High school student Jade isn’t in school today for algebra or history.
She’s here for her Bûche de Noël batter.
Her yule log cake will be a yummy vanilla and maple nut flavor. Jade is a senior, but it’s her first year at Cripple Creek-Victor Junior/Senior High School, a school in a remote region southwest of Colorado Springs. After years of being homeschooled, these cooking classes are what brought Jade back into a school building.
“I’ve known for about two or three years now that I wanted to run my own café,” said the teenager with neon yellow hair.
She was tired of homeschooling and knew she had to get back around people. When she heard about the school’s culinary program, she was sold. Jade now travels half an hour a day to perfect Italian meringue buttercream and is working toward a nationally recognized certificate in culinary arts and restaurant management skills.
The kitchen is a beehive of activity, kids whipping egg whites, sculpting meringue mushrooms and chiseling fondant cream tree bark. It smells divine. But the warm, comforting aroma of baking cakes is a far cry from where the school was five years ago.
When principal Dan Cummings and the district’s new superintendent Miriam Mondragon stepped into their jobs before the start of the 2021 school year, they knew the district had to change.
“My first year here, fights in the hallways, tardies all the time, kids coming to school and just leaving campus without permission, complete lack of participation when it came to engaging in sports or classroom work,” Cummings said.
Science teacher (and the mayor of Victor) Barbara Manning, one of the few educators who is still at the school from the before times, remembers the students as well.
“They were extremely disengaged the further back we go,” she said. “They didn’t want to be here, they saw no point in being here.”
Some 60 percent of teachers left each year. There were — and are — other challenges in the community. It struggles with poverty and a lack of affordable housing. It’s remote and there’s high numbers of kids moving to other communities. Many students here aren’t college-bound, but they need training for jobs that pay more than minimum wage.
More than book knowledge and increasing the hopefulness
The pandemic reinforced Cummings’ belief that school needed to be more than a deliverer of book knowledge and test scores. It had to focus on why students go to school, for relationships and learning that’s relevant to their lives. The new school leaders started by hosting listening sessions — what did the community want from the school?
“You get a lot of students expressing like, ‘I'm just going to end up in a minimum wage job because I don't know what else is out there,’” Cummings said.
The idea developed to create career pathway programs — culinary, construction, and fire science — where students could get industry certificates. Cummings said some students want to go into construction when they graduate. They might start at $15 an hour.
“But if they go into construction with some (tool and machinery) certifications and with their OSHA (safety certificate) and everything under their belt, they'll be starting at $20 an hour and that's an immediate benefit for them and their families.”
Because of tourism and the region’s casinos, a culinary program was an obvious choice. Patricia Bayne, the school’s CTE food services instructor, said getting various food certificates, “will increase their chances of getting hired quickly and also go in at a higher pay.”
Cummings also realized students were thirsting to know what else is out there. Some have never been to Denver. Every year the school offers a two-week “J-Term’” where students get to experience school in a different manner: They can go on trips to local mines, take a course on genealogy, sing musicals around town, photography, learn about computer science or astronomy.
“Let's create ways to show them that there are other options out there and increase that hopefulness.”
State grant (using federal money) key to transformation
It couldn’t have happened without a $1.5 million RISE grant from the state using federal pandemic money. The money trained teachers on how to shift their lesson focus to why students were learning something and presenting knowledge that was relevant to their lives and their futures. Cummings worked with teachers to double down on building relationships with students and families.
But the biggest thing the money did was help set up career pathways.
Just down the hall from math and English classes, Randy Munch, a local firefighter and the school’s fire science teacher, instructs a student as he crawls on the ground along the edge of a classroom. Dalton, a junior, is weighed down in a thermal firefighter suit, a heavy air cylinder on his back connected to a face mask, breathing deeply.
“See how hard you’re breathing when you’ve got all this on you,” Munch said. “You feeling all right? If you got to go off air, go off air.”
Dalton pushes forward, sweeping in front of him as he crawls through the imaginary smoke-filled house on fire looking for someone.
“Booger! Fire department!” he yells.
He locates “Booger.”
“Found him? Now what? Who are you going to talk to?” Munch asks.
Dalton backs out with Munch, crawling on hands and knees. Munch clicks his stopwatch, recording the time.
Dalton rips off the mask and grins: “Man, am I sweaty!”
Dalton, 17, said if he gets a basketball scholarship he might go to college. But he is thinking about being a wildland firefighter.
“I like animals and their habitat is on fire constantly ... It's kind of heartbreaking.”
The way that Dalton thinks about his core classes is they’re something he just needs to get done and pass. Fire science is different.
“This class gives me a workout, it trains mentality, it shows you self-discipline.”
His classmate, 11th grader Aubrey said the class is a step towards her goal of becoming an EMT. This class has not just physical firefighting practice but also reading on fire dynamics, how a fire grows, how the fuel affects the speed of growth. Aubrey is not interested in college.
“Personally, my mom went to college and she was in really bad debt for a long time so I don’t want to do that ... I want to be able to get … and go somewhere where I can just do what I know how to do.”
'A reason to go to school'
The state grant also built a 9,000-square-foot construction trades shop. The middle schoolers are busy using band saws and drills and making wooden horses (“My Grandma loves horses,” Charlie said) or a Bigfoot, while the older students work on coat racks or shingling, framing, or trims on a wood shed. Mason wants to go to work for his Dad in construction. He said he can’t think straight sitting at a desk.
“It definitely has improved my liking of school. I know I still have to sit at a desk, but knowing that I can look forward to doing this at the end of the day definitely gives me a reason to go to school.”
Another student plans on going to welding school when they graduate.
Construction trades instructor Dale Kozelka said many people nowadays can’t do the basic stuff and they’ll have no choice but to call an electrician, a plumber, or a carpenter. He floats around the students with tips (“Remember, we never put our hand in front of the blade,” and “Let’s get a clamp on there”) as older students monitor younger ones.
Principal Cummings said it hasn’t been easy work implementing all the changes in the district.
“I do worry about burnout,” he said. “There is nobody in this building that isn’t wearing two or three hats.”
Cummings said they’ve had to scale back on some plans. District leaders thought by now the construction students could be building tiny houses that one day could help with the region’s affordable housing crisis. That will take time. This year the focus has been on boosting academics.
District leaders and teachers all have to work on the side to apply for grants, which could be hard to come by in the future of Colorado’s tight fiscal environment and changes at the federal level.
But there are positives
The community passed a 1 percent sales tax that will go directly into career programs. Chronic absenteeism, while still high, is down over the past few years, while attendance is up. The school met state benchmarks for academic growth and tenth grade PSAT and 11th grade SAT scores are rising.
Most importantly for Cummings, the regular “hopefulness” surveys of students that the school conducts, “those that express that they have something they're looking forward to or that they have something that they are excited about has dramatically increased in the past three years.”
The number of students who feel they have a supportive relationship with an adult at school has risen six points since the fall of 2021 to 83 percent.
“Our kids want to be here,” said counselor Sadie Miller. “They are going to basketball games and cheering and they are doing these things that five years ago, nobody was doing.”
Science teacher Manning said she believes students understand the value of their education a little better now, why it’s important to know how to do basic math problems and how science gives them context to understand the world and themselves. In genetics, for example, they may examine “Why do you have a widow’s peak? Why do you have hair on your knuckles?”
She believes the biggest change is with parental engagement. She used to get one or two parents at parent teacher conferences. Now she gets 60 percent of parents. She said they see the school is listening to them.
“We've made it OK to not go to college, but we feel it's important to give our students the best opportunity for whatever pathway they choose, and I think that that makes a difference to the parents because now they can see that we do care, this is our calling in life is to get your kids prepared for whatever it is they choose.”
Seeing a future for themselves
Many students this CPR reporter meets, of course, have their eye on going to a college one day. But not many others. Several other kids tell me the school’s culinary pathway has helped them see a future.
“Eventually I’d like to make a food truck for Victor and Cripple Creek … eventually!” said eighth-grader Cooper.
Other kids are just happy they can help out their parents.
“It’s definitely a lot easier to cook at home when you know what to do and how to follow a recipe,” said Jackson, a freshman.
Cooper’s friend Duriel who is mixing up batter for his cake pops, pauses when asked about what this school gives him.
“This school gives me the option to work out my dreams.”
And their classroom mentor 12th grader Lachlan who is already working at one of the restaurants at the growing casino, said he loves the exactness of pastry. He’d loved to keep honing his skills in that area.
Without Cripple Creek-Victor Junior/Senior High School, “I probably wouldn’t … know what I wanted to do with my life.”
