How Colorado’s first agriculture-focused charter school is giving students tools for life

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The last thing the rancher from Arkansas wandering through the cattle barn at the thought he’d encounter was the group of kids surrounding him dressed in the un-ranchiest clothing. You could see it in his face. 

So it took a minute for 10th grader Kailey Seymour, in a flannel, jeans and sneakers, to gather the courage to ask if he’d let them interview him while her classmate Gianni Montoya, in a fuzzy black-and-white Raiders poncho that grazed his knees, recorded the conversation on a phone. 

Lucky for them — Philip Moon of in Harrison, Arkansas — obliged. He listened to Seymour’s question — Do you sell your cattle at stock shows? — and gave a thoughtful answer. He said he raises cow-calf pairs, raises beef for his personal use, sells bulls to the general public and sells feeder calves at the in Joplin, Missouri. And then he gave the students some bonus material that tied in to their project. 

“You’ve got to have proper nutrition and a good mineral program,” he said. “Your cattle will only excel if you do the right things to provide the opportunity.” 

Seymour and Montoya, with fellow 10th graders Rey Padilla and Ben Wyperd, were gathering material for a video they were making about food insecurity in America. It was an assignment they’d been given by their teachers at The STEAD School in Commerce City, which is unlike any other charter school in Colorado. STEAD stands for science, technology, environment, agriculture and , which Kelly Leid, one of the cofounders, said teaches kids to be “critical, holistic thinkers that can tackle tough questions and navigate and engage people with a variety of perspectives.”

STEAD is like hundreds of high schools across Colorado in that it offers a curriculum, which has become increasingly popular because it gives kids practical hands-on technical skills that can lead to well-paying jobs straight out of high school and higher-college enrollment. And like many of those schools in rural areas, its main focus is agriculture, with tracts in plant, animal, food or environmental sciences. 

Like other schools, it offers certificates that give kids a one-up when they graduate. But even though it is a free public charter school, it offers some benefits that seem private school-ish. 

STEAD kids tend a 1-acre regenerative farm plot on a 10-acre campus laid out with immaculate white buildings of the farmhouse architecture trend. They have a brand new production greenhouse they are about to start planting, and they take field trips to and receive visitors from Colorado State University’s . They intern on in Boulder, which bills itself as “diversified beyond organic.” And they’re currently participating in an important that explores how manuresheds help farmers while combating nutrient pollution. (Similar to how a watershed works, a manureshed is a system linking manure sources to manure sinks.)

“Our little farm is now part of the Department of Agriculture’s soil-health program,” said Rachel Balkcom, the school’s director of partnerships and work-based learning. “So we are tracking our regenerative strategies year to year and (USDA scientists) are helping students utilize the scientific method.” 

“Once our seed lab is built out, we’ll have an entire agricultural laboratory,” senior Davin Oray said. 

Every STEAD student in an agriculture pathway becomes a member of .

But not every STEAD kid “vibes with the ag thing,” so the school also offers an tract, co-founder Amy Schwartz said. And while they’re at it, students can pour their hearts into songwriting. Or woodworking. Or engineering. “My sophomore year, someone built a fully engineered waterfall system that reused the water,” Oray said. 

But completing in STEAD’s agriculture pathway isn’t the only thing that matters. 

The school’s North Star is building “informed citizens who understand the importance of the environment, of natural resources and of food, and who are at least going to hold people accountable that are making decisions, because they’re well-informed,” Leid said. 

But how does an ag school in the middle of a master-planned development on the edge of metro Denver relate to high schools in rural communities that have had ag programs for decades? And is there anything STEAD can offer those students — or vice versa? 

I’ll see your seed lab and raise you a meat trailer  

STEAD may be getting a seed lab, but Lone Star K-12 already has a trailer where kids can butcher a cow, pig or lamb in animal sciences class. 

The trailer is white, wide and sits just behind a small brick school where 120 students learn. The school is about 20 miles from the nearest town, Otis, population 512.   

Saralynn Vetter, Lone Star’s sole agriculture teacher, said the school applied for grants to buy the trailer when she wanted to expand the ag program but had too little space. 

“It started out as ‘this is never going to work but I’m going to throw it in the grant pile and see if someone bites,’ and someone did,” she said. 

“We call this our cutting floor,” she added, gesturing a few inches in front of her to the center of the trailer, where a shiny metal table supported a gleaming leg of raw beef. 

“There’s a chill room holding probably three carcasses,” she said, pointing to a door just past the table. “We don’t do any slaughter here. This is where all of the teaching happens.” 

Ten juniors in bright blue hairnets took turns carving up the cow leg. About half have Otis addresses, the other half Yuma, close to an hour away. Their principal, Mike Bowers, said the school is the only one in the Lone Star district. The wind races across farm fields stretching in all directions. But Bowers said Lone Star kids have a wealth of learning opportunities — Career Technical Education ag pathways and otherwise.

“We have horticulture and landscaping. We used to have two greenhouses, but one was destroyed in a tornado. Mrs. Vetter gets the other one going every spring,” Bowers said. “The kids start plants inside through a hydroponic system.  

“Then, obviously, the meat processing trailer is incredible, but we also have a shop. A machine where kids can cut metal. And we’ve got kids who are working at (a school store that sells food from the) greenhouse.”

In the trailer, Vetter said the kids were “going body part by body part, learning how to cut everything.”

The cow came from one student’s family’s ranch. Most of the kids said they took the class so they would have the skills to butcher their own meat in the future. But one said her why was “the meats evaluation” in a FFA competition coming up in April, because Lone Star would be the only school at the competition with a meat trailer.

Speaking of FFA, Bowers said the Lone Star kids throw down.

“I think they’ve won the range contest probably 10 or 12 years in a row,” he said. “Range is when you go out into a field somewhere and you have to identify every single type of plant just by feel, smell and touch. And there’s, like, 150-some different plants. Then there was milk production. They won that a lot of years in a row. Two teams that show farm animals went to nationals. The ag mechanics team and horticulture culture team did as well.”

They win flower arranging contests. And they’ve even gone up against STEAD.

“We competed against them in the World Hunger Challenge, and they were very different kids,” Vetter said. 

“I would say perhaps our students are closer to traditional production agriculture and perhaps more connected to the land,” she added. “They spend time studying soils and range pastures more than time in the greenhouse. Many of their extended families earn an income through production ag, and if not extended family today, they aren’t very many generations removed from that lifestyle.”  

Vetter introduces her students to concepts such as global hunger when they are ninth graders, “because they need to be aware of it,” she said. “But I kind of feel like I shelter them a little bit, because that’s a big, heavy load when you start thinking about the rest of the world.”

The meat sciences class hadn’t heard about the that the STEAD kids helped , a Denver incubator of “high-impact education initiatives” focused on preparing youth to build economically and environmentally resilient communities, move through the legislature and become a seal, signed by Gov. Jared Polis, that qualifying students get affixed to their diplomas.  

As they continued to carve, the kids rattled off the professions they wanted to pursue: Forensics expert. Ultrasound technician. Bomb squad. Physical therapist. Only two of 10 wanted to stay in agriculture. 

No matter what career the Lone Star students head toward, Bowers says they are supported.

“We cap classes at 15, so every kid gets individualized attention,” he said. “We make sure every kid has a pathway, someone they can relate to and someone they can talk to every day that is passionate about what they’re passionate about. 

“We also have a great partnership with ” that sees students working for them during high school and then them paying for the students’ continuing education. “You go over to , and they’ve got a great construction program. Akron also has one through some of the same pathways-type thinking. So everybody kind of has their people within their own little area who will jump in and do these things. We went to Akron to get our through the program there. You know, hopefully, in time, maybe some kids will want to come here to our animal science class and utilize what we’re strong in.”

A benevolent beehive 

STEAD is so outwardly perfect-seeming, so calm and serene, it can feel like everyone is sipping garden-grown chamomile tea from their water bottles. 

Such was the case recently when a visitor arrived unannounced, and a greeter in the Cultivate Center summoned three students to guide a tour. 

Within minutes they appeared, all welcoming and inviting. They introduced themselves as Bree Quintana, Cobe Koonce and Davin Oray. 

As they cruised the school grounds, they shared some of STEAD’s features.

“We’re a project-based learning school, so everything we do here is about creating something that will benefit STEAD or the larger community,” Oray said. 

“One of my favorite projects we did is called the animal project, or farm project. We had to incorporate all of our core classes into it. Every one of our projects goes off the four agriculture pathways. We got to decide where our farm was, how it produced things, the specific genetics of the animals and what breed of cattle we were using, creating a full-scale budget for it, putting it all into one giant spreadsheet.” 

The guides led their visitor into an airy room with a mural on the wall that read “The STEAD Community” and featured a spider, flags from around the world, the recycle symbol, a basketball and beaker. The room is named after Cal Fulenwider, board chair and CEO of , who was involved in STEAD’s creation.

Starting in the early 1900s Fulenwider’s grandfather grew dry-land wheat on a massive farm that spread to where Denver International Airport now sits. In 2001, Fulenwider LLC began developing 2,500 acres of the land on the edge of Commerce City into , whose master developer was Shea Homes until 2017 when that role transferred to Oakwood Homes. A year later, Leid, then executive vice president of operations for Oakwood, and Amy Schwartz, STEAD’s other co-founder began discussing the school.

In 2020, Cal Fulenwider donated 10 acres worth $6 million . He also partnered with the , started by the CEO of Oakwood Homes, to help raise $2.5 million for the first phase of construction. 

Schwartz is director of the BuildStrong Foundation. STEAD is her and Leid’s brainchild. Leid said the total build-out cost was $32.3 million, paid for with $19.4 million in loans, $1 million in gifts and donations, $10.1 million in bonds and a $1 million startup grant from BuildStrong. (“We are paying off a lot of debt,” Balkcom said.) 

The challenge and opportunity of STEAD, , was that “when we say ‘agriculture,’ what’s seared into our brains is this very traditional sense of what ag is” — the cow, the horse, the corn crop — “but it’s also science, technology and public policy.” 

He told ����ֱ�� STEAD is in an ideal location to bring together urban, suburban and rural kids to learn and idea-share, which is crucial because “one of the things we have to make sure of as we continue to advance the importance of agriculture amid population growth and climate change is that (those demographics) communicate.”

Never mind that at projected build-out there will be 10,000 homes on the 2,500 acres anchored by a 430-acre mixed-use development on the eastern edge of Commerce City as the suburbs continue to push into the Eastern Plains. But it also might just make it easier for more rural kids to go to STEAD if they want.

STEAD currently offers no transportation to and from school, but Schwartz said they’re working on that. The school founders also aspire to one day have a boarding school option. 

“Or maybe even more feasible, is there some online program we could create that would engage those (rural) families?” Schwartz said. “I think sometimes I hear families (in rural areas) say their way of life is kind of getting marginalized or forgotten. And this school kind of cherishes that way of life and lifts it up. We are not really engaging students that live too far away, but we hope to in the future.”

Back at school, the tour guides’ love for STEAD was overflowing. In one room, two different classes were going with the students sitting on whimsically shaped chairs and couches. Oray said open classes provide students with the option to ask more questions, “especially if you have a question in social studies that needs to be asked to a language arts teacher,” for example. 

“If I could describe STEAD in one word, it would be beehive, because it looks incredibly chaotic, like everybody is everywhere,” he said. “But everybody’s working together. They have their roles, and they’re all trying to work towards a bigger goal of just keeping the school and our community a wonderful place to be in.” 

The ag curriculum has shaped Oray’s academic intentions. Earlier in his education, he wanted to go into plant science and he wanted to go into psychology, but he “couldn’t see a relation to that originally.” So he talked to his “guide, which is what we call our teachers, and I talked to all of my references,” he said. “And I found out about horticulture therapy and how different plants affect your mind and, like, what looking at them does, so it’s really environmental psychology, and I thought that was a really cool connection that I could make.”

The other two student guides said they shared Oray’s assessment that “not everybody’s going to go into the agriculture field, but we think it’s important to be able to know how to grow a plant or know how to cook food properly and make it taste delicious, just whatever comes next.”

Koonce, for example, said he wants to be an architect who uses plant-based technology.  

Other kids are getting drone certifications or learning how to cook for the entire school. Students compete in rugby. In golf. And Oray said they do internships with Platte Valley Hospital, the Butterfly Pavilion, “a bunch of different local farms” and the Denver Zoo. 

“At STEAD you have all of this freedom, and what comes with that is responsibility,” he said. 

How Holyoke does it 

Shauna Strecker, who teaches agriculture classes at Holyoke High School, which is in Phillips County, a three-hour drive northeast of Denver, said of STEAD, “I’m a big believer in agriculture, and people need to understand where their food comes from. So I think getting those kids from that demographic exposed to it is really neat.” 

“I do think there’s a lot of difference between that school and the majority of, I’m going to use the term, ag programs throughout the state,” with the biggest two being “the bigger presence of FFA” and “the amount of pathways we teach,” she said.

Enrollment in ag classes at Holyoke is “upwards of 100 students out of 160 in grades 9 through 12,” she said. And in all of the rural schools she knows of that have ag programs, “a large number of kids are in them and getting exposure to a lot of different areas in agriculture.” 

Yet since she moved to town nine years ago, Strecker has seen “how kids, even in families that have multigenerational farms, aren’t as involved as I thought they would be.” That could be because “they have different interests or their parents are encouraging them to explore other careers,” but she said she sees “the full gamut of parents saying ‘Please go be a lawyer, a doctor. Do something other than this,’ to ‘We need you to come back and be on the farm.’” 

As a teacher, Strecker says she feels passionate about exposing students to ag careers whether they have an ag background or not. “You’d be surprised by how many students we actually have here in rural Holyoke that don’t live on a family farm or ranch.” So it’s equally important to her to “show them that agriculture is much more than just going back to a family farm, because if they don’t have that, then what are they going to do?” 

One of her big focuses is helping kids get Career Technical Education certificates for in-demand jobs. “There are thousands of industry certificates in Colorado. It just depends on what you want to go into,” she said.

Those can pay off big-time, right out of high school.    

“One student got his forklift certificate and his CDL and he went to work for the . He was earning money about six or seven weeks before everybody else.” Another “got some interesting certificates in high school that actually put her ahead of some of her peers and let her go on some job-shadowing trips out of state for six weeks.” 

Over in Lone Star, Principal Bowers said Holyoke School District Superintendent Kyle Stumpf has worked tirelessly, through Colorado’s , “to get businesses together to make sure that kids are making connections in real world situations, and getting internships and job shadows and having those work studies and a pathway so when they do get out of high school, they’re ready.”

When Strecker heard about STEAD’s focus on regenerative agriculture, she said, “They are definitely more focused, I would say, on urban agriculture, because of where they’re at in Colorado, and what we’re teaching out here is probably a little more focused on production agriculture.”

“We’re teaching more crop science so that is probably a difference,” she added. 

But “regardless of the size of a farm or the kind of agriculture, regardless of whatever you’re involved with, when it comes down to it, what we’re talking about is feeding the world,” she said. And that takes connection.  

“We have partners in Hugo. We have partners in East Grand and West Grand. We have partners in Clear Creek and our northeast school districts,” Stumpf said. 

“So even though Mrs. Strecker does a fabulous job, and she knows a lot of things about production agriculture, Wray (High School) allows our kids to join their science classes and math classes if we desire,” he added. “And Cañon City, we share a lot of resources back and forth with them.

“Whether you’re a public school, whether you’re a telephone company, you have some trade secrets, but if you want to make it in the world, you’ve got to be able to expand and reach out and make some connections with other people to see what they’re doing. And I think it would be a great partnership to take the things (STEAD) kids are learning on their 1-acre plot and then bring them out here to show them what a million-dollar combine looks like.” 

Speaking the same language 

Stumpf’s idea harkens back to what Leid said about bridging the rural-urban-suburban divide. 

But first, to clear up a few misconceptions:  

Regarding STEAD’s demographics, Balkcom said “many, many of our students are from third- or fourth-generation ranching families.” 

A good number of students have gone to STEAD for three and a half years. 

They’ve interned on farms. They’ve studied with USDA scientists. They have a pretty good understanding of how farms work.  

But it’s true: STEAD’s farm is miniscule compared to some of those near Holyoke. 

Yet STEAD is also much like Holyoke in terms of the opportunities available to their students. 

“We have a number of kids who will enter trades, so we provide the opportunities for them to do things like get their CDLs,” Balkcom said. 

They’re also a lot like Lone Star. 

“We find all of these opportunities into which our students can fit when they graduate, depending on what they want to do,” Balkcom added.

They may just put a bigger emphasis on using agriculture as a lens through which to evaluate some of society’s thorniest issues. 

“I am right now teaching an economics of agriculture class and I have students in the room who are seminaring about how to make our food economy better,” Balkcom said. “They are from every walk of life and every political persuasion, including students who have been affected by the air quality in Commerce City because of Suncor (oil refinery), students who grew up on ranches in Brighton, and folks who live in Aurora. 

“And they are working through these issues that are on the national stage right now in ways that are much more productive than most adults.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.