The Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture and Design School in Commerce City hosted a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday afternoon for its new 29,900-square-foot Founder’s Field and a tour of two new instructional buildings for students and the community, a 2,800-square-foot production greenhouse and the Cultivate Center.
The natural grass athletic field is named in honor of the school’s founding families and students. The student-led, experiential charter school currently enrolls about 500 ninth- through 12th-graders and its founding students make up the Class of 2025, its first graduating class of seniors.
The STEAD high school campus operates on 8.5 acres in the Reunion community in Commerce City managed by housing developer Oakwood Homes, and they were able to construct Founder’s Field thanks to a $550,000 grant from Adams County and the land donation from Cal Fulenwider, who chairs a Denver metro-based family real estate development company.
The new Cultivate Center will serve as the campus’s final academic building, and will be used for retreats and training for current and future educators as well as for hosting events.
In the new greenhouse facility, students are able to grow their own fresh produce in a controlled environment, which they can then use in one of the campus’s four commercial kitchens to prepare lunches. All students receive free lunch, and lunches are all prepared using produce grown at the school.
The school also has bees, chickens and critters of all kinds, including snakes and tarantulas that students are responsible for.
The school is also an official site of the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Soil Health Program, connecting students with local farmers and agricultural experts. Just this month, STEAD, CSU Spur and the CSU School of Agricultural Sciences finalized an articulation agreement that allows students to develop certain credits and guarantees them automatic admission for college.
Of this year’s graduating class, a couple seniors are attending Ivy League colleges; some who come from multi-generational ranching families are going on to work for the family business, some are headed to trade school and many are headed to CSU.
While the majority of the student body at STEAD resides in Commerce City, some students apply for admission through the school’s lottery-based system, making it uniquely diverse in terms of its mix of students’ socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Students from all over the Denver Metro apply to attend STEAD each year, but priority is given to those who reside in School District 27J.
One such student is Caleena Edwards, a junior at STEAD who gave a tour of the two new facilities on Tuesday. Edwards is hoping to attend college in Canada after graduating, specifically near Vancouver, because of the climate and its propensity for rainy days, which she says would be helpful for her particular agricultural interests.
“A lot of students come in here thinking they want to pursue, say, nursing, and then they do a nursing internship and find out they have a really queasy stomach and it’s not for them. And it’s great to find that out about yourself before going to college and going into debt for something that you might not end up enjoying,” Edwards said.
Rachel Balkham, who teaches regenerative economics of agriculture to 11th- and 12th-graders and serves as the Director of Partnerships of Work-Based Learning at the school, said that having such a diverse group of students has allowed her to create a unique, hands-on learning approach for each student, curated to their individual interests.
“All of our students are in career, technical, and education pathways. So food science, plant science, animal science and natural resources. Because of that, I’m developing partnerships in the community that align with the goals of all of our students,” she said.
“If you look around at what’s happening with our ecosystem, I think it’s a fair question to ask, do we really want to sustain this? Or do we want to create the conditions that allow for nature to regenerate itself? Historically, we’ve used the word sustainability, but that’s why we’ve shifted to regenerative agriculture. It’s essentially indigenous philosophy. We are acting in partnership with the land so that the land then begins to regenerate itself,” she explained.
This also works as an analogy for human systems, Balkham said. She invites her students to ask themselves, ‘How do we exist in emergent systems that are then regenerating as well in society?’ From there, she develops partnerships and internships that are tailored to those goals.
“Of course, some of my students come to me and are like, ‘I want to be a wedding planner!’ And that’s great. I help them explore whatever it is they’re interested in, because the point is for them to investigate those passions while they’re here.”
Some of the partnerships and internship programs STEAD has developed are with the Butterfly Pavilion, Platte Valley Medical Center, and equine-assisted therapy through the Colorado Therapeutic Riding Center.
The school also has “accelerator weeks” four times a year, two of which are for the National Western Stock Show and for community service, and the other two are more choice-based, allowing students to structure their week around their academic interests. During accelerator weeks, regular classes are not in session, and the students instead spend their days out in the field, on field trips or doing internships or community service.
“Today is less about the fact that we’re building the next big thing, which is the field,” said Kelly Hoskinson, one of the school’s co-founders at the ceremony on Tuesday.
“This is really about celebrating our senior class and the families that were here that took a leap of faith with us on this journey. We’re celebrating your legacy, and the idea of stewardship. Our seniors, the class of 2025, are now stewards of this wonderful place, and they get the opportunity to share that legacy with future students as they become alumni.”
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