The Holocaust, state Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet notes, did not begin overnight.

“It was a drip, drip, drip,” she said. “Everything didn’t change at once.”

In Colorado, where reported hate crimes are on the rise, the Commerce City Democrat fears “we are in a drip, drip, drip phase now.”

To help prevent drips from becoming floods, Michaelson Jenet — whose cousins are Holocaust survivors and who directed the Holocaust Awareness Institute at the University of Denver — is planning to bring a bill in 2020 designed to educate more young people in Colorado about the Holocaust and about genocide in general.

“It is time for us to make certain that our students understand genocide, like what happened in the Holocaust, in Armenia, to Native Americans,” she said, adding that she believes instruction on these topics is “inconsistent” in Colorado public schools.

The bill she’s working on “would require public schools to include holocaust and genocide education at age-appropriate levels,” she said.

Michaelson Jenet said she “wouldn’t want to see it start before fifth grade,” but that other details of the bill are flexible at this point.

Her legislative partner on this bill, Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, said the sponsors will welcome input from “any and all interested parties” before they file a bill.

Among those who’ve already helped shape the proposal are Colorado-based Holocaust survivors and Simon Maghakyan of the Armenian National Committee of America.

“Teaching the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, is one of the best ways to prevent bigotry in schools and raise students who care for human rights and who care for their communities,” said Maghakyan, who is running in 2020 for a northeast Denver statehouse seat.

Colorado school districts write their own individual curricula, but the Department of Education does issue standards as guidance.

The standards concerning social studies state that high school graduates should be able to “evaluate continuity and change over the course of world history,” and “investigate causes and effects of significant events throughout world history.” The social studies standards do mention both the Holocaust and genocides.

But Sirota believes young Coloradans are not grasping these topics firmly enough.

“It keeps coming up that our coming generations, millennials and students coming after them, do not have an accurate understanding of what was the Holocaust. Many of them can’t say what was Auschwitz,” she said. “If we do not educate future generations to what happened in history, you know the saying: We are doomed to repeat it.”

The state legislature often considers bills to alter state academic standards, and if those bills become laws, the State Board of Education — which itself rarely suggests new academic standards, according to a Department of Education spokesperson — is then tasked with putting them into effect.

Last legislative session alone, at least five bills sought to impact instruction in public schools. Three that passed into law concerned sex education, media literacy and the inclusion of American minorities in the teaching of history and civil government.

Before the bill about minority contributions to history passed, it was the subject of substantial debate on the floor of the state Senate, where some Republican opponents said they worried about promoting certain of history’s moments and people at the expense of others.

Asked whether she worries her 2020 bill might face some opposition in similar terms, Michaelson Jenet said she expects to get “very wide, bipartisan support.”

“I imagine there will be a number of different communities who want to make sure they get a nod or a mention, and we’ll definitely be open to talking to anybody who wants to come to the table,” she said.