Leaders in St. Vrain Valley Schools have reimagined public education during the past 12 years, leading to promising student outcomes, prominent awards and national attention.
The hard work is paying off in the form of student outcomes:
Graduation rates are up across the board, including large gains for Latino students.
Advanced Placement enrollment, especially among Latino students, has increased dramatically.
Expulsion rates are near zero.
What accounts for the progress of the past 12 years? Haddad points to about a dozen key factors. Among them: hiring great teachers, making high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten available and financially accessible for all, creating feeder systems and aligning all curriculum, instructional practices and assessments to common standards. He highlights efforts to restructure the curriculum, moving students into higher-level coursework.
The district beefed up its co-curricular programming and increased concurrent enrollment for high schoolers interested in college level coursework at Front Range Community College. Recently, the district developed a new Pathways to Teaching (P-TEACH) program, which helps students explore careers in the teaching profession.
District leaders also took time to reflect on the “supernova” happening in technology. Twitter, Facebook, smart phones, artificial intelligence, e-readers, and “the cloud” — all of these technologies and the new companies they enabled were taking off as the power and speed of microchips exploded.
“Everything was changing exponentially,” Haddad said.
The district seized the opportunity to focus on technology, wiring every building with high-speed internet and supplying each classroom with iPads and Chromebooks.
The district in 2015 launched the first PTECH program west of the Mississippi. Short for Pathways in Technology Early College High School, the program challenges students to simultaneously pursue a two-year associate’s degree in addition to their high school diploma. Although enrollment was open to all students at Skyline High School, the program targeted Latinos, females and low-income students. Its focus remains computer information systems. A second PTECH program will open at Frederick High School in fall 2019, focused on biomedicine.
“To break the cycle of poverty, we’re really focused on career development and how to get those kids ready for a middle-income career,” said Patty Quinones, Assistant Superintendent of Innovation.
“This is a great way to allow kids to get two years of college education, free to them.
”Quinones helped launch the “Falcon Tech” program as principal of Skyline High School. Today she oversees programming at the St. Vrain Innovation Center — a gleaming building of glass and steel that opened in fall 2018 and quickly became the envy of public education.
“This is just an amazing building. It’s so useful as an educator to have these resources here,” said Chris Schmitz, a computer science teacher at Soaring Heights PK-8 in Erie who teaches a class helping students become certified Apple technicians.
Today, more than 100 students are employed by St. Vrain as student designers, specializing in robotics, creating presentations, building drones for aerial photography and data collection; and building apps and websites for companies. At the Innovation Center, students host a KGNU radio program called “Tech Talk,” run blogs, study business model development and take four-hour workshops to learn how to pitch their business ideas to investors.
“It’s really great real-world skills that look amazing on a college application and also tell companies, ‘Hey, I’ve done this before,’ and that makes them much stronger candidates in our work force,” Schmitz said.
Schmitz’s daughter, Lex Schmitz, was helping her dad teach his class as one of the district’s 26 certified Apple technicians. “I’m pretty excited,” she said, adding that before her experiences at the Innovation Center, she didn’t really want to go into technology. Now she does.
“St. Vrain and Apple and the Innovation Center are really inclusive,” she said. “Providing this as a district will help get more women in the tech field, which will create more diversity.”
Salvador “Sal” Quiroz graduated from Skyline High School in the spring of 2019 with a job already lined up as a technician at the Apple Store in Boulder. His technology-oriented education “showed me the design process of thinking. It really changed the way I thought about school in a way. I really started seeing most school assignments as just problem solving.”
Sal plans to take classes for two years at Front Range Community College and then transfer to the University of Colorado Boulder. “I definitely grew as a person here and found out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said.
Plenty of work lies ahead as the district continues to scale its innovative practices. And while the overall trajectory for student outcomes has been very good, the district has identified various potential areas they could address. One such area is third-grade reading proficiency, which slipped in 2019 after many years of consistent, strong growth. In response, the district implemented “Project Launch,” a summer learning program targeting first- and second-graders who are below grade-level.
