Cherry Creek School District

Cherry Creek School District No. 5 was voted into existence in 1950 by residents of seven Arapahoe County school districts. Existing schools in the new district included:

• Melvin School, currently a schoolhouse museum on the Smoky Hill High School campus
• Castlewood School, dismantled when I-25 was built and replaced with Belleview Elementary in 1954
• Cherry Creek Elementary School
• Cherry Hills Elementary School [5]

The definition of a top-notch public education on the Colorado plains in the late 1800s was very different than the standards of 2015. When the first Cherry Creek school house opened its doors in 1874 to serve the isolated families living in the isolated community of Melvin on the rugged eastern plains of Arapahoe County, its students made do with scant resources.

Elementary school students came to class with chalkboards, chalk and little else. Long before modern technology played any kind of role in the classroom, teachers relied on the most basic kinds of classroom tools to pass along knowledge, and it worked for the school's small groups of students.

That lone schoolhouse and its first groups of teachers and students served as the roots of what would formally become the Cherry Creek School District in 1950. Following the passage of the School District Reorganization Act in 1949 and the decision by voters to unite more than 1,200 students in Arapahoe County in one district, CCSD formally launched as a continuation of the educational tradition that began with the determined settlers of the late 19th century.

Sixty-five years after that unification, the district has evolved in myriad ways. In lieu of a handful of rickety buildings spread across the county, CCSD now comprises 42 elementary schools, 10 middle schools and six high schools, in addition to an alternative high school, a magnet school and a charter school. District enrollment now exceeds 54,200, and the first class of school room instructors has grown to about 3,700 teachers. Classrooms across the district's 108 square miles feature the latest in cutting-edge technology, and students of all backgrounds and grade levels have the latest tools at their disposal.

A lot has changed since the scattered group of schools incorporated in 1950, but the Cherry Creek School District still operates on important standards staked out by its Board of Education in 1955, principles that would form the basis of the district’s mission statement: "To inspire every student to think, to learn, to achieve, to care." The first CCSD board members made character education, curriculum development, responsible school finance and looking ahead early priorities.

That year, Clark Stutler, the first CCSD superintendent, also made the following mission statement for the young district: "The only reason for a Board of Education or for any of the 82 employees of the Cherry Creek School District No. 5 is that there are 1,935 boys and girls in the district who need to be educated. It precludes everything else."

As much as Cherry Creek has changed over the past 65 years, those priorities have remained a guiding principle for district leaders.

Along with fundamental shifts in the district's population, size and scope, these advancements have made for a completely different world. The Cherry Creek School District bears very little resemblance to the one-room schoolhouses that served as its foundations. Still, those teachers and students who reported to school in the first years of the district’s existence would recognize a common thread in today’s classrooms.[6]

In 2011, the district opened the Institute of Science and Technology, a campus devoted specifically to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The building, located at 12500 E. Jewell Avenue in Aurora, is part of the Overland High School-Prairie Middle School campus. It serves Overland and Prairie students through a rich and rigorous curriculum.

The school was designed by Hutton Architecture Studio and built by Saunders Construction with science in mind. Approved by Cherry Creek voters in 2008, the $18 million, 58,000 square foot facility features lines of latitude and longitude on the floors, galaxies of stars on the ceilings, and windows that represent Fibonacci's sequence.[7]

• Cherry Creek School District
• Cherry Creek School District at the Wayback Machine (archive index)