Stone Creek Charter School has undergone a renewal this year — in more ways than one

Stone Creek Charter School was created by a group of parents who wanted a school designed to respond to student needs. Nineteen years later, the school is reorienting in the post-COVID era back toward its roots.

“In this place where we are now, where there is so much uncertainty, and we’re seeing these different students come in, the way that we are responsive is going to define who we are moving forward,” said Siri DeForest Reynolds, Stone Creek Charter School’s head of school.

This year, Stone Creek Charter School renewed its charter for another four years. The school also purchased its West Campus building in Gypsum, which has housed half the school since 2012. “We now can cultivate that space and transform it from the bank that it was into the school that we want it to be,” said Erica Espinosa, a teacher at the school.

“I think there is going to be a lot of growth at the West Campus over the next few years with all the housing going in, and so we’re anticipating that growing a little bit more than we have here (in Edwards),” DeForest Reynolds said.

But the majority of the work school staff has done this year has been about responding to students’ needs.

Support Local Journalism

Donate

Stone Creek Charter School returns to its roots post-COVID

During the COVID years, Stone Creek Charter School focused heavily on curriculum. Now, the school is turning back toward core knowledge and inquiry-based learning, in part to respond to changing student dynamics.

“We have an increase in students of special populations and an increase of students who don’t have a lot of capacity for advocating for themselves. They’re not as assertive about what they need anymore,” DeForest Reynolds said. “I think — and this is my personal connection and what I’ve read out in the world — that the impact of technology is giving this function to kids where they just need immediate feedback and gratification, and if they have to push and pursue, they just shut down.”

In the older grades, staff is seeing social media create stress and anxiety for students. “That takes up a lot of their mental capacity,” DeForest Reynolds said.

Over the last couple of years, the school has introduced several programs that engage students as learners across a spectrum of classroom, interpersonal and life skills.

“We have re-normed after COVID … to really recognize the needs now and really be responsive,” DeForest Reynolds said. “It ended up pushing us back to where we were before COVID. We’re in a spot of renewal, and we’re in a spot of a very strong foundation.”

The school has used PBL, or “project-based, place-based and passion-based learning,” as DeForest Reynolds calls it, for fifth through eighth grade students for eight years. “That has been tried and true at the older grades, and the inquiry-based portions at the younger grades,” she said.

This year, noticing that “families feel less confident than we as teachers do,” the school introduced the Powerful Learning for Active Young Minds (PLAY) program, DeForest Reynolds said. “We really want to bridge the gap and give them the confidence to support kids at home through growth mindset … We want them to teach kids that it’s okay to have setbacks and those are actually how you learn.”

The PLAY program centers play in learning, providing students the chance to build socioemotional skills, expand their imaginations, develop language skills and experience cognitive growth.

Project-based learning and PLAY encourage students to ask questions, collaborate and work though challenges. “Our goal with PLAY and project-based learning is to reinforce those life skills, the intrapersonal and interpersonal skills that we’re seeing lacking due to dependence on technology, for instance, and the way the world has changed,” Espinosa said.

The school’s Building Opportunities for Learning Deeply (BOLD) program is attached to literacy and math time. “That’s either to extend what happened in class or to scaffold for a deficit or remediation, or just to continue practice,” DeForest Reynolds said.

BOLD, which is in its second year, functions in six-week cycles in which every student at the school is assessed to see where they are and what they need in terms of support or scaffolding for deeper learning. Next year it will expand even further, with increased capacity for learning across grade and age levels. 

Stone Creek Charter School trains staff in trauma-informed approach

The school’s human-centric approach has included a significant investment in training staff to support students through trauma. “We’ve invested a lot in becoming a trauma-informed staff to be more responsive to student and family needs as that dynamic has changed over the course of the last 10 years,” Espinosa said.

The school currently has a student to teacher ratio of 11 to 1, counting support staff that include an occupational therapist, speech therapist and interventionist.

Once a week, teachers complete two hours of professional development. Last year, a quarter of that time was devoted to becoming trauma informed. This enables teachers to “have that language in the moment because you practiced it, instead of being more reactive” when a challenge arises for a student, DeForest Reynolds said.

The school has also worked with a behavior analyst to understand students’ behavior to reach and address the root of what they need, Espinosa said.

Teachers also lead students through daily socioemotional work, called the Positivity Project. The project creates safe spaces for students to share what they’re going through and connect with a safe adult at the start and end of each school day.

“Being responsive to what’s going on around us, what the student needs are — that’s how our school was founded,” DeForest Reynolds said. “I think we do that really well here.”

Stone Creek Charter School is hosting open houses on its PLAY program on Tuesday, April 29 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at both the Edwards and Gypsum campuses.