“There’s a whole entire world out there to explore. So you shouldn’t have to be locked up in a city or a house.”
-- Claire Babcock, Edison Elementary fifth-grader
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Celebrating 50 Years of Balarat Outdoor Education
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Dear Team DPS,
It is a rite of passage for our students and a cherished memory for many DPS alumni like myself: the opportunity to experience the great outdoors with your classmates. Taking a magical night walk under the stars. Bonding over snowshoeing or hiking. And the quiet. This spring we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of a DPS treasure that offers these experiences to fifth-graders throughout our schools -- the Balarat Outdoor Education Center.
The vision of Balarat is to ignite curiosity and confidence through experiences in the natural world. For many of our students, a trip to Balarat is their first time in Colorado’s high country. The 750-acre classroom in the Boulder County foothills was donated to DPS in 1968, and it’s estimated that 400,000 Denver students have visited the outdoor education center since it first opened in 1969.
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Balarat Manager Patrick Emery has worked at the camp for an amazing 37 years and describes with passion “the light in students’ eyes when they get a real-world connection to something they’ve read about or studied, and the opportunity to work in the most interactive, wonderful and wonder-full classroom available.
I remember sitting on a rock eating my sack lunch with my Barnum classmates while listening to Balarat educators talk about the difference between lichen and moss. And I’ll never forget volunteering in high school as a Balarat counselor, leading songs on the bus and working with kids who were so excited it seemed they took forever to go to sleep!
Armando Chavira, a senior at
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College
, was a student at Florida Pitt-Waller when he first visited Balarat. “I remember just having a lot of fun and looking at all the landscapes, being inspired by the high school group leaders,” he shared. “So I wanted to come back and do the same for fifth-graders, as they did for me.”
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Students participated in the ropes course at a previous balarat trip during the late 1970's.
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Erik Hurst -- a current balarat instructor -- and students hiking during the fall of 1982.
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For
Edison Elementary
fifth-grader Claire Babcock, who made her memories at the camp just last week, Balarat offers an entire new outlook on the world.
“I want to have fun with friends out in nature, which isn’t a scenery we see all that often. I think it’s very important you know what other things look like,” she said. “There’s a whole entire world out there to explore, so you shouldn’t have to be locked up in a city or a house.”
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Watch this video
featuring students from Marrama and Edison elementary schools to see for yourself the joy students experience -- the joy for learning that we want to nourish in every one of our students.
Warm Regards,
Susana
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Class of 2019 Graduation Dates Announced
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Congratulations to all of our Class of 2019 graduates!
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DPS Boosts Student Achievement by Implementing 'Principal Pipelines'
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DPS is one of six large school districts in the country that boosted student achievement by adopting a comprehensive strategy for improving principal effectiveness, according to a new RAND Corporation
report.
As part of an $85 million, six-year initiative funded by The Wallace Foundation, DPS began building a “principal pipeline” in 2011 by implementing rigorous leader standards, high-quality preservice preparation, selective hiring and placement, and on-the-job support and evaluation for its principals.
RAND’s report finds that, across all six districts participating in the initiative, building these pipelines produced positive effects on student achievement in reading and math, and by level in elementary, middle and high school. Schools with newly placed principals in pipeline districts outperformed comparison schools by 6.22 percentage points in reading and 2.87 percentage points in math.
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Students Learn Innovation and Perseverance at Destination Imagination
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For the past 20 years, students across Colorado have participated in Destination Imagination, an academic competition that provides students with an opportunity to become innovators of the future.
This year, the team from
Omar D. Blair Charter School not only learned about the arts, engineering and teamwork; they also learned how important perseverance is to success when six students tackled the Technical Challenge assignment in the competition.
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Omar D. Blair's Space Guardians team holding a sign that reads: "Through the ups and downs, your hard work sealed your fate. Congrats, Space Guardians, you're going to state!"
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The Space Guardians team, which includes
Shea Crossman Jr.
,
Maheen Rahimi
,
Treyvon Cooper
,
Brooklyn Perenyi
,
Kamil Abshir
and
Yafet Andualem
, worked together to design an aircraft capable of taking off, flying and landing while dropping a series of payloads. The students were also required to incorporate a play or skit with a feature character, special effects and team choice elements.
“Our team wanted to quit two times. We had to restart almost half our project,” said student Brooklyn Perenyi. Fortunately, they did not quit and earned the chance to compete in the April 6 state competition.
Congratulations, Space Guardians!
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Denver Public Schools sends all district newsletters and critical employee communications through Constant Contact. Please do not unsubscribe from any message; if you unsubscribe from one newsletter or one communication, you will be removed from all other district-managed email lists in Constant Contact. If you have any questions, please email
communications@dpsk12.org
.
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