. And we said, actually, what we ought to do is organize and make another school like Liberty. And that became Ridgeview. And what was better about Ridgeview was...
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in those days was that they added high school and Liberty didn't have one. Right from the start. Yeah. Liberty was only kindergarten through ninth grade up until 2010. And Ridgeview was a K-12 school. It phased into a K-12 school, but it was a K-12 design from the outset. My son's a Ridgeview grad. Oh, is that right? Yeah. And so, as I say, we're sibling rivals. We're both core knowledge schools.
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both classically oriented. We're not identical, but we're siblings. And I'm proud of that. And so it's nice. So when you say somebody got into Ridgeview, I cheer about that. That was my heart. Well, I'm proud of her, frankly, and her husband for making decisions like that, like focusing a move of your whole family based on kind of this school system. And I'm sure you've heard the same story as parents at Liberty Common. People have chosen...
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in Colorado to get their kids into Liberty or Ridgeview sometimes. So set the stage. So now you are K-12. Yes. And I don't want to go through the whole life journey, but what's, I guess, what's the current, how many campuses? So we're on four campuses now. We've got...
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We're coming up on 1,700 kids that we serve in the school. And it's expanding. We expanded four years ago at the elementary grades. That's where we had the biggest waiting list. Expanding was not our mission and not our goal. However, there was a school, Colorado Early Colleges, that had a building.
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On the southwest part of town, Taft Hill and Horsetooth. How familiar. And they called one day and said, you know, we're looking at possibly selling this building. And so every project we've ever done involved converting a building into the school we needed.
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the physical layout. But that facility was ready-made. Already made for a school. So we knew, all right, we could serve. One, we had a lot of families on the southwest part of the city that were driving across town, so we don't have a bus service. Sure. And so they were carpooling from over there, and so we could bring the school to a place that was a little more convenient for them. So that's your fourth campus there? That's the third campus. Third, okay.
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But the thing that really attracted us was the neighborhood. There is one of the largest trailer parks in northern Colorado right across the street. One of the criticisms we hear unfairly, unfair criticisms, is that somehow our school is only for elite families. Well, there is no bus service, so you've got to be able to carpool. So there is some self-selection there, and it does preclude some families from attending the school. But moving our school across the street,
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from a low income center in the community was something that was attractive to us because this curriculum that we use was intended for the inner city. That's where it was test piloted 30, 40 years ago and proven. And, uh, and it is, it is intended to be the great equalizer in income and race. And, and so we, uh, we,
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Didn't think about it very long. It took two votes of our board, but on the second vote, our board decided, let's go ahead and move over there. And so we did, and it's been a great success. So that resulted in, over the long term, around 500 new students that will be coming into the school, and we're most of the way along that trajectory. Did CEC close, or they just consolidated campuses? COVID changed their business model. And so once they did...
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They didn't need the brick and mortar physical location quite as much as they did before. And I think they ended up adapting more to using online and remote services. And we didn't. We didn't adapt to that. We very much prefer traditional classroom instruction. And so it was a win-win.
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So we ended up renting that building for three years. Then we – now we own it. All right. So having all those new students into the elementary grades has resulted in them going into junior high. Right, right. And so this past year was the first year we had sixth graders moving into the seventh grade. Okay. And –
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And so that's our biggest cohort of seventh graders ever. And next year, there'll be eighth graders with more kids coming behind them. And so we built a standalone junior high campus, which was half finished for the 25, 26 school year. It will be fully finished for the 26, 27 school year. And that will be our fourth campus. And hopefully we'll be done.
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And doing all of that, meeting with the architects, is not really the academic mission that I prefer to be focused on. And so, yeah, we're coming to the end of our expansion plans. And then I can, I don't want to say begin focusing, but I can isolate my focus to the most important thing, which is the academic mission of the school. And is that, like, is this a calling for you of sorts? Was even the, because you said, did you sponsor the legislation that got started?
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I did. Yeah. I mean, I was – my calling – yes. Yeah, absolutely. And my calling is no different than any other parent, in my opinion. It is – we have a – we call it the universal truth of public education, and that is it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.
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Now, most parents should believe that. They have children. They must educate them. You don't send them off to a place, much less a government bureaucracy, to educate your children for you. Well, unfortunately, I think culturally that's uncommon anymore. Well, listen, that is a root cause of cultural decay is that many have perpetuated that unfortunate cause.
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viewpoint that someone else raises your children, you just have them. That's troubling. And then they join the trans club. That will destroy the republic if parents abandon their responsibility. And maybe it is destroying the republic, but there are certain places of... Some bulwarks against it. Yeah, there's some bright places of hope, and I think liberty is one of those. So...
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it is the responsibility of parents to educate their children. Well, Maureen and I had twins first, and then we had another one, our boy, twin girls, then our boy was 18 months behind them. So, yeah, we were in the education business right away. It was our calling. It was our mission. It was the thing we wanted to do more than anything else was raise these children. And then we were blessed with two more children after them. And so, yeah, we were thrust into this responsibility and this enormous duty.
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And happily. So now it's hard. So we do hard things like that with a smile on our face and as cheerfully as we can. And when we concluded that the options we – that the expectations we had were not aligned with our address at the time. And the address, remember, back in the 80s and 90s, the address determined your school. Sure. Well, when the school we wanted was not attached to our address –
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We joined other parents in town who had come to similar conclusions, and that is there's got to be a better way than a government-owned, unionized, monopolized bureaucracy. And so that's when...
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I kind of became a warrior. I happened to have already been in the state legislature. Right. And decided, all right, well, I'm here. How do I make the most of it? Not just for the Schaefer kids, but to the extent we're normal to every other family that has high expectations for their child's education. So the charter school strategy was just one strategy among many. Yeah. And we did get that law passed barely. As I say, we were the third in the country. You know, that law passed by
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one vote every step of the way. One vote out of committee in the Senate, one vote off the Senate floor, one vote over in the House, at House committee, the House floor, and then went to the governor, Roy Romer, who was the only vote you need when you're in the executive branch, and he signed it. So by one vote, that passed all the way through. And probably sparked a lot of other states and stuff too, right, because Colorado has always been a kind of a leader of stuff. Who was the first, if I may?
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It was Minnesota. Oh, wow. And then California was the second. Oh, wow. Hard to believe. That is crazy. And Colorado was the third. Well, it's funny because actually those three states used to be kind of libertarian-leaning, free-thinking places where they did new and different things. Yeah. And then all three of them really started being like, hey, let's try socialism. That should work for us.
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Anyway, that's why so many from both states are moving to Colorado, I suppose. Fair enough. Fair enough. This is a sidebar, but somehow talking about the zip codes and stuff reminded me of this. In Colombia, they actually have different utility rates based on your zip code.
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So if you're – or neighborhoods, basically. They categorize it, and you're like if you're in a low-income neighborhood, you're on the one tier. If you're in a high-income neighborhood, you're on the sixth tier. And you pay ten times as much for your electricity and your sewer and stuff if you're in the sixth tier. It's a way for them to kind of distribute the cost of doing infrastructure for –
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Kids. Okay. I thought it was like less gross than like your income tax rate is 55% or something. That's a terrible idea. Okay. And I'll tell you why, because I don't want to get off track. Don't be kidding. I love chasing squirrels. Because what the Colombians are doing is using a commodity, electricity. They're using an electron as a methodology, as the basis for tax policy.
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And it is a progressive tax. So what happens is the same commodity, which costs no more in neighborhood A as it does neighborhood B, costs more. It is a tax based on one's income, your neighborhood. But there has to be taxes. Okay. But what is the purpose of this? Yes, there must be taxes.
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Well, even that's debatable. The theory would be it takes the regressivity out of it, right? Yeah, taxes we can accept as being a necessary evil for the operation of government. I like roads. I like fire trucks. However, the purpose of taxation is to raise the requisite amount of money for the legitimate function of government. Sure. When you start attaching...
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differential rates based on one's behavior. Well, now government is in the behavior business. And it is in the business of favoring certain citizens over another for the same service. That is picking winners and losers and giving government politicians the authority to do such things. What I've always said is that if you can set up the taxes in such a way that it doesn't change behavior, that would be the ideal.
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Sure. You know, like when people were hiding from 90% income taxes and all these things and, or even, you know, the value added taxes and different things. And so that's why I think, like, I barely noticed what my utility...
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bills cost and stuff. So basing it on utilities actually makes- Congratulations. Well, I mean, I notice, right? But do you take shorter showers if you notice that your water rate goes up or whatever? Or do you just take the shower that you're going to take? And so I think that having a utility rates-based pricing tiers would almost change behavior less than others. I don't know if that's the answer, but I'm definitely price conscience.
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Right. So you would move to one of those low income neighborhoods just so you could pay less in your utilities? Maybe. I'd probably move to a different country or move to a different jurisdiction if possible. Or I'd get involved in a political process and say, this electron costs the same. No matter where you live, why should one citizen pay more for it than another citizen? That is a discriminatory tax.
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that empowers government in a very wicked way. Interesting. Okay. I'm going to jump off now because we have a lot of ground to cover, but we could probably have a two-hour conversation just on tax policy. I tend to be a little more libertarian about these things. Well, I do too. That's why I thought it was really interesting because of the fact that taxes must be raised and trying to not change people's behavior is the target for me in some ways.
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I know you want to move, but as a general rule, let me just posit this. And that is, government should raise the revenue that is necessary to fund the legitimate purposes, the legitimate functions of government. Oh, for sure. And do so in a fair and equitable way.
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They devolve very quickly into very dangerous forms of discrimination on how one lives, what they prefer, what they choose, and how they live is an important element of that.
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we should be taxed equally and treated as equal citizens in a society. Well, let's talk about that. You told me earlier that you don't drink alcohol. You know, I'm drinking a bourbon here. Yeah. You know, cigarettes and alcohol have a long time had, you know, sin taxes attached to them, right? Because the theory is that because I like to drink bourbon, I'm going to have more negative health consequences and, you know, maybe run over more people over my lifetime. Right.
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Not really, but that I'm actually having a negative impact on society, so I should pay more to this funding mechanism of government. Or how would you fund government then and make it – do you like the fairtax.org proposals? Is that one that you would say is pretty accurate? I would take any tax that treats Americans on a national level, that treats Americans as equals –
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is a step in the right direction. And whether that's a sales tax or a flatter income tax, I don't like the idea of both. Pick one lane or the other. So when I served in the U.S. House of Representatives, I was a pretty strong advocate for a flat income tax, a flatter income tax,
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And so, you know, an income tax, there's no such thing as a good tax. Sure. Well, to have the government do less is ultimately the goal. Yeah. You know, kind of shrink the monster. So there's – anyway, so, yeah, governments have –
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Well, how about schools? Like, my wife and I don't have any children. Right. And yet my property taxes are the same as my neighbors. I've got five kids, and they're all going to school on my dimes. Right. Like, is that fair to me? No, it's not fair to you. Okay, just checking. Good, I like where you're screwed on. It's not fair to you. All right, we could litigate that in terms of community fairness. But you would fund government out of fees for services more then? More so, yeah, I would.
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Tariffs and stuff? Just kidding. Well, tariffs, if they would really replace income taxes. Tariffs and income taxes at the same time is just tax upon tax.
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Bad idea. You brought a stack of books today that would help kind of explain the... Get back to the topic. Yeah, you know. Sorry about that. No, it's cool. We'll come back. Yeah. Like I said, sometimes I would like to go four hours with my guests. But yeah, walk me through a little bit of what you got going on here. Well, one of the first things I brought was just a little bit of books that...
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People think we make it up at our school, and I think that often happens in public education. But Liberty Commons School was launched really with the ideas in this book right here, Cultural Literacy by Dr. E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch was an English professor at the University of Virginia who noticed at the higher ed levels that some of the smartest students in America would end up in his classroom and...
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and they had been exposed to different books. Their language was even different, their exposure to vocabulary and proper grammar. And he wondered, how can we even have – well, he was frustrated. How can we even have good conversations where –
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where we can understand inferences, we can understand the same references, where our language is suitable to have a deep conversation. And he began as an English instructor, starts going backwards in the American education system and realizing that based on what school district a child happens to come from –
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Or as they work their way up, they might have been exposed to a book all Americans should read while another smart student hadn't. And so bringing those students up to grade level to have an upper level discussion at the graduate level in college...
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It perplexed him. And so he started focusing on what went right, what went wrong in American education. And he concludes Americans used to have it correct in how Americans were educated for commonality. Yeah, they had a certain unified messaging. Yeah, well, Noah Webster back in the 1700s talked about an American ethnicity, that that should be the goal of education in the United States.
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The country being a gigantic melting pot and having all kinds of ethnic inputs into the country, but that should result in e pluribus unum, one American ethnicity, and that our schools should teach toward that for a commonality for a variety of reasons.
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Hirsch mentions that right in front of his book, and that's really where he goes with this. And that is that there are certain things all Americans should know. Certain books all American children should be exposed to. Vocabulary that all Americans should recognize. Historic references, facts, math facts, things of that sort. And he laments that...
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We used to do that in the country, but we have drifted away from that. And then he lays out an outline on how we should get there. So that's the goal. Before you move on, I want to share a little bit of my own journey in this. Sure. Because so I was born and raised in North Dakota, graduated with a high school class of five. And so very rural North Dakota. Yeah. And the whole...
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The county was 20,000 people, but we were on the fringes of that county. But in high school, I had at least two, sometimes three study halls a day. And so I would devour every Newsweek, every U.S. News and World Report, every Wall Street Journal, every Popular Mechanics, every Popular Science. That's good. Every book, Huck Finn, all that classical literature. I was reading Dostoevsky and stuff like that. Wow.
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And my actual cultural experience, like I had never, you know, when I moved to Fargo for college, like I said hi to everybody on the sidewalk, walking past them for a while until I finally realized that wasn't how you do things there. And like my experience integrating with people in larger populations and stuff was, and I had never barely met a black person, right? I had no cultural relevancy that way, but I had been steeped in,
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Americana, I suppose. And it's probably that season is probably a strengthening time of my life that I didn't even recognize. Well, it was. What you were... You were achieving a heightened level of commonality with Americans generally by reading popular sources that lots of Americans read. I mean, the idea of a high school student
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Reading the Wall Street Journal, it could be any newspaper, but reading a national publication is rare anymore. Right. And so – Yeah, there is no common dialogue, no common ingestion. And so I like this little – Okay, keep going. Thank you. Well, Hirsch mentions in cultural literacy, he says America's inability – he uses all these examples. Well, now that we don't have the 6 o'clock news anymore or anything, it's –
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It's way going down to. He uses examples of Americans on battlefields versus Germans on battlefields during the Second World War. And how the education of Americans allowed them to adapt, improvise, overcome on the battlefield in a way that was far superior than Germans. And the reason is…
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German education had become specialized. You learn at a very young age to become an engineer or a dancer or in finance or a shepherd, whatever the case is. But Americans, even up to World War II, had a broad general education and were far more adaptable. Well, he mentions that. And he suggests that American schools are getting further and further away from common knowledge and common understanding. Well, and corporations do the same thing. They want to have specialized employees and all these little...
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tubes. Different set of goals. Yeah. But he says, but he is for education for young people. He regards us as our Achilles heel. All right. Now that was a little demonstration. So I use the word Achilles heel. You nod your head in agreement because you know what that means. I will tell you that there are...
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disappointing numbers of Americans who think that's a body part. A reference to your Achilles heel because you have one. But they don't know the story of Achilles being dipped in the river sticks and having now being impenetrable or he's bulletproof except for that little place where his mom holds him and he's got that little point of vulnerability. Alright, well, what does Hirsch mean when he uses a term Achilles heel? Or what can we mean? Two words. Conjures up
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Well, there's an assumption that we both have a little exposure to Greek mythology. Yeah. And some do. So if you use that in a business meeting or in a context like this, well, then we're speaking the same language. If somebody's outside of that conversation, they're missing something very important. And whether it's that little metaphor or a thousand others that he mentions in the book, more and more Americans are not in the conversation. And so he starts with that metaphor.
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That research, that understanding, these conclusions, he paints a pathway in this book, The Schools We Need. Wow. So this guy was really the initiator of the charter school thing or the core knowledge curriculum? Core knowledge curriculum. He mentions the predecessor to Liberty Common School in Fort Collins was called the Washington Core Knowledge School.
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An alternative school in the district that we organized before we had the charter school. And the Washington Core Knowledge School is in here. Okay. And so that's a wonderful little tribute. I want to read that first one, by the way. But he takes – it's still very relevant, by the way, even though it was written in 1983, I think it was.
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But eventually, Hirsch develops these ideas into a curriculum, and that's the other book I brought here. This is the core knowledge sequence. So every core knowledge school in America that uses the core knowledge sequence follows this. And so this becomes the brilliance of – people want to know why is Liberty Common School and Ridgeview and a few other core knowledge schools in town so successful.
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And the fact is, I just opened up the history, grade one, history and geography.
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Every student in a core knowledge school is going to be following this sequence anywhere in the country. That's what I wanted to ask you about. It says sequence on there. That's a big prominent word. So it stacks one on top of the other. I think of math that way, but maybe not as... It's exactly right. Phonics maybe that way, but not as much history and stuff. Stack one upon the other. And not only... So I pointed to first grade. So here's how you can see this coming together. Every kindergarten teacher...
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is responsible for knowing what's in the first grade in history and geography and helping their students be prepared to start on day one with the background knowledge. And that background knowledge is all here. The first grade instructors, as they're teaching this, are expected to know when these topics are going to come back in the third or maybe sixth grade or maybe in high school so that they might learn about kings and queens in kindergarten. But eventually they're going to be in a deep discussion about European monarchs
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and monarchies, different time periods. What are peasants and... But none of that in high school makes an awful lot of sense unless you get the rudiments of it at a very elemental, age-appropriate level in the kindergarten or first grade. And so all of these topics are laid out in a very well-researched, proven way so that...
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It is what you say. It's knowledge stacked upon knowledge that magnifies its power and its impact in a way that is – well, it's just a multiplier effect. Consider this. And this is the lesson I learned when Maureen and I started –
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considering our neighborhood school. And that is we had twins. So twin A and twin B, Jenny and Emily were in kindergarten in the same school. They had different teachers and each teacher taught something different. Now they were both learning, but they were learning differently. Sure.
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And so the question comes up, well, what happens when these students who are learning get into the first grade? And that first grade teacher has some kids who came from that classroom, other kids who came from the other classroom. This is not just a phenomenon in Fort Collins. This is an American phenomenon that had occurred by the 1980s and early 1990s where –
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No kidding. Students would spend a month or two, or teachers would spend a month or two in every grade level, just getting their students up to grade level so they could begin teaching. And then when you do that, some kids are overcoming gaps and other kids are duplicating what they had just learned. When they check out. And it's a waste of time. And so over the course of eight years, well, nine years, kindergarten through eighth grade,
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In America, it was estimated that children were losing up to a year or a year and a half in an average school just through repetition or gaps. And so this is a remedy to that. And it's why we were so attracted to it. We didn't invent this, but we were one of the first cities to bring the core knowledge sequence west of the Mississippi. And Fort Collins is where that landed with this whole story I'm telling you. And so Liberty Commons started –
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around this curriculum. That was really the mission. And this curriculum goes up through eighth grade. We went through ninth grade for many years because that was the grade configuration of the Poudre School District. But when the district changed that and high school became ninth through twelfth grade, then we had to make a decision on jettisoning our
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ninth grade or adding a high school, and our board decided to add the high school. And that's when I came on board as an employee. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the high school doesn't necessarily rely on the core knowledge. Now it's more of a college preparatory.
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Well, but except it's in the same school. So we built our high school curriculum to continue the trajectory. There was already the spiral staircase up to the top. And as it turns out, so our history department chair, for example, is a high school teacher. But that department chair is responsible for sequencing our history curriculum all the way back to kindergarten and...
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And the conversations among faculty in our school is K through 12, all at the same table, going through lesson plans together so that that fourth grade teacher knows when they are, let's say sixth grade teacher, when they're teaching about the French Revolution. Right. They know where that lesson needs, where those kids need to be, what they need to be prepared for by the time they get into the 10th grade. Yeah. Dig it.
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You have two more books to show me. Well, there's a, why Johnny can't tell right from wrong by William Kirkpatrick is this is the book that informs our character education in the school. We feel very, um, um, uh, you know, this is a serious thing for us. The virtue and moral education that a child should receive should be as purposeful as the academic mission of the school. In fact, they're, they're interconnected. There's no difference really from a moral education and, um,
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your academic objectives, but to the extent that you can accentuate them and recognize them and reinforce them as you're talking about different periods in history. And when you're discussing, for example, the Nazi party in, uh, 1930s in Germany, there are great moral lessons and virtue lessons about individuals and as a nation that you can derive from that. So we want our teachers instructing on these, uh, time periods and the, their, their meaning
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in our complete understanding of Western civilization, but we also don't want our students to miss an opportunity to think through. What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Who reacted in a heroic way? Who reacted in a cowardly way through history? And so that's part of what this book is about. And again, to the extent that we want commonality in what Americans know,
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We want commonality in our understanding of what is right and wrong. Sure. That there are cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude. Everybody needs those. Right. Sorry. That's a feature, not a bug. No. Actually, we better take a pause. I broke it. Yep. I don't know.
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There we go. Should have been an engineer. Octopus. We'll clean that up on the backside. And what was I going to say? Oh, actually, I was thinking about current events recently and just the duality of the response to the SpaceX IPO. Some people are like, oh my god, trillionaires should not exist. We need to tax this guy into oblivion and pay off 1 60th of the national debt. And other people are like,
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Sweet. He created, you know, Elon Musk I'm referring to, obviously, created 4,000 millionaires and 400 millionaires through building this company that added so much value to the world that they kicked NASA's ass and nobody bothers shipping stuff with them anymore.
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Well, if you consider – I mean that's the politics of envy or an understanding of economics that is driven by one's envy or maybe even greed. You know, Bill Gates, for example, left industry.
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And so he was villainized while he was in industry making his billions. And then he leaves and starts some nonprofits. And for some reason, he's all of a sudden ready to – people want to canonize him. Nonprofits are mostly just a way for him to avoid persecution. Maybe. But he gives a lot of money away, right? Right. And so – but the reality is – Let's not turn him into a hero though. There's a lot of people that I agree with. But the reality is whether it's Bill Gates or whether it is Elon Musk –
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These thinkers, these innovators, these organizers of thought and ingenuity and creativity and capitalism, they create more wealth for individuals across the board than any philanthropist does by using the income that they have derived and giving it away. Which is what Warren Buffett said really throughout his last 30 years. He's like, you know, some people criticize me because I'm not super philanthropic along the way.
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But I think I can get better returns and make more of a difference when I'm gone and leave the world a better place then. Well, listen, more people engage in industries that didn't exist before, that are employed in industries that were designed or thought of or capitalized by people like Elon Musk. Yeah.
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Sure, maybe they don't identify with them. They don't have yachts. They don't have vacation homes or whatever he has. I don't know. They don't have billions, if not the first trillionaire. Right, right. Maybe people don't identify with that because they don't know what that amount of wealth is. But the...
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The impact of that in society is a capitalist forced multiplier that creates more good. It is far more moral and virtuous than is...
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taking from some and using government to take from some to give to others and redistributing other's wealth. It is the fairest economic system ever devised in human history. And so criticizing people because they are successful, because they've invented or envisioned something that you didn't, that's not somebody worthy of criticism. That's somebody worthy of admiration and replication if you can do it.
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Did you see his delivery of the two economists joke that was running the social media rounds lately? I'm sorry, no. So there's two economists that are taking a hike in the forest. And they come around the bend, and right in the middle of the trail is a big old pile of poop. And they're looking at it a little bit. They don't even know what kind it is or whatever. But the first economist says, I'll give you $100 if you eat that. And...
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The first guy's kind of embarrassed, but he's like, you know what? Okay. So he eats the poop, gets his $100. They move on. Come around a corner another hour later. They're still hiking and another pile of poop. And the economist that ate the poop was like,
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This time I'll give you $100 to eat that poop. And so somehow the guy decides to do it. And so they basically are both in the same place before the hike, but they've both eaten a pile of poop now. And the first economist says, do you know what this means? And the second one is, no, but I know we've increased the gross domestic product by $200.
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And nobody's got any more money. There's just two guys that have eaten poop. You know, so what I was thinking about is a lot of the uber-wealthy, especially that inherited their money and whatever, their money is literally in houses all across the world, in Vail and Avon and Telluride or Maui, buying up the formerly burned-up lots, you know, investing in that.
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And it just sits there. It doesn't create any jobs. It doesn't, even when it's given through a foundation and stuff, it doesn't still stimulate actual economic activity to speak of. I'd debate you there. You think? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The fact that they acquired it and paid some market price in order to acquire that market.
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dwelling, that facility, even if they leave it vacant. Oh, yeah. The contribution is the number of carpenters and electricians and all the craftspeople that contributed to that. But think of the jobs that they don't create. Like, the house gets created and then it just sits there. Well, think of it this way. An operating company, a business that's worth...
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$10 million. A local HVAC company, just for use of an example, that makes $2 million a year or something. Right. It does sales of $5 million and makes a couple million or a million and a half. It might be worth $10 million. But it's probably created, it's probably got 100 jobs on the payroll. Their payroll might be $5 million a month to create that kind of, or a couple million dollars a month or something to create that kind of a business. Okay. That's different than having a $10 million house that,
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in Vail that just sits there and gets used for two weeks a year. That house doesn't create any activity to speak of after it's been built. But it is infrastructure, it is property tax paying, so I guess we do want to build things. But it still has a use value, it still has a market value. I'm just saying there's a difference in net worth. It pushes outward the value of improved land all around as well. Would it be as beneficial? Okay, yeah.
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All right. Well, yeah, we could – you would be correct, I think, that – I would agree with you that there is – there's going to be a variable. If Elon shut down Tesla and SpaceX – Yeah, and productivity with those capital improvements. And laid off all those people. Yeah. He laid off all those people and just invested his trillion dollars in real estate around the world. Right.
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that would be so much less of a benefit to society and humanity. The real estate appreciates in value is not much different than investing it in a stock market or somewhere else. Many people invest in real estate as an investment to grow their income. Along the way, you still need maintenance people to go out there and mow the lawn. You still need – a pipe's still going to break. You're still going to need to keep the electricity flowing just to keep it warm in the wintertime. There's all kinds of –
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Either way, it's better than getting it to the government. You could – so yes, you're right. You're right. One could create more value out of that improvement, but one is still creating value just by owning it even if they hold it. And it's far better, by the way, than if government buys that unused land. Sure.
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And puts it on the government rolls because the worst landlord in America is the United States government. In Utah, they're trying to make it less than 70% federally owned land at some point in time. I know. God bless them. Yep. It should be. Why should that ever have been the case?
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Anyway, I digress. You've got two more books. Oh, the other two. So we've got one of these books for every grade, K through 8. This is what every sixth grader should know or what your sixth grader should know. So it's kind of lined up with that sequence there. Yeah. So this is the guide that our teachers are using in the classroom and that I as an administrator are making sure we're aligned to and sticking to it. So that's the guidebook, the roadmap, at a sophisticated level. Yeah.
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But for parents, this is what they have available to them. So when your student go, here's just a truism. You bring any sixth grade boy or girl comes home from school, and there they are at the dinner table, and you say, hey –
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Johnny, what did you learn today in the sixth grade? They all have the same answer. And the answer is nothing. They don't want to talk about this at home. They just spent their whole day doing brain dumps and listening and taking their notes and maybe some tests. And they come home. Last thing they want to do at dinner is talk to mom and dad about what they learned.
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But this is how our parents can deepen their engagement in a child's education because they've got the curriculum maps at home and they can just open it up. I just opened it here. This must be a history and geography section. Well, you must have learned about the reform movement, Johnny. You must have learned about farmers and populism. Tell me about Williams Jennings Bryant. Jennings Bryant. Tell me about the progressive era. Tell me about socialism in America.
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And tell me about Jane Addams. Tell me about Theodore Roosevelt. Tell me about reform for African Americans. And I'm just hitting the headlines here, but you can see the detail that are in here. It's at a level that is intended for parents to be able to keep up with their kids and push them and challenge them when they come home. And that's the conversation that needs to be happening at home.
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not just at school, but when we say it is the right responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, well, they don't need to be history experts. They just need to get these books and just read the summaries of them so they can start a conversation at home and know that their kids are on track and their kids are learning. So that's that book. This is one I just brought for fun.
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Every year, all the faculty, all the employees at my school read a book together. And this is an autobiography. Very obscure one. This is called The Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. It was written by Joseph Plum Martin. He was a grunt private in the Revolutionary War. But he kept a great journal. He wrote his memoirs. What's that?
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But he kept a great journal. He did. And it's written in a kind of colloquial New England language, which is fun. But, you know, this guy lived a harrowing life. It's amazing. He lived through the Revolutionary War. But, you know, what we know about the 250th anniversary of the country, right? And what most of us know about this time period is from the generals and from the American founding fathers. Well, they always polished up what made them look better and stuff.
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And I really wanted us to all be – we know that from what we teach already. But I wanted us to have a really important injection of our perspective from a grunt private in fighting in the revolutionary cause. You hear about the soldiers in Valley Forge who had no shoes and you could trace their – you could see where they had been based on the blood in the snow from having no – this was one of those guys. Frozen bloody feet.
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Yeah, he tells that story. And so we're all reading it together. I take it everywhere I go just because it's an easy book to acquire. Everyone should read this. Read it along with us. You can even come to the school and sit in on our faculty discussions. What's that again? Is it a memoir? It's called A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. I guess about 100 years ago, this book was called The Memoirs of Private Yankee Doodle.
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Oh, interesting. Oh, really? That's where the Yankee Doodle song came from? Well, no. I mean, the term Yankees was what they called themselves and was around well before that. That's just the New Englander. I've learned over time that, for better or worse, the education that I received back in North Dakota and maybe my whole region up there uses a lot of, like,
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old English, like English American, right? Like American or English English rather than American English. Like when Google corrects me, it's because I've spelt questionnaire with two ends or things like that that are somehow I'm unclear on why my little segment of North Dakota seemed to have taught me more like obscure English, English than American English.
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Well, there are pockets of that throughout the country, the Appalachians and so on. A lot of people just depending on – certainly all the colonials would have spoken the Queen's English and spelled things the way in that – We have a New England, North Dakota that's not too far from us and stuff. So I'm guessing there was kind of concentrations of English settlers back in the day that – Yeah, it could have been depending on the time or what the national goals were to send people on –
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on the backs of or on on trains probably to get out to north dakota to settle the great frontier yeah yeah so uh they could have come all come from certain villages or towns or places over in england you never know you've got two more things you can show me quick before we take a break well the other by law yeah the other is uh when i mentioned that how long it takes i'll just share this one
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You mentioned right at the beginning of the show how difficult it is to remove just a mediocre teacher from the classroom. Right. And this is a graphic flowchart in Colorado of the steps you have to go through. I don't know if you're going to get this. You won't be able to read it. No, you won't. You won't. But you can see all of the steps that it takes. And again, the example I use is imagine a science teacher who's just not that great at teaching science.
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They're not dangerous. Yeah, they're not diddling anybody or anything like that. They're just not good at their job. In my school, if I can't improve them or push them to improve quickly, I can just say today's your last day. In regular public schools where they have tenure, once they've got that, which is only three years, then this is an impossible process. This takes about three years and costs at least a million dollars.
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for a teacher to exercise all of their, quote-unquote, due process to get weighed on here. So schools don't even bother. They move them around, first of all. And when that becomes – it's called the dance of the lemons. It's an actual public education term. Trust me. Every principal and assistant principal who might be watching knows this term. And they're just trying to push their bad people off at each other. Yeah. You get to a certain part of the year, and you're trying to persuade your friend in another school to –
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hey, I got a science teacher that would be great for you. Great. Yeah. I'll write a great letter of recommendation for that teacher. Get them out of my place. Put them in yours. And they move them around until everybody figures it out. And then they go to what's called a rubber room. And then a rubber room is every big school district. Just where you can't hurt yourself or others. This is an office at the central headquarters. Right. And these people get titles like curriculum specialist. And they... That's why the admin class has grown so much in schools. No? Yeah.
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Part of it. Like those rubber room people. Yeah, and I mean, at Denver Public Schools, there's floors in their headquarters. The Denver Public School office building is nothing but rubber rooms. They can probably now, now that you can work remotely, you can probably just leave them at home. But it's cheaper to keep them on the payroll until they retire than it is to go through that process I just showed you and fire them. So school district, the cheaper thing to do. This is so...
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Maddening. Just pay them $75,000 a year to not break anything. Yeah, to pay them and just have them review somebody's curriculum books or maybe some board member has a question. What are they doing over there at Liberty? I got somebody who can do that research. And the person who does that is a specialist.
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Who nobody wants to put around children anymore. So people out there listening, if your neighbor has a title like education specialist or curriculum specialist or something. Yeah, I always hesitate. I mean, let me qualify that, especially for this broad audience. There might be actually some qualified. Well, because some of these people, that is a legitimate title.
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Right. One out of four curriculum specialists is actually a useful person. That's probably generous. But there are some people with the curriculum specialist title who really are doing important work. There are others who have that title that are somebody who has jumped. They were a lemon who danced around several schools until they got sent to the rubber room and they're still on the payroll. And all right, as a taxpayer that makes you angry...
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And people are right to ask, why is the administration bloated when the number of students is shrinking? It's a harsh reality.
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And trust me, there's going to be some administrator listening, thinking, thank you for explaining this, Schaefer. It is cheaper to the taxpayer, given all the laws and all the union contracts and provisions, everything, all those bubbles I showed you. Right, each one of those steps costs 50 grand. It's cheaper to pay somebody $80,000, $90,000 a year to do nothing than it is to...
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Actually try to remove them. So it'll cost you far more to go through all these steps. Headaches go along with it. It's maddening. And so, you know, look, that's just that it's hard to say it's any one person's fault. It's the way an enormous bureaucracy has grown over the 150 years that Colorado has been a state.
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Yeah, I mean, I think of it, you know what Virginia Creeper is? Yeah, the plant, the vine. Yeah, the plant, the vine. Yeah. Like, it just kind of grows on everything if you let it. Right. And I think of the admin and bureaucracy and in government, in school systems, in a lot of not-for-profit organizations even, frankly. And it's just kind of, it just, like, it's not the Virginia Creeper's fault that it just grows wherever you allow it to grow. It just does.
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And some people will say, well, it's not fair that the charter schools don't have to deal with all these inefficient laws. And we do. And it isn't fair. But what we know through 150 years of- It's not fair that Americans have to deal with it. No. Well, Colorado is 150 years old this year. And what we know from the history of our state is that the state will not fix this. The remedy is charter schools. I get it. It's not fair. But you know what? We-
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There are laws on the books that allow all school districts in Colorado to move in the direction of freedom that charter schools represent. And if we happen to have any in northern Colorado that are truly interested in that, I will help. And I will help in a valuable way along with an army of people that think this would be a good idea. I dig it.
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I'm going to call a short break. We're going to come back and talk about your, you actually had a political career and, uh, you have family and some grand adventures, I'm sure. Sure. Yeah. So we'll be back in a few. Okay. Okay.
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And we're back. Okay. So we've talked a lot about really the mission and how the mechanics of the school works and stuff like that. But this is a business and personal, so we're going to talk about the man outside of the mission. I know you had a whole career before Liberty Common as well. But we're going to go back to like first grade.
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yeah first grade we've time machine if we popped out in first little bob first grade uh okay graduation day what what would we have found oh well i grew up in rural ohio north of cincinnati out in farm country okay um and uh all my all my uh friends uh many of them were uh the parents were farmers and okay um
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But some worked downtown, and we were out in the – What was your – Not just the suburbs. Family. Whatever next is. My dad was a school teacher. Okay. And became a school administrator eventually, and his whole career was spent in public education in the Cincinnati public school system. Oh, interesting. So he drove an hour to get into the inner city, worked down there, and came home every day. Wow.
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And was he kind of a warrior for education in that region as well? Yeah, he was. Was he notable of sorts? He was. I think he went into teaching just because he liked the subject matter and thought teaching was a great thing. I don't know that – just because he grew up in another state, Michigan, and was recruited by the University of Cincinnati to play football, and so that brought him to a big town. And he did a student teaching downtown, and I think he just discovered –
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urban education and loved it and loved the kids loved the challenges yeah uh loved the role of being a father figure in for many students who did not have two parents and he was a father figure for a lot of kids i witnessed that growing up throughout just going to the mall with my dad how many people how many people would shout out hey mr schaefer and
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remember me and my dad remembered all these names sure and uh they'd come up and tell stories about yeah growing up and your dad would make a difference in their life and and and how my dad uh you know helped guide some of these uh some of these students boys and girls so i always admired that never thought i'd go into education he advised me not to what uh what was your family setting was it uh you have siblings as well yeah i got a brother and a sister i'm the oldest and
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All right. Yep. Pretty natural. And were you a smart kid right away? Were you into academics? Not so much. I was pretty well, I was an average student. I'll leave it at that. All right. I got a, there were a few subjects in classes where I hit it out of the park and others where my dad had to threaten hitting me if I didn't bring my grades up. So no, I was not some genius student. Sports and things like that?
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Football and baseball. I went to Cincinnati Moeller High School, which at the time was the national champion in high school boys football. Now, the national championship is a points calculation. Oh, right, because they didn't return them or anything. Right, but we were the state champions in Ohio year in and year out back in those days. And a lot of guys I played with went and played pro. I didn't. But they –
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So football was my thing. Were you a linebacker or something like that? I was the wide receiver. Wide receiver, okay. Magnetic fingers here. Yeah, is that right? I like it. I like it. That's an important football team. And so then...
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I guess off to college somewhere. Yeah, I went to the University of Dayton, which wasn't too far from where I grew up. Moeller High School is a Catholic high school. All boys run by the Marianist religious order, and the Marianists also run the University of Dayton. Oh, is that right? So going there... The Marianist is kind of like a niche, like the Jesuits and the Catholics? It's a religious order within the Catholic Church of Rome.
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Okay. And so there are Marianist priests, Marianist brothers. It's all males. No, there are Marianist sisters too. Not many. But my school was run by Marianist brothers. Okay. Interesting. I'm not familiar with that. You've heard Jesuits and Franciscans and others. Marianist is another. It's founded in France. And it's worldwide and it's been around for a long time. It's just not as big as some of these others you might have heard of. Fair enough. Okay. Okay.
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And, uh, but the university of Dayton is their flagship university at the higher ed level. And, uh, so a lot of guys that I went to high school with went to the university of Dayton and it felt an awful lot like just the, the next, the 13th grade was going to the university of Dayton. And so, uh, I did. And, um, my, uh, my girlfriend went to university of Dayton too. Um,
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And that's where we met in high school, but we both went to college together. And then she eventually said yes. And so we got married and moved to Colorado. She moved out here first. And what was that? So she finished up college and stuff and you dated through college? I finished first and I was a speechwriter in the Ohio House of Representatives. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and I worked there for one year.
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With a political science degree? Yeah, political science degree. And a lot of... You know, it's interesting. It's political science, but I was focused on, in my coursework, on city management and city planning. I thought that's what I wanted. You could have been our Darren Atterbury here. Yeah, absolutely.
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And I did an internship with the city of Dayton and worked on those kinds of projects for my boss. But the main thing was he had lots of reports to prepare and I helped him with those. And it was the writing. I took a lot of English courses. The University of Dayton taught me well and my high school did also. And it was the writing that got the attention of the city council, of my boss, and then that
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I ended up parlaying that into the speechwriter position in Columbus. And so I kind of left behind the thing I thought I wanted to do to end up writing for others who...
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might have been brilliant at the public policy, but they were not smart enough to describe what it was they were doing. So I didn't put words in anybody's mouth, but I put better words in their mouth than they were able to do on their own. Was that a job or were you like a freelancer? No, I did that. No, there was a program that they had. It was a one year fellowship kind of thing. Like a party affiliated kind of thing? Yeah. I worked for the House Republicans. Yeah. Yeah. And so I did that there. I didn't
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know that kind of thing existed but that makes sense it does not exist in colorado but yeah it did there that program still exists today and so i was in the 1985 class yeah of that fellowship program and then but during that time my wife then graduated from university of dayton with electrical engineering degree and she took a job here in fort collins for ncr microelectronics if anybody remembers that sure actually that's uh that is a
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Paul Knight. Wasn't that Paul Knight's business? And Larry Salmon? Don't remember those names. A couple of guys from my rotary club. NCR actually bought their business, was their exit. They built something that was kind of in that space way back in the day. Could be. Yeah, it was Symbios Logic and an AT&T bottom, and then that building is now, well, Broadcom bought. Or he came out of that before he started his own company. Yeah, that could be. And now it's the...
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built the company there the building mad wires in there now originally well national cash register is it may date that was yeah yeah but that was the company too right yeah like that's what ncr was that's right it was a microelectronics division and so they made computer chips here and yeah yeah yeah microelectronics uh processors so that's how you landed and so she came out here and took that job and then when we got engaged shortly after the here was the question what
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somebody's got to quit their job and move if we really wanted to get married and live together. Right. Right. And I did. And so that was either a move to Columbus, Ohio, or move to Fort Collins, Colorado. And if, uh, if anybody's been to both, you know, that's not a hard decision. Fort Collins is the place to go. For sure. So we moved here and, uh, and got married and, um, and that's how it was 1986. Like what was your early career here? Well, it turned out I got almost the identical job in the Colorado legislature. Oh, I, uh,
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started applying around while there were several of those positions in the Ohio house in Colorado, there was only one for at least on the Senate Republican Senate side. And, um, I, I got that. I got the, almost the exact same job. And I was the, I was the press secretary, speech writer, coffee fetcher. I did all kinds of things for the Senate Republicans. They only had two partisan staffers. Yeah. And I was one of those. Interesting. And I did that for a year and a half. And then the local Senator here, uh, Senator Jim Beatty, uh,
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the 14th Senate district, he was the, you know, held the, held the seat. And, um, he, uh, also was a lawyer and his law firm demanded that he give up serving in the legislature and go devote his time. He had to make a hard decision. And he's like, Hey Bob, listen, I like the way you write.
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No, he didn't. It wasn't his decision. He just decided to move on before his term was over. And so there was a vacancy committee that exists. So in Colorado, there's a vacancy committee appointed for every state legislature. I applied for the vacant city council position here last December or so.
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I didn't make this. Well, this is a little different. Every state house and state senate seat has a vacancy committee just waiting in the wings. Yep. That probably will never meet. When somebody gets thrown out because of ethics violations or whatever. Yeah, somebody goes to jail or dies or gets kicked out for an ethics violation. Then that vacancy, or just quits. Right, right. And that happens from time to time. Sure. Then this vacancy committee convenes and they have 10 days typically to pick a replacement. And that person serves out the term.
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You serve out the rest of the term. That's right. And so for me, there was only one year left in that term. And I was a long shot. I wasn't even – there were a lot of people who put in for that decision. Well, you're relatively new in town comparatively. They were pillars of the community and names that everybody had heard of. In fact, there was a newspaper called the Triangle Review. Are you getting around long enough if you remember that? No, I moved here in 99.
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Okay, the Triangle Review was a weekly paper, and it did a profile on all the candidates. There were about 15 of us. And it had a picture and a couple paragraphs about everybody. And then way down at the bottom, it said, and Bob Schaefer, 25. That's how old I was. And no picture, no profile, nothing. And so the vacancy committee met. And you can imagine how upset a lot of people were when that guy down there at the bottom wins. How did that happen? It was a...
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Yeah, we could do a whole show on that problem. Everybody else had enemies or something? No, these were good people. I was kind of shocked myself because I was told I wasn't going to get appointed that somebody else had their votes lined up. And so the pressure was off, but I was persuaded to get in the process for later that I –
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Yeah, that would be a good warm-up for you. Yeah, that I'd introduce myself and maybe some future time, point in time, maybe I'd be considered if I wanted to. So I went, but I went with a plan. And first I called everybody I knew in town in one year and asked them all to call the committee and asked them to vote for me. Yeah, yeah. Now, most of these were children and parents on a Little League baseball team that I coached. So the shortstop called, the first baseman called, and their parents called and said, Bob Schaefer should be the senator.
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I discovered nobody else had made that kind of an effort. And then I went with talking points. And I remember I had three little slides written on paper back then, because we didn't have PowerPoint in those days. So the first one was a number 25. I held it up, and I said, the average age of a Fort Collins resident is 25. I'm 25. Next one was a stick figure. It was a man, woman, two kids. I said, the...
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Census Bureau says this is the profile of an average Fort Collins family. Well, that's me, Maureen, my twin girls. And then the next one was some income figure. I don't remember what it is anymore, but that was the average income in the range of an average household in Fort Collins. And I said, that's our – That's basically Maureen's salary right there. I said, I –
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I said, I'm the average guy. And then we talked through all kinds of issues, which, of course, I could articulate because that's what I did for a living. For sure. And I went home and thought that was just a fun experience. And then at about 2 or 3 in the morning, the phone rang. And I picked it up.
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It was a state representative who was on the committee, and he said, I know we told you that somebody else was going to get this position, but we changed our mind. We want you to do it. And so I really hadn't counted on that. So I said, I told him, I'll call you back in 10 minutes. So I'd wake my wife up and say, you're not going to believe this.
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Are you ready for a life in politics, baby? Yeah. Called her back and she said, sure, when do you get a chance to do that? That's pretty rare. Yeah. And it was part – the legislature only meets 120 days a year. Sure. So I quit that job that I had, said yes. I was a state senator the very next day and started another business, too, to make the rest of the income that I needed. Which was –
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It was a marketing business. I worked for a lot of the tourism industry in the state. I distributed promotional material and bought some radio and airtime. You wrote good content for them and stuff like that. Well, no, they produced it all. They produced it all. I was in the distribution of everything from brochures to coupon books to all kind of stuff. And, yeah, they produced radio ads maybe and some other – cable TV was just becoming a thing. And so they would produce –
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they would make the collateral material. I would just distribute it and make buys for them. Do you know Rayno Caesar? Yes, very well. Rayno's a mentor of mine. His grandkids go to Liberty Commons School. That's cool. I just wanted to mention, because during my banking career, Rayno was an influence on me, and in part because he said, you know, Kurt, one of the things that you have that the other commercial lenders really don't bring is your writing.
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your writing is so excellent. I can understand exactly what it is. And writing is thinking. Yeah, yeah. And I can tell you think about a lot of things. And so anyway, he changed my perspective on my own self. That is such good advice. I give that same advice all the time, and I'm not surprised to hear that from Reno. But yeah.
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You know, people ask all the time, you know, what should they, you know, how to get into one industry or another. I don't care whether you're an accountant or an engineer or in finance or medicine, learn to write and learn how to communicate and express yourself well. It is such an advantage that so many people don't.
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don't have, mainly because it's not stressed and it's not treated as important. Well, especially not now. I can just tell chat to write something up for me. It's so easy. Well, even still. I agree that that's a great technological advantage, but I think there's... No, but it doesn't make me think at all. Right. And I think readers will recognize the difference. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, if you...
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I find when I ask AI to write a – give me the first draft and I say, in the language of Bob Schaefer. Right, right. And it goes and finds it from all my old floor speeches and everything else I've ever done. The quality of it is more along the lines of what I want and what I'm looking for.
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And there's so much of it out there because I could write well. Sure. Yeah. No, I, well, I've got, I've written a once a month blog for eight years now. And so there's a lot of data out there, right? It can write in my style. My style is very much kind of what it is. Sure. So anyway, I wanted to ask about actually when I first started,
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met you, I was a banker, and I met you in the context of your wife, I believe, having started a margarita business. That's right. When did that come along? Yeah. And what was the story of that? So Coyote Golden Margaritas was born somewhere around, I want to say, 1999.
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Oh, wow. Okay, so that goes back farther than I realized. Okay. Maybe 96. It didn't really explode until later. No, it didn't. I tell you, it really took off in Colorado, and then they were in several other states. Okay. Oh, going back to NCR Microelectronics, the guy who hired her, Randy Zwetsig, is in town still. Oh, I know that guy too. You know Randy? Yeah. Randy and Maureen were coworkers at NCR, and they joined forces to start Coyote Gold Margaritas. Katie Zwetsig or something like that? Katie Zwetsig's husband, yeah.
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Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I know her. I don't really, I met Randy at Matthew's house events, I believe. Yeah. Well, so they started Coyote Gold and Maureen worked on that full time. And so as I say, they were in several States, but it was really, it took off and was growing in Colorado. And so they decided to just focus on Colorado. And that's when, that's when the products just started selling at an exponential rate.
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in the state to the point where just two years ago, they sold the company to a manufacturer out of Michigan. And it's still a hot product in Colorado and Maureen still is involved in it just a little bit. But that company no longer belongs to Maureen and Randy. Sure. Well, I guess that was a successful entrepreneurial journey.
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You know, it was a great adventure, great product. People love it and still do. But I get my wife's time back. Well, you told me you never have drank. Well, I've sipped it to taste it. Okay, so I was going to say, so you weren't that much use in the margarita development. For me, it's just an interesting thing. I just don't like it.
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Tastes like furniture polish to me. All alcohol, not kind of gold. Everything. Coors light, doesn't matter if it's bourbon. It really doesn't matter. Hey, Matt, listen, I'll sip a little wine maybe at dinner. If somebody says this is a good glass of wine, I'll try it. And sometimes it is. But I'm just, you know, some say you have to acquire a taste. I ask myself why. Why would I want to, yeah. That's fair.
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One of the things that's kind of part of your lore is, look, you said you were going to only do so many terms, and then you quit. Yeah. Tell me about that a little bit. I served nine years in the state senate. So you got in with the one-year program kind of thing. Yeah, and then I got reelected two more times. So four-year terms. Yeah, and in 1994, I was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor statewide. So I was Bruce Benson, became the president of the University of Colorado. Yeah.
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He was the Republican nominee for governor, and I was his running mate. And I was a pretty young guy still. And serving in the state senate, I'm the youngest in the history of Colorado to have served in the state senate. I'm not surprised, yeah. And there were some other 25-year-olds, but the clerk told me. I didn't realize you were so young, actually. I knew you were not as old as a lot of people, but I was a 27-year-old banker or something when I first became aware of your...
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Yeah, the Constitution says you have to be 25 to serve, and I barely was when this whole appointment thing took place. And so anyway, so I served there nine years, ran statewide for lieutenant governor, and lost. But in that process, I learned the state, and I learned the dynamics of running big campaigns. And so as it turned out, the very next cycle, Wayne Allard, our congressman, decided he was going to run for the U.S. Senate, and that created a vacancy or an open seat for the U.S. House of Representatives, the fourth district. Okay.
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I no longer live in a fourth district. The boundary changed. But you did at that time. Yeah, at the time I did. And it's the whole eastern plains of Colorado. So you kind of downgraded from Senate to House, right? State Senate to U.S. House. Oh, to U.S. House. To U.S. House. Oh, fancier then. It wasn't a downgrade. Well, maybe it is. Tell me about that. I think the state is the higher priority, if you ask me. Well, and that's kind of my message to people, too, is keep your focus local.
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Like, don't worry so much about what Trump's doing and what's going on here and what's going on there. You know, pay attention to what you can actually impact here right where you are. That's right. No, you could put far more points on the board at the state capitol than you can as a member of the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate.
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I'm convinced. Now, those still are important jobs and we need more constituents. Three terms. So at the time I ran in 1996 for the U.S. House, term limits was a big – it was very popular. The voters had just voted for term limits for members of Congress.
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But the Supreme Court threw it out. So I was running that very next year. And so imagine all these farmers and ranchers that I represented as I was campaigning would say, all right, well, we voted one way. And I know the courts threw our opinion out. But who are you going to stick with when you get elected? And I'm like, oh, six years is if the voters – and I agreed with that, by the way.
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I'm in favor of term limits for members of the U.S. Congress. Well, because the Virginia creeper just grows on everybody. Like it doesn't matter how clean your soul is. If you get to Washington for too long, it's going to turn you up. Yeah, the seniority process is the core source of corruption in D.C. Now, you know, there's something to be said about institutional knowledge and all that that you lose.
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You do trade one set of problems for a different set of problems, but in my experience, both at the state capitol, because I was there before we had term limits in the state, and in Congress where there has never been term limits. Yeah, term limits solves more problems than it creates in my estimation. And so those who have – What was that expression you used to describe that? It creates more problems. No, but the previous – Oh, replaces one set of problems with another? Yeah.
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No, the problem that lack of term limits creates, like that institutionalized kind of corruption. It is the core of congressional corruption. Yeah. It really is. Or the seniority thing, really, ultimately. Yes, thank you. So seniority, it drives everything back there. It's committee hirings. It's all these kind of things. But it's corruptive.
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Yeah, when I was a state legislator, look, I was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, still in my 20s. And I go to Washington, and you look down the table of – because you sit in the order of seniority, and you look down that table to the chairman, and you start counting how many years –
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Everybody's been there between you and that chairman seat, and you don't advance until you get older. Merit does not matter. And so you start thinking, the only way I'm going to become chairman is if that guy dies, that one goes to jail, that one loses an election, and that one quits. And you start thinking of ways to make those things happen. To sabotage them. Yeah. No, that's crazy. When you have bad incentives, you have bad outcomes.
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Yeah, well, I took a voluntary term limits pledge and knew I was going to leave in six years. And so I knew I'd never be chairman of anything. And then, so, you know, my staff and I... Did you miss it? Oh, I missed... I got invited to go back just last week to go speak at a panel at the U.S. Department of Treasury on federal... So you stayed involved. Yeah, education freedom tax credit. So I'm still, you know, I still got my old friends and...
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still get called back into it from time to time. But I, uh, I tried to get back in 2008, I ran for the U S Senate, got trounced by Mark Udall. And, uh, and then that's when the Udall family has a lot of money. I've heard. Yeah, they do. I discovered that and Mark, look, Mark's a nice guy. And, uh, and so, uh, you know, I, I wish I'd have won. I absolutely do. But that created, it was, that was the same time that the board at Liberty common school was contemplating adding a
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made that decision at the same time I lost that Senate race. And so they said, well, don't go. I was in the oil and gas industry before that. And they said, hey, don't go back to Denver. Come and help us run the school. And that's when I became employed by Liberty Commons. Oil and gas, like.
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Doing communications for them? Doing some lobbying things and stuff? No, I was doing a lot with... My job title was vice president for business development. Oh, interesting. And my job duties was almost everything that didn't fit in somebody else's job title. So I did a lot of... Look, we got...
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We got drilling rigs that Chinese made drilling rigs into the United States at a time when you couldn't buy it. You couldn't rent a drilling rig. Right. So we got our own. And they were in China. So getting in here was hard. And all the instructions were written in Chinese. So I had to get Chinese engineers over here. So I spent a lot of time doing stuff like that.
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All kinds of environmental regulatory compliance issues. And then the boss was interested in getting the company involved in business entry in foreign countries. So there were five or six other countries where I got the company involved and –
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helped them get up and running. Yeah, yeah. And there's lots of, just all kinds of ancillary projects that go with the oil and gas industry that when we look around the table and everybody's, not it, I'm not doing it. And it was like, I'll take a crack at that. I can figure it out. Yeah. And so I ended up doing lots of really exciting and interesting things for five, six, or seven years. Has to be like a friend of a friend kind of thing or something like that? Or how did you land in, like...
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It seems like an unlikely career transition. Well, okay, well, we've been talking about education, but in addition to serving on the Education Committee in Washington, I was also on the Natural Resources and Interior Committee and on the Agriculture Committee. So those were areas where I developed some expertise and worked a lot with America as well. Yeah. Natural Resources. Mining, timber, public lands. On network and understanding. Yeah, all of that. Well, and general understanding. Yeah. Right? Like one of the things I love about this podcast is I can talk to a lot of interesting people that know stuff. Yeah. And then I can just get smarter by talking to them and listening. Yeah.
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And we were in the wind power business. We did a lot of renewable investment and other natural resources too. We bought 51% interest in one of the largest potash mines in North America. And so there was just, you know, I had an eclectic boss who was just an economic entrepreneurial genius. Yeah. And learned a lot from him. And so he'd identify problems and point to me and say, can you fix that or take care of it?
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run point on it and sometimes i could sometimes uh sometimes i didn't deliver it seems like your uh your personality could have also been very fulfilled in kind of traditional business and industry stuff instead of the education space or politics or whatever i'll mention i ran my own for a while just a one-man show when i was
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in the state legislature and i ended up enjoying that a lot uh offloaded that to run for a lieutenant governor in the state and then um after i left congress one of the first things i did was get in the energy uh arena and i love that too do you have other uh do you like make cheese at home or weird things like that it seems like you might have some of those kind of eclectic hobbies i'm not i
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You know, I'm a gardener. I like, and I'm not, nothing remarkable or anything like that. I'll grow my own green beans and a little bit of lettuce. Yeah. But you get your fingers dirty. It's a cany or two. And my backyard is very prosperous. I like it. I like it. I like it.
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We are going to enter into the local experience segment. Okay. Which, I guess before we get there, do you want to give a shout out to Maureen, your girls, your family along the way? Yeah, Maureen's the love of my life. She's my wife. How many years? 40 years this year. 40 years. Yeah, yeah. Or we've exceeded 40 years already. And so 40 years.
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Uh, we had five kids, uh, Jenny, Emily, or twin girls, both warriors, one air force, one army, the army daughters over in Germany right now. Uh, both of them are, um, um, uh, uh, Oh shoot. Um, Lieutenant colonels now. Oh wow. I just became both. And then, uh, so is my son-in-law and, um,
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So they married warriors as well. And then my son, he's an Army veteran now as well. He's a banker, follow your footsteps. He's an economist. My next daughter, the number four girl, she just became a mom and a doctor, medical doctor. And so she is just starting her residency in Pennsylvania in anesthesiology.
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And the baby of the family is an arborist here in town. She's got a business degree from University of Northern Colorado, an arborist by profession. And she's over in Germany right now helping my other daughter take care of her four boys. Oh, awesome. So between all those five kids, they've made 11 other humans. Nice. And so Maureen and I have 11 grandkids, number 12's on the way. Perhaps a few more to come yet. Yeah, yeah. Well, number 12's going to be here in a few months. And so I don't know what else there is. That's pretty outstanding. That's the most important aspect of my life.
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life and the biggest blessings. That's kind of my own journey, you know, all my siblings and some step-siblings and stuff and everybody's got kind of a cool spouse and good kids and you know, it's just a joy to see that kind of unfolding. You bet. Well, four of those grandkids, three of them go to Liberty Common School. So it's a real treat for me to, in the day job, be able to turn a corner and see one of the grandkids, having them shout out across, hey grandpa.
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I sprinkled this hot sauce maybe a little bit prematurely, but we're going to go ahead and get it. Okay. Oh, don't hit the hot spot there. This is our crazy ginger hot sauce, which is your gift for being on the show today. Okay. If you'd like to grab one of those. All right, I'll take that saturated burger. You want that crazy one? Oh, boy. Let's see your impressions. You can have more. Oh, wow. Yeah.
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It's a peach habanero, bell pepper, fresh garlic, fresh ginger. Wow. It was kind of the flavor profile that Paul made up for me. Okay. I just had the name. Paul from the Matador. When I do my writing. Paul sent his kids to Liberty, by the way. When I do my writing for blogs and stuff, I always come up with the title first.
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And then I write the words. Yeah. And so same thing here. I came up with the hot sauce name Crazy Ginger. Yeah. Because we all kind of know a crazy ginger somewhere in our life. Wow. Yeah, Gilligan's Island at least. Right. Exactly. Right. And I saw it. But it needed to be kind of that orange color. And local think tank has got some orange branding thing and stuff. So Paul just worked on recipes until he had one he was proud of. Well, he hit a home run here. This is lovely. Yeah.
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You've got to like a little heat, I think, and I do. Yeah, I'd say this is about an 8 out of 10. It's not stupid hot. It's an enjoyable hot.
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Yeah. I'm a fan. Awesome. Well, you could buy that at Matador Mexican Grill, actually. They have that on the shelf there to buy, but you get your first bottle for free for being here. I love that place right near my house. Yeah, he was saying he's actually eating that more than any of his other sauces lately. So thanks, Paul, for developing that. Amen. Leading us into the Loco Experience story, which is the craziest experience of your lifetime that you're willing to share with our listeners.
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And it's got to be local? No. Local in this case means instead of local community, it means crazy. So a crazy experience from your lifetime that you may or may not want your grandkids to hear you tell someday, but it'll add some color to your character along the way.
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I, uh, I, I'm going to go with the farm story. Okay. Uh, when I was working my way through college as a farm laborer in Southern Ohio, um, the boss wanted to drain a swamp. You, you hear that metaphor all the time. We were actually draining a swamp. Yeah. Like Trump's been doing. Yeah. So you, uh, you get a big old scoop and put the tractor at the other end and somebody, and I said, say go and drag it down the middle and the.
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Oh, so you just literally almost like pulling a plow through that thing. You try to get a trench through there. And so it fell to me to hold that scoop. And so I said, go. And the boss started pulling me across the swamp from one end to the other. I went about 20 feet into the middle of that once it was a pond. You're like sitting on top of this piece? No, I'm walking behind it. Oh, wow.
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because I was told it was only about four feet deep. Well, I got stuck and I start sinking and I was, I was going under in the middle of the swamp and there's no way Emmett could reach me. Oh, shit. Emmett and Billy, who's the other college kid working there, they're standing on the edge watching me just go down inch by inch.
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until I hit the bottom, but that swamp was right up just above my chin, underneath my lip. Oh, damn. And I thought I was going to die there. Yeah. Like they couldn't have got you. And they didn't have the gear or the equipment or anything to get me. So they say, just hold on. And I watched that tractor go up over the hill in plow gear, over the hill, over to the barn. They came back with some big old sheets of plywood and some ropes and stuff to pull me out.
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And, um, and there I was in the swamp, every, every horsefly in Southern Ohio figured out my location. Those things were just die bombing me and eating holes in me. And you're literally like up to your, yeah. So I was, so I'm slapping these horseflies. Of course, now my head and my face is covered with mud and blood from these things. And, um, and it's hot and muggy and, and I, I literally thought I'm going to die. So I did lots of praying and bargaining and promising, um,
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uh to the almighty and um like 20 30 minutes later these guys come back and laid plywood out on the yeah on the muck and like trying to get your dog out of ice got their way out there a little way but they still couldn't reach me through some ropes out and eventually pulled me sideways and drug me out my boots are still at the bottom of that swamp uh they came off and i think my pants did too and um if i remember right
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Didn't matter. And I didn't care. I was just out of there. Wow. Got my life back. And that little episode, strange thing, when you are convinced you're going to die.
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And have some time to contemplate it. It gives you a perspective that, one, I'll never forget. And two, it just recenters things. I was probably 19, 20 years old at that point in time. And that little episode had a huge impact on me to this day.
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I don't doubt it at all. Not to get deeper, but how do you think it changed you specifically? Well, one, I think I take things more seriously than I did before. You were kind of whimsical before-ish or something? Maybe. I mean, I was never out of control as a kid or anything like that. I was not a troubled youth or never mentioned this alcohol.
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Alcohol was a big thing with all my friends and so on. It just wasn't for me. Yeah. But they were still my friends and I hung out with them. So I wasn't though, you know, you're not a teetotaler, like judgy kind of person in that space. I'm not. I just, it's just a, it's really just a taste thing for me. But, um, um, but, I, I,
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Yeah, I think that episode, I think about it all the time when I'm feeling like life's not fair or I've been dealt an injustice or lose an election, let's say. Because, of course, I know everybody should have voted for me. Of course, yeah. And I don't know what's wrong with these people.
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It's like when I find out somebody doesn't really like me, I'm like, what? And then whenever I think woe is me or how something's miserable or it's not fair or I should be making more money or whatever the case is, I think back and I'm like, you know what? I was this close to being dead. Right. And –
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Yeah, I'm a spiritual person. I'm Catholic, and thank God for the Catholic Church is where I need to be because they welcome sinners, thank God, and so I belong there. I usually say I dispense grace easily because I require more of it than most people. Yeah, but I mean I said a lot of prayers that day, and I think there is –
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When you consider where that muck line stopped, I mean, literally one inch more and I'd have been a goner. And so there are just a lot of things that lined up that allowed me to live as long as I have. And it could have all ended up there in the bottom of a swamp in southern Ohio. I, for one, will say, and I think Maureen would agree with me, that I hope you get another 40 more.
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I hope so too. And I hope I never have to literally drain a swamp. Well, I wish you would, maybe. Honestly, I don't know how long this headmaster thing goes and liberty grows and stuff like that. But man, I would vote for you. Just saying.
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Oh, well, thank you. You know what? I know we're over, but back in the first Trump term, I got invited. I was a finalist for U.S. Secretary of Education. Oh, is that right? Yeah, they invite me back there to Trump Tower. And I don't know Donald Trump. I've never met him, but I got invited in –
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And so I was in this interview panel with, and these are all like Trump people. None of them are education people. And so, uh, I mentioned the story. I said, you know, you guys keep talking about draining the swamp. You know, believe it or not, I've actually, I've really done that. I've drained a real, real swamp. And, um, and, uh, oh, we did, by the way, we did get that swamp drained in the end. Um, just not that day. And so not that strategy.
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But, you know, we really did. And I said, so I know everybody's talking about this, but I know how you do it. You cut a trench down the middle and let all the just let all the fluid follow it out. And then the rest of it eventually dries out so that you shovel it out. And I said, I this works in government, too. I know this having been a member of Congress for all those years. And.
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Well, both parties are kind of full of shit anyway Yeah, well, that was the thing So they said, is there any reason you wouldn't take this job? And I said, yeah, if you guys aren't serious about draining the swamp Then you should give it to somebody else Because I don't have any interest in doing anything else here And so they didn't call me back Doesn't seem like they're that interested They didn't call me back For that topic They called me back for other things Fair Well, Bob
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I hope you've enjoyed this time. I did, a lot. And, you know, vote for Bob Schaefer for Senate when that time comes around. Well, that's not going to come around. Nine years. But you can send your kids to Liberty Commons School. Do send your kids to Liberty Commons. Send your kids to Liberty Commons School. And if they can't get into Liberty Commons, send them to Ridgeview. Yeah, I'll give you a personal tour of Liberty anyway and have good things to say about Ridgeview. Appreciate you, Bob. Thank you. Godspeed.
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Hi, this is Kurt Baer, host of The Loco Experience. And I wanted to let our listeners know that beginning in June of 2026, we're going to be releasing podcast episodes on Wednesday mornings instead of on Saturdays. So we've tested Saturdays for a while. Meh. Honestly, we were better on Wednesdays before. So we're heading back to that. And I hope to see you there every Wednesday with a new episode of The Loco Experience.
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My guest for today's conversation was Bob Schaefer, headmaster of the Liberty Commons School in Fort Collins and chairman of leadership program of the Rockies. Bob presented to my Rotary Club a couple months back and was kind enough to share time with me on the Loco Experience podcast. Long before his focus on education, because he yet had no children, Bob got into politics, mostly as a writer.
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His first real job was an intern slash speechwriter for the Republican caucus in Ohio, and he was good at it, and it translated well to a similar role for the then-majority Republican Party in Colorado when he and his wife moved here. One thing we agree on is that writing is thinking, and Bob's good at both, which is why he was appointed at the age of 25 to finish a departing state senator's term,
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the youngest in Colorado history to serve in the role. And it's also why, after his own little started arriving, that he turned his focus toward education, first in the Colorado Senate, then in the US House of Representatives. And that's where Wikipedia notes he also sponsored a balanced budget resolution and amendment to the Constitution, which unfortunately for all of us was unsuccessful. But since our country is broke, we're gonna need smart kids to dig us out. And that's where Liberty Common School comes in.
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Bob shares widely about how they're different and why, and how everyday moms and dads and grandparents can be involved in their children's education. Bob's the kind of guy I could enjoy a six hour conversation with, so consider this hopefully a part one, and please enjoy, as I did, my conversation with Bob Schaefer. Welcome to the Loco Experience Podcast. On this show, you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, and through it all, you'll be inspired and entertained.
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These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Okay.
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Welcome back to the Loco Experience Podcast. My guest today is Bob Schaefer. Bob is the headmaster of the Liberty Commons School. He's also the chairman of the leadership program of the Rockies, devoted husband and father, and my latest guest on the Loco Experience Podcast. Well, thanks for having me. I got to say, you came in saying that you had checked out a couple of my previous podcasts before coming in. So I really appreciate that. Sometimes people come in cold and...
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Curious about the setup and how you do. Did you enjoy either of them more than the others, or who were the guests that you tuned in for? I knew you were going to ask me now who I watched. I don't recall. Nobody you knew before. Sorry about that, but I was more interested in the setup and what exactly you do here.
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Yeah, I'd like to say in the podcast world, there's a couple of pretty famous podcasts. How I Built This is an NPR podcast. They interview big tycoons and such. And then the Joe Rogan experience is kind of a wide-ranging comedian conversation and whatever. So I kind of hybridize that, plus a northern Colorado audience. Right, good. So life and business journey, plus we might chase squirrels for 25 minutes. OK. Get you in all kinds of trouble.
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You have the board at Liberty Common being like, Bob, can't be saying those kind of things. We'll see. I doubt it. I doubt it. So I guess let's just set the stage a little bit for listeners that, especially if you're not in northern Colorado or adjacent, tell me about Liberty Common School. I was surprised how much it had grown and how many campuses are going on and stuff now.
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Yeah. Well, Liberty Common School is one of the first charter schools in the state. It's not the first, but it was in that first wave of charter schools way back in the 1990s. So 1997 is when we applied for our charter, had it approved. And the...
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Colorado Charter School Act passed the legislature and became law in 1994. So there were some initial charters that were initiated right away. And we were in that wave of early charter schools. For Liberty, it was a two-year, two-cycle process.
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The first charter effort in 1996 was defeated. Well, there was a lot of school district opposition, right? It was enormous back in those days. Well, there was some – way back then, the whole idea of charter schools was new, but
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I was a state senator in those days and was one of the sponsors of the Charter School Act. And Colorado was the third state in the country to adopt charter schools. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So when we proposed, I did that as a legislator. But in the meantime, my wife and I were parents of three kids and interested in high quality education here in northern Colorado. We live in the Poudre School District and always have.
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And so just the idea of a charter school was brand new. Nobody had heard of it. There was a lot of fear associated with charter schools. And it was just a different age. Now there's more comfort with them. Somewhere around it's approaching 20% of Colorado school children are educated in charter schools. So there's no mystery behind them anymore. All of the fears about...
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Yeah, all kind of bizarre things that we had to deal with. The kids didn't all get up on cocaine or anything like that. So what was the fears around? Just like they would put too much pressure on the regular schools kind of thing? Well, there is a competitive fear. Well, that's what I like. Yeah.
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Yeah, the competition was new. Public schools are still, even to this day, substantially government-owned, unionized, bureaucratized monopolies. And heavily subsidized in comparison. And it was even more the case where your zip code or your address was the determinant of what school you were going to receive.
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Those days are long gone, and I credit charter schools with changing the dynamics of public education in Colorado. Even that school choice element and stuff like that is driven by that. Yeah, intra-district choice, intra-district choice were things that were not heard of before the charter school movement came along. But once charters did, then those sorts of options within an education marketplace became a little broader and more.
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We moved what is called the Overton window, where something that seemed pretty radical now is very mainstream. So, all right, all that to say, way back then, the opposition was just the existence of competition. There were some other things that seemed odd and strange. One was, for example, under the Charter School Act, charter schools are not obligated to...
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to limit their hiring pool just to licensed teachers. So that scared many people. Oh, so quality concern, I suppose. Yeah, because many people think that license has something to do with quality, and that's just not true. Can we go back one step? Sure. What's that base difference between a charter school and a traditional public school? Sure.
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Well, a charter school is a public school. That's the first thing. But it is a public school that is one step removed from direct control by a local school board. There is some control by a local school board and by the state, where charter schools are still obligated under state law to meet certain expectations and have some testing, for example. But if you want to have a thematic one or like, I remember that –
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Polaris Expeditionary School was a charter school, right? Because it had a special intentional focus on adventurous things or whatever. Right. So the management of the school itself becomes local. Like a spin-off, almost. Which we call site-based management. Okay. The board...
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So whereas a headmaster or – they don't call them that – but a principal of a regular public school is under the jurisdiction of the superintendent and the local school board, my boss is seven parents who serve on the Liberty Common School board. Yeah. And so there's – it is local control, localized control, site-based management in that regard. Yeah.
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But along with that, we have flexibility in who we can hire, the terms under which we hire them. We're not unionized, for example, so we can hire each employee based on their contribution to the organization. And fire them without an act of Congress. We are all hired at will, meaning if our board doesn't even need a strong reason. I've heard horror stories about teachers being terrible, and it's just too hard to fire them so you promote them to admin or something.
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I brought a flow chart on how hard it is to remove a teacher from a regular public school who is... Now, if they're dangerous, I don't want to scare anybody. If they're dangerous, if they are doing inappropriate things, personal relationships with the students, even a regular public school can remove that individual right away.
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But if you have a teacher who is, let's just say a science teacher who turns out to be mediocre at teaching science, it's really, really difficult in regular public education to move that person out of the classroom. And you can't do it quickly, that's for sure. So it's just a lot more localized control. In my school, we can do it more quickly. Now, we don't race to go fire people at my school. Our teachers stick around for a long time.
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And so retention for us is something we can be really proud of. However, it has occurred in my 16 years since I've been working there that we brought somebody in to be a teacher that wasn't meeting the high expectations that we have. And so we coach and we try to assist and we try to guide them towards success. But in a few occasions, it has not worked out. And so we either get...
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to the middle of the year or sometimes just middle of the week. And we just decide, uh, today's your last day. And we're sorry, we've done all the things that we should be doing to, yeah, for prudent coaching. It didn't work out. So today's your last day. Yeah. Trying to really eliminate the bureaucracy of education as best you can is what I think I'm, is it the core thing I'm hearing? Now, if I did that willy nilly and for light and transient causes, nobody would want to work there anymore, but we don't, we do that for reasonable purposes.
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for proper reasons. And then our board wants to, my board has questions about those things. Why did you get rid of Mrs. Jones? And what were the circumstances? And so on. And if I don't have a good answer, well, then they'll fire me. Sure. Not to interject, but I came to Fort Collins actually working for a bank organization called Community First National Bank. And they eventually grew up to somewhere around 130 banks
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buying banks that the big U.S. banks and stuff like that, First Bank, didn't want. And then they set up little systems where there was a decent amount of management just vested in the local branch, and then they would bind together four to six regional branches and then give them a lot more lending authority and really outsource a lot of the decision-making on how to run the bank, because it's different to run a bank in Fargo than it is in western Nebraska than it is in Iowa. Right.
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And so they really had that same kind of mentality and a certain significant portion of their budget for community engagement, sponsoring the school sports teams and doing stuff like that and really being a community citizen of sorts. Of course. Rather than just, you know, Wells Fargo, 1-800, here's your banker. And so what you're talking about is kind of the same kind of elimination of bureaucracy from letting the local people on the ground make more decisions.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, so, all right, personnel is one thing. The other is the pay scale. So let's face it, hiring a really good physics instructor...
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In any state for high school is very difficult. Okay. If you aspire to- If you want a mediocre physical instructor, then that's easier. Well, I'm just thinking about it. If you aspire to achieve a physics degree, you're probably a pretty smart person whose value out in the marketplace is much higher than what a public school will pay.
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In a general public school setting, that physics teacher in year one coming out of college, let's say, will get paid the same amount of money based on their lane and their steps, as they're called, the number of years that they've been in the district and their degree.
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as let's say a third or fourth grade teacher. Now they're valuable too, but the value is different. Well, the specialization of skill. Well, and they're rare. The physics instructor. Yeah. So if, if scarcity is a reality about a certain, certain skill set, um,
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Well, that professional employee ought to be able to command more in a legitimate marketplace. And at my school, that's true. We wheel and deal with new teachers or teachers who have taught somewhere else until we arrive at a handshake agreement where they win and we win and in the door they come. And that dollar amount is going to be different than someone else.
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Do you have to pay less for your third and fourth grade teachers then to balance it on the overall, or there's just less administrators in your system? No, it's a K through 12 school, and so the distinction is not really a function of grade level. Now, it's true. A physics instructor, a very good physics instructor, a chemistry instructor is harder to find.
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We – just depending on the experience at that point in time, I mean, look, if I've got 10 applicants who want to teach high school chemistry, then I'm not going to pay top dollar. Right, right. I'm going to pay a lot. I'm going to pay a reasonable amount to get a very good chemistry instructor, but I'm not beholden to a marketplace of scarcity. You don't have that one unicorn you need to hire. Yeah. And so –
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So it is probably fair to say when it comes to elementary instructors, I can find more of them. Now, I want the highest quality I can find. So if in the interview process we find a teacher that has a third grade, fourth grade teacher that...
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meets a certain set of needs that we have, whether it's leadership, whether it's special education applications, whether it is just really dialing in the curriculum that we utilize, the core knowledge sequence, yeah, we'll pay premium dollar for that instructor.
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Now, time matters for us, too. There are those who have taught a lot out in public education. And we do place a higher value on instructors that have taught for a number of years in our school, our curriculum, in our setting. And we have a pay-for-performance plan. So, yeah.
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In a nutshell. Like if the kids get better grades. Those who are new. No, it's not a function of grades. Okay.
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It'd be easy to crank the grades up a little bit. Well, that's another difference between us and regular public schools. There's a state law that requires a teacher evaluation in regular public schools to be a factor of a child's performance on state standardized scores. We think that's malpractice, frankly. And so we have other metrics that we use and state standardized scores we look at, but we don't teach to those state standards. We teach to a...
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a different curriculum, hence another advantage of charter schools. So, all right, getting back, getting back to this, if you're in the school for a number of years and you keep adding value and adding value that gets rewarded. And everyone in our organization knows that. So a very good teacher at Liberty common school makes more than they would in almost any other public school setting anywhere, newer teachers, new,
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Not yet. Yeah. They know that there's a trajectory. They know it's for real. They know they want to be there. And they're in an environment where they see after – sometimes it takes a year or two to prove that to a new teacher. Sure. That, no, value added is rewarded here. And then once –
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You build that culture. I got to tell you, people get into it. They love it. They are motivated by it. They want to get their kids in that school. And they stay for a long time. How do you know how much value people are adding? Is it like creating new curricula content? Is it like just having the kids at the end of the year say, Mrs. Schaefer or Mrs. Smith was the best teacher ever? How do you actually gather that data? No, the opinions of the kids...
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That's, it's interesting. And I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it is not the, it's not the, the essence of the metrics that we use. The nice lady that doesn't teach them anything doesn't really qualify. And, um,
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So it, it, uh, all right. So the, um, how do you know? Well, it's, it, it is, it is a moving target in a moving mark in a dynamic marketplace. Let's say the amount of funds we receive from the state, cause we're a, we're a public school. Sure. Um, the per pupil operating revenue changes. For example, we're, we're receiving somewhere between three and 4% increase year over year.
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in total funding. Sure. So there's some reasonable, rational constraints on what we have to work with within a year. Yeah, your gross budget is the budget and stuff. And to the extent that everyone in the school understands that, nobody's expecting gigantic pay raises year to year. However, some are going to receive 7% pay raises and some are going to receive maybe one. And that's going to get redistributed. But how do you know who's doing a really good job and who's not? Sure. It's an elaborate... Okay. It's a very elaborate...
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set of data points that we collect in informal and formal evaluations. Now, I say test score, we don't predicate someone's pay or their evaluation on test scores, but we do predicate it on their ability to utilize test scores. So we have to take the state exam, the CMASS test,
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We take a glance at it. We don't teach to the state standards. We teach to the core knowledge curriculum, K-8, and a college preparatory classically oriented curriculum that continues on through high school. So the curriculum is not as impacted by the testing as...
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The state testing. Now we do use another different metrics. We use and it's called the NWEA test that aligns more closely with our core knowledge curriculum for juniors and at the high school level.
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All juniors in the state of Colorado take the SAT. That's a pretty good predictor of college success, which is what it's designed to be. But we also take the classical learning exam, a classic learning exam, CLE, which we take both. And so we have a number, and there's just their preparation to be ready to go to college.
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So we look at all of those metrics. The standard of measure of sorts is how well are you preparing kids to go enter the world more? Well, at our school. Into the world, for us, it's, yes, into the world. But we are distinctly a college preparatory institution. Yeah, gotcha.
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And to the extent we have a college target, it is selective university. So it's a high level that we are aimed at. And so we can see year over year, students in the English department are how well prepared they are on that particular battery of subject matter in their college pursuits. And whether history, math, English, science, foreign language, we're able to –
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assess college preparation on a departmental level. And then within the department, we can see. So that's one of those measures that you can measure teachers by. Yes. I'm going to pull this even back up to a higher view. How many, as you said, all the way K through 12. Right. How many students? How many campuses? Is it just Larimer County that you're serving? So any campus?
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Any child of a Colorado resident is eligible to attend Liberty Commons School. So they can be in another county. They can be in another school district. We give enrollment priority to those who live in our constituents in our Poudre School District. Okay. Because we're a Poudre School District school. So therefore, we have an obligation to serve Poudre School District students first. Yep. And if there is an opening after we've exhausted that part of the lottery, then students from –
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Other districts can come into the school. So that happens sometimes. It's happening with greater frequency just because of, from a demographic standpoint, what's called the big shrink up and down the front range and throughout the country. And that is the birth rate has dropped years ago. And so that cohort is getting smaller.
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Yeah. I just wrote about that last month in my blog about the best thing you can do for the northern Colorado workforce is make more babies because we're not importing them like we used to. That's exactly right. We try to speak that suggestion over the children to the parents. We don't want our high school juniors and seniors thinking that that applies to them. After college.
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Yeah. And due time. They get that message. But, um, but so we, uh, there, there is a lottery. You go to our website and, uh, you can, there's an enrollment button. And so you have to get on a lottery first. We draw down the lottery and it is a lottery. So it's, you could get on the lottery tomorrow. You could get on the lottery years ago. It doesn't matter when we get to the certain part in the year, when we draw down our lottery, it really is a legitimate lottery. And, um,
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And then it's like you're qualified or you're not qualified. Well, there's no qualification. Really? There's no entrance exam or anything like that. Once you're in, we test a student to ensure that the curriculum we offer is going to match that child's readiness.
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If they're behind in one subject matter or another, then we will make some accommodations to close those gaps as quickly as we can. If they're behind in more than a couple, then we might have a conversation about the wisdom of repeating a grade. Parents don't try to send their kids necessarily like, my kid's really struggling. I'm going to go ahead and send them to the really college preparatory community.
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Oh, no, they do. They do? Yeah. Okay, so you get the rehab projects as well as the smart kids that are looking for a little more challenge. Some would call them that. You wouldn't use that terminology, but that's what I said, not you. Yeah, I would say they might have just been in a school that was a mismatch for what those parents' expectations was. And so, yeah, we get a lot of families who get to some point of realizing that their children are in a place they did not anticipate.
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It's sometimes behind. Yeah. And they come to Liberty because they know, frankly, we're very, very good at closing those achievement gaps very quickly. That's cool. Sorry to tease you on that a little bit. The projects. Well, so I had my former marriage counselor on years ago. And I asked him, what are your favorite kind of clients to work with? And whatever. He's like, well, people that are actually motivated to change. I'm like, oh.
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Well, duh. Like, who doesn't want? You know, and so same for you. It's like, hey, we want those really super. But it's cool that you – I didn't realize that it was not a competitive thing to get in. It's really just a lottery, and then you do your best that you can with them. Yeah, we do the assessments after they're already in the school. And as I say, then we make sure that we manage –
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their curricular goals in a way that is going to give them the greatest chance of success, grade level to grade level. I have a story I need to share with you, just in light of our meeting at the Rotary Club and your talk there. But I met with a gal recently, and she has a fractional HR consulting business here in town.
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And she and her husband moved here about eight months ago with their two kids. And I asked her, you know, up from Centennial. They lived in Centennial area, Denver Metro. I was like, you know, what brought you up here anyway? And she said, well, our oldest daughter got into Ridgeview Classical School. Oh, good. So we had to move up. And I was like, oh, that's...
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That's a cool story. That is a great story. Well, we're big fans of – I'm a big fan of Ridgeview. Right. You guys are budsies, right? Well, we helped start Ridgeview. As I thought, yeah. And so we – you'd say friendly competitors. I'd call us sibling rivals because there was a point in around 2000 – yeah, it was around 2000 –
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Liberty's waiting list was just enormous and continued to grow, and many families just wanted us to make Liberty bigger. And we said, actually, what we ought to do is organize and make another school like Liberty. And that became Ridgeview. And what was better about Ridgeview was...
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in those days was that they added high school and Liberty didn't have one. Right from the start. Yeah. Liberty was only kindergarten through ninth grade up until 2010. And Ridgeview was a K-12 school. It phased into a K-12 school, but it was a K-12 design from the outset. My son's a Ridgeview grad. Oh, is that right? Yeah. And so, as I say, we're sibling rivals. We're both core knowledge schools.
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both classically oriented. We're not identical, but we're siblings. And I'm proud of that. And so it's nice. So when you say somebody got into Ridgeview, I cheer about that. That was my heart. Well, I'm proud of her, frankly, and her husband for making decisions like that, like focusing a move of your whole family based on kind of this school system. And I'm sure you've heard the same story as parents at Liberty Common. People have chosen...
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in Colorado to get their kids into Liberty or Ridgeview sometimes. So set the stage. So now you are K-12. Yes. And I don't want to go through the whole life journey, but what's, I guess, what's the current, how many campuses? So we're on four campuses now. We've got...
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We're coming up on 1,700 kids that we serve in the school. And it's expanding. We expanded four years ago at the elementary grades. That's where we had the biggest waiting list. Expanding was not our mission and not our goal. However, there was a school, Colorado Early Colleges, that had a building.
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On the southwest part of town, Taft Hill and Horsetooth. How familiar. And they called one day and said, you know, we're looking at possibly selling this building. And so every project we've ever done involved converting a building into the school we needed.
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the physical layout. But that facility was ready-made. Already made for a school. So we knew, all right, we could serve. One, we had a lot of families on the southwest part of the city that were driving across town, so we don't have a bus service. Sure. And so they were carpooling from over there, and so we could bring the school to a place that was a little more convenient for them. So that's your fourth campus there? That's the third campus. Third, okay.
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But the thing that really attracted us was the neighborhood. There is one of the largest trailer parks in northern Colorado right across the street. One of the criticisms we hear unfairly, unfair criticisms, is that somehow our school is only for elite families. Well, there is no bus service, so you've got to be able to carpool. So there is some self-selection there, and it does preclude some families from attending the school. But moving our school across the street,
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from a low income center in the community was something that was attractive to us because this curriculum that we use was intended for the inner city. That's where it was test piloted 30, 40 years ago and proven. And, uh, and it is, it is intended to be the great equalizer in income and race. And, and so we, uh, we,
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Didn't think about it very long. It took two votes of our board, but on the second vote, our board decided, let's go ahead and move over there. And so we did, and it's been a great success. So that resulted in, over the long term, around 500 new students that will be coming into the school, and we're most of the way along that trajectory. Did CEC close, or they just consolidated campuses? COVID changed their business model. And so once they did...
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They didn't need the brick and mortar physical location quite as much as they did before. And I think they ended up adapting more to using online and remote services. And we didn't. We didn't adapt to that. We very much prefer traditional classroom instruction. And so it was a win-win.
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So we ended up renting that building for three years. Then we – now we own it. All right. So having all those new students into the elementary grades has resulted in them going into junior high. Right, right. And so this past year was the first year we had sixth graders moving into the seventh grade. Okay. And –
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And so that's our biggest cohort of seventh graders ever. And next year, there'll be eighth graders with more kids coming behind them. And so we built a standalone junior high campus, which was half finished for the 25, 26 school year. It will be fully finished for the 26, 27 school year. And that will be our fourth campus. And hopefully we'll be done.
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And doing all of that, meeting with the architects, is not really the academic mission that I prefer to be focused on. And so, yeah, we're coming to the end of our expansion plans. And then I can, I don't want to say begin focusing, but I can isolate my focus to the most important thing, which is the academic mission of the school. And is that, like, is this a calling for you of sorts? Was even the, because you said, did you sponsor the legislation that got started?
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I did. Yeah. I mean, I was – my calling – yes. Yeah, absolutely. And my calling is no different than any other parent, in my opinion. It is – we have a – we call it the universal truth of public education, and that is it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.
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Now, most parents should believe that. They have children. They must educate them. You don't send them off to a place, much less a government bureaucracy, to educate your children for you. Well, unfortunately, I think culturally that's uncommon anymore. Well, listen, that is a root cause of cultural decay is that many have perpetuated that unfortunate cause.
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viewpoint that someone else raises your children, you just have them. That's troubling. And then they join the trans club. That will destroy the republic if parents abandon their responsibility. And maybe it is destroying the republic, but there are certain places of... Some bulwarks against it. Yeah, there's some bright places of hope, and I think liberty is one of those. So...
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it is the responsibility of parents to educate their children. Well, Maureen and I had twins first, and then we had another one, our boy, twin girls, then our boy was 18 months behind them. So, yeah, we were in the education business right away. It was our calling. It was our mission. It was the thing we wanted to do more than anything else was raise these children. And then we were blessed with two more children after them. And so, yeah, we were thrust into this responsibility and this enormous duty.
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And happily. So now it's hard. So we do hard things like that with a smile on our face and as cheerfully as we can. And when we concluded that the options we – that the expectations we had were not aligned with our address at the time. And the address, remember, back in the 80s and 90s, the address determined your school. Sure. Well, when the school we wanted was not attached to our address –
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We joined other parents in town who had come to similar conclusions, and that is there's got to be a better way than a government-owned, unionized, monopolized bureaucracy. And so that's when...
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I kind of became a warrior. I happened to have already been in the state legislature. Right. And decided, all right, well, I'm here. How do I make the most of it? Not just for the Schaefer kids, but to the extent we're normal to every other family that has high expectations for their child's education. So the charter school strategy was just one strategy among many. Yeah. And we did get that law passed barely. As I say, we were the third in the country. You know, that law passed by
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one vote every step of the way. One vote out of committee in the Senate, one vote off the Senate floor, one vote over in the House, at House committee, the House floor, and then went to the governor, Roy Romer, who was the only vote you need when you're in the executive branch, and he signed it. So by one vote, that passed all the way through. And probably sparked a lot of other states and stuff too, right, because Colorado has always been a kind of a leader of stuff. Who was the first, if I may?
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It was Minnesota. Oh, wow. And then California was the second. Oh, wow. Hard to believe. That is crazy. And Colorado was the third. Well, it's funny because actually those three states used to be kind of libertarian-leaning, free-thinking places where they did new and different things. Yeah. And then all three of them really started being like, hey, let's try socialism. That should work for us.
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Anyway, that's why so many from both states are moving to Colorado, I suppose. Fair enough. Fair enough. This is a sidebar, but somehow talking about the zip codes and stuff reminded me of this. In Colombia, they actually have different utility rates based on your zip code.
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So if you're – or neighborhoods, basically. They categorize it, and you're like if you're in a low-income neighborhood, you're on the one tier. If you're in a high-income neighborhood, you're on the sixth tier. And you pay ten times as much for your electricity and your sewer and stuff if you're in the sixth tier. It's a way for them to kind of distribute the cost of doing infrastructure for –
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Kids. Okay. I thought it was like less gross than like your income tax rate is 55% or something. That's a terrible idea. Okay. And I'll tell you why, because I don't want to get off track. Don't be kidding. I love chasing squirrels. Because what the Colombians are doing is using a commodity, electricity. They're using an electron as a methodology, as the basis for tax policy.
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And it is a progressive tax. So what happens is the same commodity, which costs no more in neighborhood A as it does neighborhood B, costs more. It is a tax based on one's income, your neighborhood. But there has to be taxes. Okay. But what is the purpose of this? Yes, there must be taxes.
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Well, even that's debatable. The theory would be it takes the regressivity out of it, right? Yeah, taxes we can accept as being a necessary evil for the operation of government. I like roads. I like fire trucks. However, the purpose of taxation is to raise the requisite amount of money for the legitimate function of government. Sure. When you start attaching...
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differential rates based on one's behavior. Well, now government is in the behavior business. And it is in the business of favoring certain citizens over another for the same service. That is picking winners and losers and giving government politicians the authority to do such things. What I've always said is that if you can set up the taxes in such a way that it doesn't change behavior, that would be the ideal.
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Sure. You know, like when people were hiding from 90% income taxes and all these things and, or even, you know, the value added taxes and different things. And so that's why I think, like, I barely noticed what my utility...
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bills cost and stuff. So basing it on utilities actually makes- Congratulations. Well, I mean, I notice, right? But do you take shorter showers if you notice that your water rate goes up or whatever? Or do you just take the shower that you're going to take? And so I think that having a utility rates-based pricing tiers would almost change behavior less than others. I don't know if that's the answer, but I'm definitely price conscience.
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Right. So you would move to one of those low income neighborhoods just so you could pay less in your utilities? Maybe. I'd probably move to a different country or move to a different jurisdiction if possible. Or I'd get involved in a political process and say, this electron costs the same. No matter where you live, why should one citizen pay more for it than another citizen? That is a discriminatory tax.
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that empowers government in a very wicked way. Interesting. Okay. I'm going to jump off now because we have a lot of ground to cover, but we could probably have a two-hour conversation just on tax policy. I tend to be a little more libertarian about these things. Well, I do too. That's why I thought it was really interesting because of the fact that taxes must be raised and trying to not change people's behavior is the target for me in some ways.
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I know you want to move, but as a general rule, let me just posit this. And that is, government should raise the revenue that is necessary to fund the legitimate purposes, the legitimate functions of government. Oh, for sure. And do so in a fair and equitable way.
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They devolve very quickly into very dangerous forms of discrimination on how one lives, what they prefer, what they choose, and how they live is an important element of that.
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we should be taxed equally and treated as equal citizens in a society. Well, let's talk about that. You told me earlier that you don't drink alcohol. You know, I'm drinking a bourbon here. Yeah. You know, cigarettes and alcohol have a long time had, you know, sin taxes attached to them, right? Because the theory is that because I like to drink bourbon, I'm going to have more negative health consequences and, you know, maybe run over more people over my lifetime. Right.
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Not really, but that I'm actually having a negative impact on society, so I should pay more to this funding mechanism of government. Or how would you fund government then and make it – do you like the fairtax.org proposals? Is that one that you would say is pretty accurate? I would take any tax that treats Americans on a national level, that treats Americans as equals –
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is a step in the right direction. And whether that's a sales tax or a flatter income tax, I don't like the idea of both. Pick one lane or the other. So when I served in the U.S. House of Representatives, I was a pretty strong advocate for a flat income tax, a flatter income tax,
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And so, you know, an income tax, there's no such thing as a good tax. Sure. Well, to have the government do less is ultimately the goal. Yeah. You know, kind of shrink the monster. So there's – anyway, so, yeah, governments have –
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Well, how about schools? Like, my wife and I don't have any children. Right. And yet my property taxes are the same as my neighbors. I've got five kids, and they're all going to school on my dimes. Right. Like, is that fair to me? No, it's not fair to you. Okay, just checking. Good, I like where you're screwed on. It's not fair to you. All right, we could litigate that in terms of community fairness. But you would fund government out of fees for services more then? More so, yeah, I would.
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Tariffs and stuff? Just kidding. Well, tariffs, if they would really replace income taxes. Tariffs and income taxes at the same time is just tax upon tax.
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Bad idea. You brought a stack of books today that would help kind of explain the... Get back to the topic. Yeah, you know. Sorry about that. No, it's cool. We'll come back. Yeah. Like I said, sometimes I would like to go four hours with my guests. But yeah, walk me through a little bit of what you got going on here. Well, one of the first things I brought was just a little bit of books that...
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People think we make it up at our school, and I think that often happens in public education. But Liberty Commons School was launched really with the ideas in this book right here, Cultural Literacy by Dr. E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch was an English professor at the University of Virginia who noticed at the higher ed levels that some of the smartest students in America would end up in his classroom and...
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and they had been exposed to different books. Their language was even different, their exposure to vocabulary and proper grammar. And he wondered, how can we even have – well, he was frustrated. How can we even have good conversations where –
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where we can understand inferences, we can understand the same references, where our language is suitable to have a deep conversation. And he began as an English instructor, starts going backwards in the American education system and realizing that based on what school district a child happens to come from –
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Or as they work their way up, they might have been exposed to a book all Americans should read while another smart student hadn't. And so bringing those students up to grade level to have an upper level discussion at the graduate level in college...
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It perplexed him. And so he started focusing on what went right, what went wrong in American education. And he concludes Americans used to have it correct in how Americans were educated for commonality. Yeah, they had a certain unified messaging. Yeah, well, Noah Webster back in the 1700s talked about an American ethnicity, that that should be the goal of education in the United States.
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The country being a gigantic melting pot and having all kinds of ethnic inputs into the country, but that should result in e pluribus unum, one American ethnicity, and that our schools should teach toward that for a commonality for a variety of reasons.
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Hirsch mentions that right in front of his book, and that's really where he goes with this. And that is that there are certain things all Americans should know. Certain books all American children should be exposed to. Vocabulary that all Americans should recognize. Historic references, facts, math facts, things of that sort. And he laments that...
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We used to do that in the country, but we have drifted away from that. And then he lays out an outline on how we should get there. So that's the goal. Before you move on, I want to share a little bit of my own journey in this. Sure. Because so I was born and raised in North Dakota, graduated with a high school class of five. And so very rural North Dakota. Yeah. And the whole...
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The county was 20,000 people, but we were on the fringes of that county. But in high school, I had at least two, sometimes three study halls a day. And so I would devour every Newsweek, every U.S. News and World Report, every Wall Street Journal, every Popular Mechanics, every Popular Science. That's good. Every book, Huck Finn, all that classical literature. I was reading Dostoevsky and stuff like that. Wow.
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And my actual cultural experience, like I had never, you know, when I moved to Fargo for college, like I said hi to everybody on the sidewalk, walking past them for a while until I finally realized that wasn't how you do things there. And like my experience integrating with people in larger populations and stuff was, and I had never barely met a black person, right? I had no cultural relevancy that way, but I had been steeped in,
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Americana, I suppose. And it's probably that season is probably a strengthening time of my life that I didn't even recognize. Well, it was. What you were... You were achieving a heightened level of commonality with Americans generally by reading popular sources that lots of Americans read. I mean, the idea of a high school student
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Reading the Wall Street Journal, it could be any newspaper, but reading a national publication is rare anymore. Right. And so – Yeah, there is no common dialogue, no common ingestion. And so I like this little – Okay, keep going. Thank you. Well, Hirsch mentions in cultural literacy, he says America's inability – he uses all these examples. Well, now that we don't have the 6 o'clock news anymore or anything, it's –
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It's way going down to. He uses examples of Americans on battlefields versus Germans on battlefields during the Second World War. And how the education of Americans allowed them to adapt, improvise, overcome on the battlefield in a way that was far superior than Germans. And the reason is…
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German education had become specialized. You learn at a very young age to become an engineer or a dancer or in finance or a shepherd, whatever the case is. But Americans, even up to World War II, had a broad general education and were far more adaptable. Well, he mentions that. And he suggests that American schools are getting further and further away from common knowledge and common understanding. Well, and corporations do the same thing. They want to have specialized employees and all these little...
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tubes. Different set of goals. Yeah. But he says, but he is for education for young people. He regards us as our Achilles heel. All right. Now that was a little demonstration. So I use the word Achilles heel. You nod your head in agreement because you know what that means. I will tell you that there are...
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disappointing numbers of Americans who think that's a body part. A reference to your Achilles heel because you have one. But they don't know the story of Achilles being dipped in the river sticks and having now being impenetrable or he's bulletproof except for that little place where his mom holds him and he's got that little point of vulnerability. Alright, well, what does Hirsch mean when he uses a term Achilles heel? Or what can we mean? Two words. Conjures up
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Well, there's an assumption that we both have a little exposure to Greek mythology. Yeah. And some do. So if you use that in a business meeting or in a context like this, well, then we're speaking the same language. If somebody's outside of that conversation, they're missing something very important. And whether it's that little metaphor or a thousand others that he mentions in the book, more and more Americans are not in the conversation. And so he starts with that metaphor.
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That research, that understanding, these conclusions, he paints a pathway in this book, The Schools We Need. Wow. So this guy was really the initiator of the charter school thing or the core knowledge curriculum? Core knowledge curriculum. He mentions the predecessor to Liberty Common School in Fort Collins was called the Washington Core Knowledge School.
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An alternative school in the district that we organized before we had the charter school. And the Washington Core Knowledge School is in here. Okay. And so that's a wonderful little tribute. I want to read that first one, by the way. But he takes – it's still very relevant, by the way, even though it was written in 1983, I think it was.
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But eventually, Hirsch develops these ideas into a curriculum, and that's the other book I brought here. This is the core knowledge sequence. So every core knowledge school in America that uses the core knowledge sequence follows this. And so this becomes the brilliance of – people want to know why is Liberty Common School and Ridgeview and a few other core knowledge schools in town so successful.
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And the fact is, I just opened up the history, grade one, history and geography.
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Every student in a core knowledge school is going to be following this sequence anywhere in the country. That's what I wanted to ask you about. It says sequence on there. That's a big prominent word. So it stacks one on top of the other. I think of math that way, but maybe not as... It's exactly right. Phonics maybe that way, but not as much history and stuff. Stack one upon the other. And not only... So I pointed to first grade. So here's how you can see this coming together. Every kindergarten teacher...
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is responsible for knowing what's in the first grade in history and geography and helping their students be prepared to start on day one with the background knowledge. And that background knowledge is all here. The first grade instructors, as they're teaching this, are expected to know when these topics are going to come back in the third or maybe sixth grade or maybe in high school so that they might learn about kings and queens in kindergarten. But eventually they're going to be in a deep discussion about European monarchs
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and monarchies, different time periods. What are peasants and... But none of that in high school makes an awful lot of sense unless you get the rudiments of it at a very elemental, age-appropriate level in the kindergarten or first grade. And so all of these topics are laid out in a very well-researched, proven way so that...
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It is what you say. It's knowledge stacked upon knowledge that magnifies its power and its impact in a way that is – well, it's just a multiplier effect. Consider this. And this is the lesson I learned when Maureen and I started –
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considering our neighborhood school. And that is we had twins. So twin A and twin B, Jenny and Emily were in kindergarten in the same school. They had different teachers and each teacher taught something different. Now they were both learning, but they were learning differently. Sure.
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And so the question comes up, well, what happens when these students who are learning get into the first grade? And that first grade teacher has some kids who came from that classroom, other kids who came from the other classroom. This is not just a phenomenon in Fort Collins. This is an American phenomenon that had occurred by the 1980s and early 1990s where –
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No kidding. Students would spend a month or two, or teachers would spend a month or two in every grade level, just getting their students up to grade level so they could begin teaching. And then when you do that, some kids are overcoming gaps and other kids are duplicating what they had just learned. When they check out. And it's a waste of time. And so over the course of eight years, well, nine years, kindergarten through eighth grade,
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In America, it was estimated that children were losing up to a year or a year and a half in an average school just through repetition or gaps. And so this is a remedy to that. And it's why we were so attracted to it. We didn't invent this, but we were one of the first cities to bring the core knowledge sequence west of the Mississippi. And Fort Collins is where that landed with this whole story I'm telling you. And so Liberty Commons started –
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around this curriculum. That was really the mission. And this curriculum goes up through eighth grade. We went through ninth grade for many years because that was the grade configuration of the Poudre School District. But when the district changed that and high school became ninth through twelfth grade, then we had to make a decision on jettisoning our
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ninth grade or adding a high school, and our board decided to add the high school. And that's when I came on board as an employee. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the high school doesn't necessarily rely on the core knowledge. Now it's more of a college preparatory.
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Well, but except it's in the same school. So we built our high school curriculum to continue the trajectory. There was already the spiral staircase up to the top. And as it turns out, so our history department chair, for example, is a high school teacher. But that department chair is responsible for sequencing our history curriculum all the way back to kindergarten and...
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And the conversations among faculty in our school is K through 12, all at the same table, going through lesson plans together so that that fourth grade teacher knows when they are, let's say sixth grade teacher, when they're teaching about the French Revolution. Right. They know where that lesson needs, where those kids need to be, what they need to be prepared for by the time they get into the 10th grade. Yeah. Dig it.
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You have two more books to show me. Well, there's a, why Johnny can't tell right from wrong by William Kirkpatrick is this is the book that informs our character education in the school. We feel very, um, um, uh, you know, this is a serious thing for us. The virtue and moral education that a child should receive should be as purposeful as the academic mission of the school. In fact, they're, they're interconnected. There's no difference really from a moral education and, um,
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your academic objectives, but to the extent that you can accentuate them and recognize them and reinforce them as you're talking about different periods in history. And when you're discussing, for example, the Nazi party in, uh, 1930s in Germany, there are great moral lessons and virtue lessons about individuals and as a nation that you can derive from that. So we want our teachers instructing on these, uh, time periods and the, their, their meaning
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in our complete understanding of Western civilization, but we also don't want our students to miss an opportunity to think through. What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Who reacted in a heroic way? Who reacted in a cowardly way through history? And so that's part of what this book is about. And again, to the extent that we want commonality in what Americans know,
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We want commonality in our understanding of what is right and wrong. Sure. That there are cardinal virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude. Everybody needs those. Right. Sorry. That's a feature, not a bug. No. Actually, we better take a pause. I broke it. Yep. I don't know.
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There we go. Should have been an engineer. Octopus. We'll clean that up on the backside. And what was I going to say? Oh, actually, I was thinking about current events recently and just the duality of the response to the SpaceX IPO. Some people are like, oh my god, trillionaires should not exist. We need to tax this guy into oblivion and pay off 1 60th of the national debt. And other people are like,
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Sweet. He created, you know, Elon Musk I'm referring to, obviously, created 4,000 millionaires and 400 millionaires through building this company that added so much value to the world that they kicked NASA's ass and nobody bothers shipping stuff with them anymore.
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Well, if you consider – I mean that's the politics of envy or an understanding of economics that is driven by one's envy or maybe even greed. You know, Bill Gates, for example, left industry.
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And so he was villainized while he was in industry making his billions. And then he leaves and starts some nonprofits. And for some reason, he's all of a sudden ready to – people want to canonize him. Nonprofits are mostly just a way for him to avoid persecution. Maybe. But he gives a lot of money away, right? Right. And so – but the reality is – Let's not turn him into a hero though. There's a lot of people that I agree with. But the reality is whether it's Bill Gates or whether it is Elon Musk –
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These thinkers, these innovators, these organizers of thought and ingenuity and creativity and capitalism, they create more wealth for individuals across the board than any philanthropist does by using the income that they have derived and giving it away. Which is what Warren Buffett said really throughout his last 30 years. He's like, you know, some people criticize me because I'm not super philanthropic along the way.
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But I think I can get better returns and make more of a difference when I'm gone and leave the world a better place then. Well, listen, more people engage in industries that didn't exist before, that are employed in industries that were designed or thought of or capitalized by people like Elon Musk. Yeah.
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Sure, maybe they don't identify with them. They don't have yachts. They don't have vacation homes or whatever he has. I don't know. They don't have billions, if not the first trillionaire. Right, right. Maybe people don't identify with that because they don't know what that amount of wealth is. But the...
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The impact of that in society is a capitalist forced multiplier that creates more good. It is far more moral and virtuous than is...
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taking from some and using government to take from some to give to others and redistributing other's wealth. It is the fairest economic system ever devised in human history. And so criticizing people because they are successful, because they've invented or envisioned something that you didn't, that's not somebody worthy of criticism. That's somebody worthy of admiration and replication if you can do it.
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Did you see his delivery of the two economists joke that was running the social media rounds lately? I'm sorry, no. So there's two economists that are taking a hike in the forest. And they come around the bend, and right in the middle of the trail is a big old pile of poop. And they're looking at it a little bit. They don't even know what kind it is or whatever. But the first economist says, I'll give you $100 if you eat that. And...
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The first guy's kind of embarrassed, but he's like, you know what? Okay. So he eats the poop, gets his $100. They move on. Come around a corner another hour later. They're still hiking and another pile of poop. And the economist that ate the poop was like,
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This time I'll give you $100 to eat that poop. And so somehow the guy decides to do it. And so they basically are both in the same place before the hike, but they've both eaten a pile of poop now. And the first economist says, do you know what this means? And the second one is, no, but I know we've increased the gross domestic product by $200.
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And nobody's got any more money. There's just two guys that have eaten poop. You know, so what I was thinking about is a lot of the uber-wealthy, especially that inherited their money and whatever, their money is literally in houses all across the world, in Vail and Avon and Telluride or Maui, buying up the formerly burned-up lots, you know, investing in that.
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And it just sits there. It doesn't create any jobs. It doesn't, even when it's given through a foundation and stuff, it doesn't still stimulate actual economic activity to speak of. I'd debate you there. You think? Oh, yeah. Yeah. The fact that they acquired it and paid some market price in order to acquire that market.
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dwelling, that facility, even if they leave it vacant. Oh, yeah. The contribution is the number of carpenters and electricians and all the craftspeople that contributed to that. But think of the jobs that they don't create. Like, the house gets created and then it just sits there. Well, think of it this way. An operating company, a business that's worth...
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$10 million. A local HVAC company, just for use of an example, that makes $2 million a year or something. Right. It does sales of $5 million and makes a couple million or a million and a half. It might be worth $10 million. But it's probably created, it's probably got 100 jobs on the payroll. Their payroll might be $5 million a month to create that kind of, or a couple million dollars a month or something to create that kind of a business. Okay. That's different than having a $10 million house that,
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in Vail that just sits there and gets used for two weeks a year. That house doesn't create any activity to speak of after it's been built. But it is infrastructure, it is property tax paying, so I guess we do want to build things. But it still has a use value, it still has a market value. I'm just saying there's a difference in net worth. It pushes outward the value of improved land all around as well. Would it be as beneficial? Okay, yeah.
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All right. Well, yeah, we could – you would be correct, I think, that – I would agree with you that there is – there's going to be a variable. If Elon shut down Tesla and SpaceX – Yeah, and productivity with those capital improvements. And laid off all those people. Yeah. He laid off all those people and just invested his trillion dollars in real estate around the world. Right.
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that would be so much less of a benefit to society and humanity. The real estate appreciates in value is not much different than investing it in a stock market or somewhere else. Many people invest in real estate as an investment to grow their income. Along the way, you still need maintenance people to go out there and mow the lawn. You still need – a pipe's still going to break. You're still going to need to keep the electricity flowing just to keep it warm in the wintertime. There's all kinds of –
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Either way, it's better than getting it to the government. You could – so yes, you're right. You're right. One could create more value out of that improvement, but one is still creating value just by owning it even if they hold it. And it's far better, by the way, than if government buys that unused land. Sure.
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And puts it on the government rolls because the worst landlord in America is the United States government. In Utah, they're trying to make it less than 70% federally owned land at some point in time. I know. God bless them. Yep. It should be. Why should that ever have been the case?
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Anyway, I digress. You've got two more books. Oh, the other two. So we've got one of these books for every grade, K through 8. This is what every sixth grader should know or what your sixth grader should know. So it's kind of lined up with that sequence there. Yeah. So this is the guide that our teachers are using in the classroom and that I as an administrator are making sure we're aligned to and sticking to it. So that's the guidebook, the roadmap, at a sophisticated level. Yeah.
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But for parents, this is what they have available to them. So when your student go, here's just a truism. You bring any sixth grade boy or girl comes home from school, and there they are at the dinner table, and you say, hey –
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Johnny, what did you learn today in the sixth grade? They all have the same answer. And the answer is nothing. They don't want to talk about this at home. They just spent their whole day doing brain dumps and listening and taking their notes and maybe some tests. And they come home. Last thing they want to do at dinner is talk to mom and dad about what they learned.
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But this is how our parents can deepen their engagement in a child's education because they've got the curriculum maps at home and they can just open it up. I just opened it here. This must be a history and geography section. Well, you must have learned about the reform movement, Johnny. You must have learned about farmers and populism. Tell me about Williams Jennings Bryant. Jennings Bryant. Tell me about the progressive era. Tell me about socialism in America.
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And tell me about Jane Addams. Tell me about Theodore Roosevelt. Tell me about reform for African Americans. And I'm just hitting the headlines here, but you can see the detail that are in here. It's at a level that is intended for parents to be able to keep up with their kids and push them and challenge them when they come home. And that's the conversation that needs to be happening at home.
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not just at school, but when we say it is the right responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children, well, they don't need to be history experts. They just need to get these books and just read the summaries of them so they can start a conversation at home and know that their kids are on track and their kids are learning. So that's that book. This is one I just brought for fun.
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Every year, all the faculty, all the employees at my school read a book together. And this is an autobiography. Very obscure one. This is called The Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. It was written by Joseph Plum Martin. He was a grunt private in the Revolutionary War. But he kept a great journal. He wrote his memoirs. What's that?
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But he kept a great journal. He did. And it's written in a kind of colloquial New England language, which is fun. But, you know, this guy lived a harrowing life. It's amazing. He lived through the Revolutionary War. But, you know, what we know about the 250th anniversary of the country, right? And what most of us know about this time period is from the generals and from the American founding fathers. Well, they always polished up what made them look better and stuff.
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And I really wanted us to all be – we know that from what we teach already. But I wanted us to have a really important injection of our perspective from a grunt private in fighting in the revolutionary cause. You hear about the soldiers in Valley Forge who had no shoes and you could trace their – you could see where they had been based on the blood in the snow from having no – this was one of those guys. Frozen bloody feet.
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Yeah, he tells that story. And so we're all reading it together. I take it everywhere I go just because it's an easy book to acquire. Everyone should read this. Read it along with us. You can even come to the school and sit in on our faculty discussions. What's that again? Is it a memoir? It's called A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. I guess about 100 years ago, this book was called The Memoirs of Private Yankee Doodle.
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Oh, interesting. Oh, really? That's where the Yankee Doodle song came from? Well, no. I mean, the term Yankees was what they called themselves and was around well before that. That's just the New Englander. I've learned over time that, for better or worse, the education that I received back in North Dakota and maybe my whole region up there uses a lot of, like,
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old English, like English American, right? Like American or English English rather than American English. Like when Google corrects me, it's because I've spelt questionnaire with two ends or things like that that are somehow I'm unclear on why my little segment of North Dakota seemed to have taught me more like obscure English, English than American English.
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Well, there are pockets of that throughout the country, the Appalachians and so on. A lot of people just depending on – certainly all the colonials would have spoken the Queen's English and spelled things the way in that – We have a New England, North Dakota that's not too far from us and stuff. So I'm guessing there was kind of concentrations of English settlers back in the day that – Yeah, it could have been depending on the time or what the national goals were to send people on –
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on the backs of or on on trains probably to get out to north dakota to settle the great frontier yeah yeah so uh they could have come all come from certain villages or towns or places over in england you never know you've got two more things you can show me quick before we take a break well the other by law yeah the other is uh when i mentioned that how long it takes i'll just share this one
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You mentioned right at the beginning of the show how difficult it is to remove just a mediocre teacher from the classroom. Right. And this is a graphic flowchart in Colorado of the steps you have to go through. I don't know if you're going to get this. You won't be able to read it. No, you won't. You won't. But you can see all of the steps that it takes. And again, the example I use is imagine a science teacher who's just not that great at teaching science.
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They're not dangerous. Yeah, they're not diddling anybody or anything like that. They're just not good at their job. In my school, if I can't improve them or push them to improve quickly, I can just say today's your last day. In regular public schools where they have tenure, once they've got that, which is only three years, then this is an impossible process. This takes about three years and costs at least a million dollars.
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for a teacher to exercise all of their, quote-unquote, due process to get weighed on here. So schools don't even bother. They move them around, first of all. And when that becomes – it's called the dance of the lemons. It's an actual public education term. Trust me. Every principal and assistant principal who might be watching knows this term. And they're just trying to push their bad people off at each other. Yeah. You get to a certain part of the year, and you're trying to persuade your friend in another school to –
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hey, I got a science teacher that would be great for you. Great. Yeah. I'll write a great letter of recommendation for that teacher. Get them out of my place. Put them in yours. And they move them around until everybody figures it out. And then they go to what's called a rubber room. And then a rubber room is every big school district. Just where you can't hurt yourself or others. This is an office at the central headquarters. Right. And these people get titles like curriculum specialist. And they... That's why the admin class has grown so much in schools. No? Yeah.
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Part of it. Like those rubber room people. Yeah, and I mean, at Denver Public Schools, there's floors in their headquarters. The Denver Public School office building is nothing but rubber rooms. They can probably now, now that you can work remotely, you can probably just leave them at home. But it's cheaper to keep them on the payroll until they retire than it is to go through that process I just showed you and fire them. So school district, the cheaper thing to do. This is so...
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Maddening. Just pay them $75,000 a year to not break anything. Yeah, to pay them and just have them review somebody's curriculum books or maybe some board member has a question. What are they doing over there at Liberty? I got somebody who can do that research. And the person who does that is a specialist.
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Who nobody wants to put around children anymore. So people out there listening, if your neighbor has a title like education specialist or curriculum specialist or something. Yeah, I always hesitate. I mean, let me qualify that, especially for this broad audience. There might be actually some qualified. Well, because some of these people, that is a legitimate title.
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Right. One out of four curriculum specialists is actually a useful person. That's probably generous. But there are some people with the curriculum specialist title who really are doing important work. There are others who have that title that are somebody who has jumped. They were a lemon who danced around several schools until they got sent to the rubber room and they're still on the payroll. And all right, as a taxpayer that makes you angry...
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And people are right to ask, why is the administration bloated when the number of students is shrinking? It's a harsh reality.
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And trust me, there's going to be some administrator listening, thinking, thank you for explaining this, Schaefer. It is cheaper to the taxpayer, given all the laws and all the union contracts and provisions, everything, all those bubbles I showed you. Right, each one of those steps costs 50 grand. It's cheaper to pay somebody $80,000, $90,000 a year to do nothing than it is to...
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Actually try to remove them. So it'll cost you far more to go through all these steps. Headaches go along with it. It's maddening. And so, you know, look, that's just that it's hard to say it's any one person's fault. It's the way an enormous bureaucracy has grown over the 150 years that Colorado has been a state.
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Yeah, I mean, I think of it, you know what Virginia Creeper is? Yeah, the plant, the vine. Yeah, the plant, the vine. Yeah. Like, it just kind of grows on everything if you let it. Right. And I think of the admin and bureaucracy and in government, in school systems, in a lot of not-for-profit organizations even, frankly. And it's just kind of, it just, like, it's not the Virginia Creeper's fault that it just grows wherever you allow it to grow. It just does.
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And some people will say, well, it's not fair that the charter schools don't have to deal with all these inefficient laws. And we do. And it isn't fair. But what we know through 150 years of- It's not fair that Americans have to deal with it. No. Well, Colorado is 150 years old this year. And what we know from the history of our state is that the state will not fix this. The remedy is charter schools. I get it. It's not fair. But you know what? We-
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There are laws on the books that allow all school districts in Colorado to move in the direction of freedom that charter schools represent. And if we happen to have any in northern Colorado that are truly interested in that, I will help. And I will help in a valuable way along with an army of people that think this would be a good idea. I dig it.
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I'm going to call a short break. We're going to come back and talk about your, you actually had a political career and, uh, you have family and some grand adventures, I'm sure. Sure. Yeah. So we'll be back in a few. Okay. Okay.
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And we're back. Okay. So we've talked a lot about really the mission and how the mechanics of the school works and stuff like that. But this is a business and personal, so we're going to talk about the man outside of the mission. I know you had a whole career before Liberty Common as well. But we're going to go back to like first grade.
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yeah first grade we've time machine if we popped out in first little bob first grade uh okay graduation day what what would we have found oh well i grew up in rural ohio north of cincinnati out in farm country okay um and uh all my all my uh friends uh many of them were uh the parents were farmers and okay um
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But some worked downtown, and we were out in the – What was your – Not just the suburbs. Family. Whatever next is. My dad was a school teacher. Okay. And became a school administrator eventually, and his whole career was spent in public education in the Cincinnati public school system. Oh, interesting. So he drove an hour to get into the inner city, worked down there, and came home every day. Wow.
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And was he kind of a warrior for education in that region as well? Yeah, he was. Was he notable of sorts? He was. I think he went into teaching just because he liked the subject matter and thought teaching was a great thing. I don't know that – just because he grew up in another state, Michigan, and was recruited by the University of Cincinnati to play football, and so that brought him to a big town. And he did a student teaching downtown, and I think he just discovered –
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urban education and loved it and loved the kids loved the challenges yeah uh loved the role of being a father figure in for many students who did not have two parents and he was a father figure for a lot of kids i witnessed that growing up throughout just going to the mall with my dad how many people how many people would shout out hey mr schaefer and
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remember me and my dad remembered all these names sure and uh they'd come up and tell stories about yeah growing up and your dad would make a difference in their life and and and how my dad uh you know helped guide some of these uh some of these students boys and girls so i always admired that never thought i'd go into education he advised me not to what uh what was your family setting was it uh you have siblings as well yeah i got a brother and a sister i'm the oldest and
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All right. Yep. Pretty natural. And were you a smart kid right away? Were you into academics? Not so much. I was pretty well, I was an average student. I'll leave it at that. All right. I got a, there were a few subjects in classes where I hit it out of the park and others where my dad had to threaten hitting me if I didn't bring my grades up. So no, I was not some genius student. Sports and things like that?
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Football and baseball. I went to Cincinnati Moeller High School, which at the time was the national champion in high school boys football. Now, the national championship is a points calculation. Oh, right, because they didn't return them or anything. Right, but we were the state champions in Ohio year in and year out back in those days. And a lot of guys I played with went and played pro. I didn't. But they –
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So football was my thing. Were you a linebacker or something like that? I was the wide receiver. Wide receiver, okay. Magnetic fingers here. Yeah, is that right? I like it. I like it. That's an important football team. And so then...
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I guess off to college somewhere. Yeah, I went to the University of Dayton, which wasn't too far from where I grew up. Moeller High School is a Catholic high school. All boys run by the Marianist religious order, and the Marianists also run the University of Dayton. Oh, is that right? So going there... The Marianist is kind of like a niche, like the Jesuits and the Catholics? It's a religious order within the Catholic Church of Rome.
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Okay. And so there are Marianist priests, Marianist brothers. It's all males. No, there are Marianist sisters too. Not many. But my school was run by Marianist brothers. Okay. Interesting. I'm not familiar with that. You've heard Jesuits and Franciscans and others. Marianist is another. It's founded in France. And it's worldwide and it's been around for a long time. It's just not as big as some of these others you might have heard of. Fair enough. Okay. Okay.
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And, uh, but the university of Dayton is their flagship university at the higher ed level. And, uh, so a lot of guys that I went to high school with went to the university of Dayton and it felt an awful lot like just the, the next, the 13th grade was going to the university of Dayton. And so, uh, I did. And, um, my, uh, my girlfriend went to university of Dayton too. Um,
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And that's where we met in high school, but we both went to college together. And then she eventually said yes. And so we got married and moved to Colorado. She moved out here first. And what was that? So she finished up college and stuff and you dated through college? I finished first and I was a speechwriter in the Ohio House of Representatives. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and I worked there for one year.
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With a political science degree? Yeah, political science degree. And a lot of... You know, it's interesting. It's political science, but I was focused on, in my coursework, on city management and city planning. I thought that's what I wanted. You could have been our Darren Atterbury here. Yeah, absolutely.
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And I did an internship with the city of Dayton and worked on those kinds of projects for my boss. But the main thing was he had lots of reports to prepare and I helped him with those. And it was the writing. I took a lot of English courses. The University of Dayton taught me well and my high school did also. And it was the writing that got the attention of the city council, of my boss, and then that
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I ended up parlaying that into the speechwriter position in Columbus. And so I kind of left behind the thing I thought I wanted to do to end up writing for others who...
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might have been brilliant at the public policy, but they were not smart enough to describe what it was they were doing. So I didn't put words in anybody's mouth, but I put better words in their mouth than they were able to do on their own. Was that a job or were you like a freelancer? No, I did that. No, there was a program that they had. It was a one year fellowship kind of thing. Like a party affiliated kind of thing? Yeah. I worked for the House Republicans. Yeah. Yeah. And so I did that there. I didn't
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know that kind of thing existed but that makes sense it does not exist in colorado but yeah it did there that program still exists today and so i was in the 1985 class yeah of that fellowship program and then but during that time my wife then graduated from university of dayton with electrical engineering degree and she took a job here in fort collins for ncr microelectronics if anybody remembers that sure actually that's uh that is a
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Paul Knight. Wasn't that Paul Knight's business? And Larry Salmon? Don't remember those names. A couple of guys from my rotary club. NCR actually bought their business, was their exit. They built something that was kind of in that space way back in the day. Could be. Yeah, it was Symbios Logic and an AT&T bottom, and then that building is now, well, Broadcom bought. Or he came out of that before he started his own company. Yeah, that could be. And now it's the...
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built the company there the building mad wires in there now originally well national cash register is it may date that was yeah yeah but that was the company too right yeah like that's what ncr was that's right it was a microelectronics division and so they made computer chips here and yeah yeah yeah microelectronics uh processors so that's how you landed and so she came out here and took that job and then when we got engaged shortly after the here was the question what
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somebody's got to quit their job and move if we really wanted to get married and live together. Right. Right. And I did. And so that was either a move to Columbus, Ohio, or move to Fort Collins, Colorado. And if, uh, if anybody's been to both, you know, that's not a hard decision. Fort Collins is the place to go. For sure. So we moved here and, uh, and got married and, um, and that's how it was 1986. Like what was your early career here? Well, it turned out I got almost the identical job in the Colorado legislature. Oh, I, uh,
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started applying around while there were several of those positions in the Ohio house in Colorado, there was only one for at least on the Senate Republican Senate side. And, um, I, I got that. I got the, almost the exact same job. And I was the, I was the press secretary, speech writer, coffee fetcher. I did all kinds of things for the Senate Republicans. They only had two partisan staffers. Yeah. And I was one of those. Interesting. And I did that for a year and a half. And then the local Senator here, uh, Senator Jim Beatty, uh,
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the 14th Senate district, he was the, you know, held the, held the seat. And, um, he, uh, also was a lawyer and his law firm demanded that he give up serving in the legislature and go devote his time. He had to make a hard decision. And he's like, Hey Bob, listen, I like the way you write.
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No, he didn't. It wasn't his decision. He just decided to move on before his term was over. And so there was a vacancy committee that exists. So in Colorado, there's a vacancy committee appointed for every state legislature. I applied for the vacant city council position here last December or so.
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I didn't make this. Well, this is a little different. Every state house and state senate seat has a vacancy committee just waiting in the wings. Yep. That probably will never meet. When somebody gets thrown out because of ethics violations or whatever. Yeah, somebody goes to jail or dies or gets kicked out for an ethics violation. Then that vacancy, or just quits. Right, right. And that happens from time to time. Sure. Then this vacancy committee convenes and they have 10 days typically to pick a replacement. And that person serves out the term.
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You serve out the rest of the term. That's right. And so for me, there was only one year left in that term. And I was a long shot. I wasn't even – there were a lot of people who put in for that decision. Well, you're relatively new in town comparatively. They were pillars of the community and names that everybody had heard of. In fact, there was a newspaper called the Triangle Review. Are you getting around long enough if you remember that? No, I moved here in 99.
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Okay, the Triangle Review was a weekly paper, and it did a profile on all the candidates. There were about 15 of us. And it had a picture and a couple paragraphs about everybody. And then way down at the bottom, it said, and Bob Schaefer, 25. That's how old I was. And no picture, no profile, nothing. And so the vacancy committee met. And you can imagine how upset a lot of people were when that guy down there at the bottom wins. How did that happen? It was a...
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Yeah, we could do a whole show on that problem. Everybody else had enemies or something? No, these were good people. I was kind of shocked myself because I was told I wasn't going to get appointed that somebody else had their votes lined up. And so the pressure was off, but I was persuaded to get in the process for later that I –
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Yeah, that would be a good warm-up for you. Yeah, that I'd introduce myself and maybe some future time, point in time, maybe I'd be considered if I wanted to. So I went, but I went with a plan. And first I called everybody I knew in town in one year and asked them all to call the committee and asked them to vote for me. Yeah, yeah. Now, most of these were children and parents on a Little League baseball team that I coached. So the shortstop called, the first baseman called, and their parents called and said, Bob Schaefer should be the senator.
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I discovered nobody else had made that kind of an effort. And then I went with talking points. And I remember I had three little slides written on paper back then, because we didn't have PowerPoint in those days. So the first one was a number 25. I held it up, and I said, the average age of a Fort Collins resident is 25. I'm 25. Next one was a stick figure. It was a man, woman, two kids. I said, the...
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Census Bureau says this is the profile of an average Fort Collins family. Well, that's me, Maureen, my twin girls. And then the next one was some income figure. I don't remember what it is anymore, but that was the average income in the range of an average household in Fort Collins. And I said, that's our – That's basically Maureen's salary right there. I said, I –
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I said, I'm the average guy. And then we talked through all kinds of issues, which, of course, I could articulate because that's what I did for a living. For sure. And I went home and thought that was just a fun experience. And then at about 2 or 3 in the morning, the phone rang. And I picked it up.
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It was a state representative who was on the committee, and he said, I know we told you that somebody else was going to get this position, but we changed our mind. We want you to do it. And so I really hadn't counted on that. So I said, I told him, I'll call you back in 10 minutes. So I'd wake my wife up and say, you're not going to believe this.
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Are you ready for a life in politics, baby? Yeah. Called her back and she said, sure, when do you get a chance to do that? That's pretty rare. Yeah. And it was part – the legislature only meets 120 days a year. Sure. So I quit that job that I had, said yes. I was a state senator the very next day and started another business, too, to make the rest of the income that I needed. Which was –
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It was a marketing business. I worked for a lot of the tourism industry in the state. I distributed promotional material and bought some radio and airtime. You wrote good content for them and stuff like that. Well, no, they produced it all. They produced it all. I was in the distribution of everything from brochures to coupon books to all kind of stuff. And, yeah, they produced radio ads maybe and some other – cable TV was just becoming a thing. And so they would produce –
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they would make the collateral material. I would just distribute it and make buys for them. Do you know Rayno Caesar? Yes, very well. Rayno's a mentor of mine. His grandkids go to Liberty Commons School. That's cool. I just wanted to mention, because during my banking career, Rayno was an influence on me, and in part because he said, you know, Kurt, one of the things that you have that the other commercial lenders really don't bring is your writing.
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your writing is so excellent. I can understand exactly what it is. And writing is thinking. Yeah, yeah. And I can tell you think about a lot of things. And so anyway, he changed my perspective on my own self. That is such good advice. I give that same advice all the time, and I'm not surprised to hear that from Reno. But yeah.
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You know, people ask all the time, you know, what should they, you know, how to get into one industry or another. I don't care whether you're an accountant or an engineer or in finance or medicine, learn to write and learn how to communicate and express yourself well. It is such an advantage that so many people don't.
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don't have, mainly because it's not stressed and it's not treated as important. Well, especially not now. I can just tell chat to write something up for me. It's so easy. Well, even still. I agree that that's a great technological advantage, but I think there's... No, but it doesn't make me think at all. Right. And I think readers will recognize the difference. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, if you...
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I find when I ask AI to write a – give me the first draft and I say, in the language of Bob Schaefer. Right, right. And it goes and finds it from all my old floor speeches and everything else I've ever done. The quality of it is more along the lines of what I want and what I'm looking for.
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And there's so much of it out there because I could write well. Sure. Yeah. No, I, well, I've got, I've written a once a month blog for eight years now. And so there's a lot of data out there, right? It can write in my style. My style is very much kind of what it is. Sure. So anyway, I wanted to ask about actually when I first started,
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met you, I was a banker, and I met you in the context of your wife, I believe, having started a margarita business. That's right. When did that come along? Yeah. And what was the story of that? So Coyote Golden Margaritas was born somewhere around, I want to say, 1999.
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Oh, wow. Okay, so that goes back farther than I realized. Okay. Maybe 96. It didn't really explode until later. No, it didn't. I tell you, it really took off in Colorado, and then they were in several other states. Okay. Oh, going back to NCR Microelectronics, the guy who hired her, Randy Zwetsig, is in town still. Oh, I know that guy too. You know Randy? Yeah. Randy and Maureen were coworkers at NCR, and they joined forces to start Coyote Gold Margaritas. Katie Zwetsig or something like that? Katie Zwetsig's husband, yeah.
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Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I know her. I don't really, I met Randy at Matthew's house events, I believe. Yeah. Well, so they started Coyote Gold and Maureen worked on that full time. And so as I say, they were in several States, but it was really, it took off and was growing in Colorado. And so they decided to just focus on Colorado. And that's when, that's when the products just started selling at an exponential rate.
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in the state to the point where just two years ago, they sold the company to a manufacturer out of Michigan. And it's still a hot product in Colorado and Maureen still is involved in it just a little bit. But that company no longer belongs to Maureen and Randy. Sure. Well, I guess that was a successful entrepreneurial journey.
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You know, it was a great adventure, great product. People love it and still do. But I get my wife's time back. Well, you told me you never have drank. Well, I've sipped it to taste it. Okay, so I was going to say, so you weren't that much use in the margarita development. For me, it's just an interesting thing. I just don't like it.
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Tastes like furniture polish to me. All alcohol, not kind of gold. Everything. Coors light, doesn't matter if it's bourbon. It really doesn't matter. Hey, Matt, listen, I'll sip a little wine maybe at dinner. If somebody says this is a good glass of wine, I'll try it. And sometimes it is. But I'm just, you know, some say you have to acquire a taste. I ask myself why. Why would I want to, yeah. That's fair.
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One of the things that's kind of part of your lore is, look, you said you were going to only do so many terms, and then you quit. Yeah. Tell me about that a little bit. I served nine years in the state senate. So you got in with the one-year program kind of thing. Yeah, and then I got reelected two more times. So four-year terms. Yeah, and in 1994, I was the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor statewide. So I was Bruce Benson, became the president of the University of Colorado. Yeah.
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He was the Republican nominee for governor, and I was his running mate. And I was a pretty young guy still. And serving in the state senate, I'm the youngest in the history of Colorado to have served in the state senate. I'm not surprised, yeah. And there were some other 25-year-olds, but the clerk told me. I didn't realize you were so young, actually. I knew you were not as old as a lot of people, but I was a 27-year-old banker or something when I first became aware of your...
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Yeah, the Constitution says you have to be 25 to serve, and I barely was when this whole appointment thing took place. And so anyway, so I served there nine years, ran statewide for lieutenant governor, and lost. But in that process, I learned the state, and I learned the dynamics of running big campaigns. And so as it turned out, the very next cycle, Wayne Allard, our congressman, decided he was going to run for the U.S. Senate, and that created a vacancy or an open seat for the U.S. House of Representatives, the fourth district. Okay.
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I no longer live in a fourth district. The boundary changed. But you did at that time. Yeah, at the time I did. And it's the whole eastern plains of Colorado. So you kind of downgraded from Senate to House, right? State Senate to U.S. House. Oh, to U.S. House. To U.S. House. Oh, fancier then. It wasn't a downgrade. Well, maybe it is. Tell me about that. I think the state is the higher priority, if you ask me. Well, and that's kind of my message to people, too, is keep your focus local.
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Like, don't worry so much about what Trump's doing and what's going on here and what's going on there. You know, pay attention to what you can actually impact here right where you are. That's right. No, you could put far more points on the board at the state capitol than you can as a member of the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate.
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I'm convinced. Now, those still are important jobs and we need more constituents. Three terms. So at the time I ran in 1996 for the U.S. House, term limits was a big – it was very popular. The voters had just voted for term limits for members of Congress.
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But the Supreme Court threw it out. So I was running that very next year. And so imagine all these farmers and ranchers that I represented as I was campaigning would say, all right, well, we voted one way. And I know the courts threw our opinion out. But who are you going to stick with when you get elected? And I'm like, oh, six years is if the voters – and I agreed with that, by the way.
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I'm in favor of term limits for members of the U.S. Congress. Well, because the Virginia creeper just grows on everybody. Like it doesn't matter how clean your soul is. If you get to Washington for too long, it's going to turn you up. Yeah, the seniority process is the core source of corruption in D.C. Now, you know, there's something to be said about institutional knowledge and all that that you lose.
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You do trade one set of problems for a different set of problems, but in my experience, both at the state capitol, because I was there before we had term limits in the state, and in Congress where there has never been term limits. Yeah, term limits solves more problems than it creates in my estimation. And so those who have – What was that expression you used to describe that? It creates more problems. No, but the previous – Oh, replaces one set of problems with another? Yeah.
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No, the problem that lack of term limits creates, like that institutionalized kind of corruption. It is the core of congressional corruption. Yeah. It really is. Or the seniority thing, really, ultimately. Yes, thank you. So seniority, it drives everything back there. It's committee hirings. It's all these kind of things. But it's corruptive.
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Yeah, when I was a state legislator, look, I was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, still in my 20s. And I go to Washington, and you look down the table of – because you sit in the order of seniority, and you look down that table to the chairman, and you start counting how many years –
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Everybody's been there between you and that chairman seat, and you don't advance until you get older. Merit does not matter. And so you start thinking, the only way I'm going to become chairman is if that guy dies, that one goes to jail, that one loses an election, and that one quits. And you start thinking of ways to make those things happen. To sabotage them. Yeah. No, that's crazy. When you have bad incentives, you have bad outcomes.
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Yeah, well, I took a voluntary term limits pledge and knew I was going to leave in six years. And so I knew I'd never be chairman of anything. And then, so, you know, my staff and I... Did you miss it? Oh, I missed... I got invited to go back just last week to go speak at a panel at the U.S. Department of Treasury on federal... So you stayed involved. Yeah, education freedom tax credit. So I'm still, you know, I still got my old friends and...
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still get called back into it from time to time. But I, uh, I tried to get back in 2008, I ran for the U S Senate, got trounced by Mark Udall. And, uh, and then that's when the Udall family has a lot of money. I've heard. Yeah, they do. I discovered that and Mark, look, Mark's a nice guy. And, uh, and so, uh, you know, I, I wish I'd have won. I absolutely do. But that created, it was, that was the same time that the board at Liberty common school was contemplating adding a
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made that decision at the same time I lost that Senate race. And so they said, well, don't go. I was in the oil and gas industry before that. And they said, hey, don't go back to Denver. Come and help us run the school. And that's when I became employed by Liberty Commons. Oil and gas, like.
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Doing communications for them? Doing some lobbying things and stuff? No, I was doing a lot with... My job title was vice president for business development. Oh, interesting. And my job duties was almost everything that didn't fit in somebody else's job title. So I did a lot of... Look, we got...
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We got drilling rigs that Chinese made drilling rigs into the United States at a time when you couldn't buy it. You couldn't rent a drilling rig. Right. So we got our own. And they were in China. So getting in here was hard. And all the instructions were written in Chinese. So I had to get Chinese engineers over here. So I spent a lot of time doing stuff like that.
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All kinds of environmental regulatory compliance issues. And then the boss was interested in getting the company involved in business entry in foreign countries. So there were five or six other countries where I got the company involved and –
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helped them get up and running. Yeah, yeah. And there's lots of, just all kinds of ancillary projects that go with the oil and gas industry that when we look around the table and everybody's, not it, I'm not doing it. And it was like, I'll take a crack at that. I can figure it out. Yeah. And so I ended up doing lots of really exciting and interesting things for five, six, or seven years. Has to be like a friend of a friend kind of thing or something like that? Or how did you land in, like...
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It seems like an unlikely career transition. Well, okay, well, we've been talking about education, but in addition to serving on the Education Committee in Washington, I was also on the Natural Resources and Interior Committee and on the Agriculture Committee. So those were areas where I developed some expertise and worked a lot with America as well. Yeah. Natural Resources. Mining, timber, public lands. On network and understanding. Yeah, all of that. Well, and general understanding. Yeah. Right? Like one of the things I love about this podcast is I can talk to a lot of interesting people that know stuff. Yeah. And then I can just get smarter by talking to them and listening. Yeah.
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And we were in the wind power business. We did a lot of renewable investment and other natural resources too. We bought 51% interest in one of the largest potash mines in North America. And so there was just, you know, I had an eclectic boss who was just an economic entrepreneurial genius. Yeah. And learned a lot from him. And so he'd identify problems and point to me and say, can you fix that or take care of it?
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run point on it and sometimes i could sometimes uh sometimes i didn't deliver it seems like your uh your personality could have also been very fulfilled in kind of traditional business and industry stuff instead of the education space or politics or whatever i'll mention i ran my own for a while just a one-man show when i was
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in the state legislature and i ended up enjoying that a lot uh offloaded that to run for a lieutenant governor in the state and then um after i left congress one of the first things i did was get in the energy uh arena and i love that too do you have other uh do you like make cheese at home or weird things like that it seems like you might have some of those kind of eclectic hobbies i'm not i
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You know, I'm a gardener. I like, and I'm not, nothing remarkable or anything like that. I'll grow my own green beans and a little bit of lettuce. Yeah. But you get your fingers dirty. It's a cany or two. And my backyard is very prosperous. I like it. I like it. I like it.
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We are going to enter into the local experience segment. Okay. Which, I guess before we get there, do you want to give a shout out to Maureen, your girls, your family along the way? Yeah, Maureen's the love of my life. She's my wife. How many years? 40 years this year. 40 years. Yeah, yeah. Or we've exceeded 40 years already. And so 40 years.
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Uh, we had five kids, uh, Jenny, Emily, or twin girls, both warriors, one air force, one army, the army daughters over in Germany right now. Uh, both of them are, um, um, uh, uh, Oh shoot. Um, Lieutenant colonels now. Oh wow. I just became both. And then, uh, so is my son-in-law and, um,
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So they married warriors as well. And then my son, he's an Army veteran now as well. He's a banker, follow your footsteps. He's an economist. My next daughter, the number four girl, she just became a mom and a doctor, medical doctor. And so she is just starting her residency in Pennsylvania in anesthesiology.
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And the baby of the family is an arborist here in town. She's got a business degree from University of Northern Colorado, an arborist by profession. And she's over in Germany right now helping my other daughter take care of her four boys. Oh, awesome. So between all those five kids, they've made 11 other humans. Nice. And so Maureen and I have 11 grandkids, number 12's on the way. Perhaps a few more to come yet. Yeah, yeah. Well, number 12's going to be here in a few months. And so I don't know what else there is. That's pretty outstanding. That's the most important aspect of my life.
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life and the biggest blessings. That's kind of my own journey, you know, all my siblings and some step-siblings and stuff and everybody's got kind of a cool spouse and good kids and you know, it's just a joy to see that kind of unfolding. You bet. Well, four of those grandkids, three of them go to Liberty Common School. So it's a real treat for me to, in the day job, be able to turn a corner and see one of the grandkids, having them shout out across, hey grandpa.
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I sprinkled this hot sauce maybe a little bit prematurely, but we're going to go ahead and get it. Okay. Oh, don't hit the hot spot there. This is our crazy ginger hot sauce, which is your gift for being on the show today. Okay. If you'd like to grab one of those. All right, I'll take that saturated burger. You want that crazy one? Oh, boy. Let's see your impressions. You can have more. Oh, wow. Yeah.
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It's a peach habanero, bell pepper, fresh garlic, fresh ginger. Wow. It was kind of the flavor profile that Paul made up for me. Okay. I just had the name. Paul from the Matador. When I do my writing. Paul sent his kids to Liberty, by the way. When I do my writing for blogs and stuff, I always come up with the title first.
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And then I write the words. Yeah. And so same thing here. I came up with the hot sauce name Crazy Ginger. Yeah. Because we all kind of know a crazy ginger somewhere in our life. Wow. Yeah, Gilligan's Island at least. Right. Exactly. Right. And I saw it. But it needed to be kind of that orange color. And local think tank has got some orange branding thing and stuff. So Paul just worked on recipes until he had one he was proud of. Well, he hit a home run here. This is lovely. Yeah.
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You've got to like a little heat, I think, and I do. Yeah, I'd say this is about an 8 out of 10. It's not stupid hot. It's an enjoyable hot.
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Yeah. I'm a fan. Awesome. Well, you could buy that at Matador Mexican Grill, actually. They have that on the shelf there to buy, but you get your first bottle for free for being here. I love that place right near my house. Yeah, he was saying he's actually eating that more than any of his other sauces lately. So thanks, Paul, for developing that. Amen. Leading us into the Loco Experience story, which is the craziest experience of your lifetime that you're willing to share with our listeners.
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And it's got to be local? No. Local in this case means instead of local community, it means crazy. So a crazy experience from your lifetime that you may or may not want your grandkids to hear you tell someday, but it'll add some color to your character along the way.
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I, uh, I, I'm going to go with the farm story. Okay. Uh, when I was working my way through college as a farm laborer in Southern Ohio, um, the boss wanted to drain a swamp. You, you hear that metaphor all the time. We were actually draining a swamp. Yeah. Like Trump's been doing. Yeah. So you, uh, you get a big old scoop and put the tractor at the other end and somebody, and I said, say go and drag it down the middle and the.
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Oh, so you just literally almost like pulling a plow through that thing. You try to get a trench through there. And so it fell to me to hold that scoop. And so I said, go. And the boss started pulling me across the swamp from one end to the other. I went about 20 feet into the middle of that once it was a pond. You're like sitting on top of this piece? No, I'm walking behind it. Oh, wow.
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because I was told it was only about four feet deep. Well, I got stuck and I start sinking and I was, I was going under in the middle of the swamp and there's no way Emmett could reach me. Oh, shit. Emmett and Billy, who's the other college kid working there, they're standing on the edge watching me just go down inch by inch.
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until I hit the bottom, but that swamp was right up just above my chin, underneath my lip. Oh, damn. And I thought I was going to die there. Yeah. Like they couldn't have got you. And they didn't have the gear or the equipment or anything to get me. So they say, just hold on. And I watched that tractor go up over the hill in plow gear, over the hill, over to the barn. They came back with some big old sheets of plywood and some ropes and stuff to pull me out.
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And, um, and there I was in the swamp, every, every horsefly in Southern Ohio figured out my location. Those things were just die bombing me and eating holes in me. And you're literally like up to your, yeah. So I was, so I'm slapping these horseflies. Of course, now my head and my face is covered with mud and blood from these things. And, um, and it's hot and muggy and, and I, I literally thought I'm going to die. So I did lots of praying and bargaining and promising, um,
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uh to the almighty and um like 20 30 minutes later these guys come back and laid plywood out on the yeah on the muck and like trying to get your dog out of ice got their way out there a little way but they still couldn't reach me through some ropes out and eventually pulled me sideways and drug me out my boots are still at the bottom of that swamp uh they came off and i think my pants did too and um if i remember right
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Didn't matter. And I didn't care. I was just out of there. Wow. Got my life back. And that little episode, strange thing, when you are convinced you're going to die.
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And have some time to contemplate it. It gives you a perspective that, one, I'll never forget. And two, it just recenters things. I was probably 19, 20 years old at that point in time. And that little episode had a huge impact on me to this day.
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I don't doubt it at all. Not to get deeper, but how do you think it changed you specifically? Well, one, I think I take things more seriously than I did before. You were kind of whimsical before-ish or something? Maybe. I mean, I was never out of control as a kid or anything like that. I was not a troubled youth or never mentioned this alcohol.
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Alcohol was a big thing with all my friends and so on. It just wasn't for me. Yeah. But they were still my friends and I hung out with them. So I wasn't though, you know, you're not a teetotaler, like judgy kind of person in that space. I'm not. I just, it's just a, it's really just a taste thing for me. But, um, um, but, I, I,
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Yeah, I think that episode, I think about it all the time when I'm feeling like life's not fair or I've been dealt an injustice or lose an election, let's say. Because, of course, I know everybody should have voted for me. Of course, yeah. And I don't know what's wrong with these people.
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It's like when I find out somebody doesn't really like me, I'm like, what? And then whenever I think woe is me or how something's miserable or it's not fair or I should be making more money or whatever the case is, I think back and I'm like, you know what? I was this close to being dead. Right. And –
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Yeah, I'm a spiritual person. I'm Catholic, and thank God for the Catholic Church is where I need to be because they welcome sinners, thank God, and so I belong there. I usually say I dispense grace easily because I require more of it than most people. Yeah, but I mean I said a lot of prayers that day, and I think there is –
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When you consider where that muck line stopped, I mean, literally one inch more and I'd have been a goner. And so there are just a lot of things that lined up that allowed me to live as long as I have. And it could have all ended up there in the bottom of a swamp in southern Ohio. I, for one, will say, and I think Maureen would agree with me, that I hope you get another 40 more.
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I hope so too. And I hope I never have to literally drain a swamp. Well, I wish you would, maybe. Honestly, I don't know how long this headmaster thing goes and liberty grows and stuff like that. But man, I would vote for you. Just saying.
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Oh, well, thank you. You know what? I know we're over, but back in the first Trump term, I got invited. I was a finalist for U.S. Secretary of Education. Oh, is that right? Yeah, they invite me back there to Trump Tower. And I don't know Donald Trump. I've never met him, but I got invited in –
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And so I was in this interview panel with, and these are all like Trump people. None of them are education people. And so, uh, I mentioned the story. I said, you know, you guys keep talking about draining the swamp. You know, believe it or not, I've actually, I've really done that. I've drained a real, real swamp. And, um, and, uh, oh, we did, by the way, we did get that swamp drained in the end. Um, just not that day. And so not that strategy.
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But, you know, we really did. And I said, so I know everybody's talking about this, but I know how you do it. You cut a trench down the middle and let all the just let all the fluid follow it out. And then the rest of it eventually dries out so that you shovel it out. And I said, I this works in government, too. I know this having been a member of Congress for all those years. And.
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Well, both parties are kind of full of shit anyway Yeah, well, that was the thing So they said, is there any reason you wouldn't take this job? And I said, yeah, if you guys aren't serious about draining the swamp Then you should give it to somebody else Because I don't have any interest in doing anything else here And so they didn't call me back Doesn't seem like they're that interested They didn't call me back For that topic They called me back for other things Fair Well, Bob
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I hope you've enjoyed this time. I did, a lot. And, you know, vote for Bob Schaefer for Senate when that time comes around. Well, that's not going to come around. Nine years. But you can send your kids to Liberty Commons School. Do send your kids to Liberty Commons. Send your kids to Liberty Commons School. And if they can't get into Liberty Commons, send them to Ridgeview. Yeah, I'll give you a personal tour of Liberty anyway and have good things to say about Ridgeview. Appreciate you, Bob. Thank you. Godspeed.
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Hi, this is Kurt Baer, host of The Loco Experience. And I wanted to let our listeners know that beginning in June of 2026, we're going to be releasing podcast episodes on Wednesday mornings instead of on Saturdays. So we've tested Saturdays for a while. Meh. Honestly, we were better on Wednesdays before. So we're heading back to that. And I hope to see you there every Wednesday with a new episode of The Loco Experience.
