DENVER — Academy 360 elementary charter school is in a unique building in northwest Denver. The Denver Public School in the Montbello Community Building has become a hub of the neighborhood and a place for students to thrive.
The pre-K through fifth-grade tuition-free school serves students from the Montbello and Green Valley Ranch neighborhoods, along with students from Aurora and Commerce City.
It was founded in 2013 under the model of "whole school, whole community and whole child" with a mission of offering equitable education to underserved students.
“We serve about 90% students of color, about 80% free and reduced lunch,” said Becky McLean, executive director of the school. “There’s been a lot happening in the Montbello community, and members of Montbello said, ‘This is what we want, this is what we need.’ ”
According to the school, their vision was to create a new way that they could serve their community by building community partnerships with local organizations like the Denver Public Library, Children’s Farms in Action and Swallow Hill Music.
These partners offer individualized learning for each student to help them grow both socially and emotionally.
“Those are experiences our kids often don’t get because they can’t make it to where they are, and so those partners afford our kids more accessibility to bring those experiences to us,” McLean said. “It really is part of the fabric of the school, and so without those partnerships, we lose a little bit of our identity.”
McLean said they serve about 225 grade-schoolers from the area and intentionally keep their numbers small so they can give individualized attention to each of their students.
“There’s something about having a smaller community to understand why students are thriving,” she said. “Our elementary schools in this community are 400 or 500 or 600 large, we’re 225 and so that just means more individualized education [and] more importantly individualized relationships.”
That includes relationships with students like fourth-grader King Howard, who is in his first year at Academy 360 after having a difficult time at his last school. He said now he can focus in the classroom.
“When you don’t have it, you’re not going to be able to learn, but when you do have it, it’s going to help you,” Howard said. “This school, I like very much. I would stay at this school for the rest of my life. I will work here.”
The school shares a building with nine community partners that offer wrap-around services to not only the students and their families but also to the greater Montbello neighborhood. McLean said that’s what makes this a unique facility.
“We’re able to wrap students and families with those supports … not only academics but ‘I’m having difficulties paying my utility bill, I’m new to the country,’ ” McLean said. “We really focus in on what social and emotional is for students in elementary schools and really how can a school partner with its community and vice versa.”
McLean said the hope is that the students go into middle school with a sense of being part of the Academy 360 family.
“Middle school is a big deal, and that is going to be a significant shift when they leave us,” she said. “But I hope that they can look back and be like, ‘They really cared for us, they had our back, I now understand why they may have been stricter or stronger on us because they were helping us to prepare for that next step.’ ”
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