St. Vrain Valley Schools’ Nutrition Services Department will once again offer summer meals at no cost to families from June 6-30 on Monday-Thursday each week. Drive-through meal service will provide breakfast and lunch each day. Double meals will be handed out on Thursdays.
The curbside meal program will be available at the following locations:
Altona Middle School | 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. The Community Food Share will provide grocery staples for families every Tuesday.
Frederick High School | 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. The Weld Food Bank Farms to Families truck will be onsite to deliver fresh produce every Monday.
Mead Elementary School | 11-12:00 p.m.
Skyline High School | 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. The Community Food Share will provide grocery staples for families every Tuesday. Longmont Public Library will provide books for families on June 7.
Confluence 2022 highlights science, leadership skills at every grade level
The youngest presenter to the Lyons Ecology Advisory Board on Tuesday was a pre-schooler who talked about the science and conservation he learned about in class.
“Science is fun!” he concluded to applause.
The preschool student was one of a slate of presenters at the Confluence 2022 hosted by Lyons Elementary School and Lyons Middle Senior High School. The presentations of environmental leadership and conservation learning were part of the Lyons Ecology Advisory Board meeting.
Unified student athletes celebrated the end of the school year with an exciting Monday full of outdoor events at Longmont High School.
For the Unified Day of Champions, student athletes from eight high schools in the St. Vrain Valley School District were grouped with their schools and participated in a variety of activities including outdoor bowling, kickball, basketball and shuffleboard. The most exciting station, however, may have been the dunk tank holding principals and administrators.
Unified Sports offers after school sports activities such as basketball, soccer and bowling to St. Vrain students with and without disabilities throughout the school year.
The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program (DP) has long been a staple of Niwot High School, and has always been instrumental in attracting students and helping them reach their full potential. With 75 students in the IB DP and an additional 104 students accessing IB education through individual courses, 179 students have been registered to take their IB exams in May 2022.
At Niwot, the IB DP is a part of the school’s tradition and a great source of pride for the community.
“IB provides students with an excellent, rigorous program that opens doors and we are always looking for ways to improve and strengthen an already excellent program”, said Eric Rauschkolb, Niwot High Principal.
One of the ways the program has been strengthened is through providing access to individual IB courses to students and making the courses available to all students. Adds Rauschkolb, “It allows students to get a more flexible, positive, and joyful experience. All students now have the opportunity to engage in IB education and they are thriving with more choice.”
Congrats to Eilene Heo for completing IB CAS! Eilene and her CAS project partner built and planted a raised garden bed for senior residents at Bross Street Assisted Living. We are proud of her efforts to help our community. @svvsd_NHS_IB@SVVSD@NiwotHSpic.twitter.com/GydhMuKunH
In the last couple of years, Sunset Middle School has become an IB World School and is offering the Middle Years Programme (MYP) to all students, helping to increase IB’s visibility throughout the Niwot feeder. Staff at Niwot is also constantly working on encouraging all students to take advanced courses including IB courses. Every ninth grader is now taking Niwot Pre-IB (NPIB) Social Studies classes, which is intended to open the door to future advanced coursework.
At Niwot High, 70 percent of upperclassmen take at least one AP or IB course, which offer students an opportunity to earn college credit. The class of 2021 earned $17 million in college scholarships. There is a direct relationship between having access to more higher-level coursework and college savings.
However, the uniqueness of IB lies in its core: Creativity, Activity, and Service; Extended Essay; and Theory of Knowledge. “Every student that has access to IB education will be a better global citizen. They are learning to see outside of themselves and their local community. We want our students to “act locally as we encourage them to think globally”, says Towlen, the NHS IB DP Coordinator.
Niwot IB DP Senior Jace Simons embodies the spirit of IB education. For his CAS project, Jace developed a gas phase particle simulation and donated it to Niwot’s physics department so future students could use it. Simons has learned a lot from his experience in the IB DP program. “IB has taught me problem solving, soft skills and the value of time management. Problem solving is something which we require through our entire lives,” says Simons. “Time management has been a real beneficial skill that I’ve learned from IB. It is no secret how much work IB takes. Between the rigorous coursework, Extended Essay and CAS, and IB tests, time management is a real world skill that IB has taught me, which will continue to be useful for my whole life.”
Erie High School will be host to Colorado Education Initiative’s 11th annual Advanced Placement for All Summer Institute.
Educators from across the state will gather at Erie, hosted by the Colorado Education Initiative partnering for the first time with a school district to host the event. The Institute will offer educators training to ensure AP students succeed, including those typically underrepresented in AP courses like students of color and students experiencing poverty.
Monarch High graduating senior Hannah Rowton dressed a cardboard cutout of “Harry Potter” villain Draco Malfoy in different outfits as a backdrop to keep herself engaged as online classes dragged on during her junior year.
“It was hard mentally,” she said. “It was so hard not knowing when things would end, if I would get a senior year, if we could take masks off. In classes, I feed off of people’s energy. Online, it didn’t feel like school. You could feel how everybody was burned out. To feel so disconnected was hard.”
Saturday, May 14 from 8 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., the Innovation Center will host a MATE Rocky Mountain Regional ROV Competition at their newest districtwide facility, the Aquatic Center of St. Vrain Valley Schools. The tournament will have seven teams competing with five high school teams and two college teams. The high school teams will include three teams from the Innovation Center with representation from high schools across the district, as well as two teams from Boulder High School. The college teams will include students based out of the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The teams are tasked with designing an underwater robot, demonstrating how they can market their robot, and finally, they will showcase how their robot can complete various tasks in the pool.
On Monday, fifth-graders from across the St. Vrain Valley school district met at Longmont High School for a track and field day. Students were able to participate in up to four events including a three-legged race, shoe kicking, 50m run, tug-of-war and more. Teachers and volunteers quickly handed out ribbons to students as they placed in their event.
Eight high schools in the St. Vrain Valley School District have been named as a 2022 U.S. News Best High School.
The U.S. News ranks uses data on more than 24,000 public high schools, ranking nearly 18,000 schools on six factors. Those factors included college readiness, state assessment proficiency, state assessment performance, underserved student performance, college curriculum breadth and graduation rate.
