Metro North Schools Embrace Innovation
Published Apr 17, 2007
Westminster’s F.M. Day Elementary offers a dual-language curriculum to students including (from left) Pablo Rodriguez, Maria Lupita Gonzalez, Vickie Vue and Jacob Finkbeiner. The school is part of District 50, where more than 40 languages are represented.
It was an extreme makeover that even Ty Pennington would have been proud to pull off.
Mapleton Public Schools Superintendent Charlotte Ciancio, along with the school board and the Mapleton community, put on their hard hats and decided it was time for a remodeling. And quite a remodeling it became.
The system, officially the Adams County No. 1 School District, was completely overhauled by the 2006-07 academic year. Its previous nine schools were transitioned into 18 smaller schools, six of which are high schools, each with fewer than 100 students per grade level.
No new facilities were constructed for the initiative known as Small by Design; existing buildings were reworked to accommodate the changes, with the exception of an expansion to one structure that now houses the Welby New Technology High School.
By providing students with new choices for learning, the school district intends to improve test scores and graduation rates.
“Mapleton offers the community a full system of choice,” Ciancio says. “Our students can now go to any school in the district and be transported [there by bus].”
Thanks in large part to a grant of more than $2.7 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the six new high schools are reaching students where their interests lie.
For example, Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts offers learning through the arts, while Mapleton Preparatory High School and Front Range Early College High School allow students to learn through internships in a professional field of their choosing.
The changes have the community abuzz. “It’s been a flurry of excitement,” Ciancio says, “and the best is yet to come.”
The goings-on in Mapleton have attracted attention from far beyond the Denver area. In the June 16, 2006, issue of BusinessWeek, reporter William C. Symonds wrote that the overhaul “may be the nation’s most radical experiment in public school choice.”
Other school districts that serve the Metro North Region also are building or renovating facilities and implementing new academic programs to keep their records of student achievement on an upward trajectory.
Adams County School District 27J has funded improvements to schools, including a $19 million renovation of Brighton High.
The district also has enacted a $1,000-per-dwelling impact fee on builders to provide for another high school, Prairie View. “It’s a partnership with the developers so that when they build homes and the district is impacted, they provide some resource to help the district deal with that impact,” says District 27J Superintendent Rod Blunck, who adds that the assessment brought in $6.8 million for Prairie View High over five years.
Adams County District 14 in Commerce City has received accolades for its emphasis on music and the arts. In fact, Superintendent John Lange received the 2006 Administrator Award for Distinguished Support of Music Education, sponsored in part by the VH1 Save The Music Foundation.
“While our academics and tests scores are going up, we’re still focusing on educating the whole child with a heavy emphasis on music and the arts,” Lange says.
More than 50 percent of the district’s students are involved in one of the school’s music programs, such as the mariachi band, jazz ensemble, marching band or concert band.
District 14 and Adams County District 50 in Westminster lead the way in offering an International Baccalaureate Program to their students.
The prestigious International Baccalaureate Organization, which only 2,000 schools worldwide are a part of, teaches an internationally approved curriculum that, among other things, fosters student-led discussion, inquiry and extracurricular learning.
District 50 is among the most diverse school districts in metropolitan Denver, with more than 40 languages represented.
In recognition of its multicultural, multilingual nature, the district has a dual-language school, F.M. Day Elementary.
“Dual language means that the curriculum is divided into both English and Spanish. So, the teacher would say something in English and then repeat it in Spanish,” says Deb Haviland, director of communications and community relations for District 50.
She also says some subjects are taught entirely in Spanish and others are entirely in English, so students learn both languages proficiently.
Story by Jenni Betts
Photo by Antony Boshier
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