Our Future is BRIGHT!
MCA has decided to forgo appealing MCSD's decision to deny our charter application to the Colorado State Board of Education (SBOE).
Instead, we are reapplying to MCSD this spring, setting our sights on opening the academy fall of 2026!
Why Reapply instead of Appeal?
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The timing of MCSD’s 2024 application window, which was a late fall submission, meant an appeal would not have been heard until February 2025 at the earliest. Even if the SBOE voted to remand the application back to MCSD, opening MCA by fall 2025 would have been nearly impossible.
We want to work with the district not against. An appeal would have cost the district a great deal in legal fees. We are addressing CACSA's concerns and working to strengthen those areas to make our application even more robust! MCA is meant to be an exciting new educational opportunity in Montrose... not a divisive issue.
Setting Our Sights to Open MCA Fall of 2026!
New legislation—House Bill 23-1025—provides a promising and quicker path forward. Signed into law by Governor Jared Polis in 2023, this bill allows charter applicants to submit applications between February 1 and April 1, 2025 creating an 18-month preparation window. This extended timeline addresses the challenges of the previous 12-month cycle and ensures we have sufficient time to meet the milestones necessary for a successful launch.
Together, We Can Achieve Something Extraordinary for Our Community!
MCA represents an incredible opportunity for Montrose and the surrounding areas. By offering a classical education model that emphasizes critical thinking, character development, and a love of learning, MCA will provide students with a strong foundation for success in life. This school is not just an investment in education but in the future of our community.
Our First Application's Denial Resolution: (Why MCSD denied MCA and what our responses are to each point)
Letter to the Editor Rebuttal (A rebuttal letter to a recent letter published in The Mirror.
VISION
MISSION
Montrose Classical Academy's mission is to offer a vibrant curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences, fostering a passion for knowledge, virtue, reason and an appreciation of our American heritage. Our program will empower students in a supportive, creative atmosphere to achieve their full potential and become exemplary citizens.
Montrose Classical Academy's vision is to provide every student with a content-rich classical education that will enhance their lives and enable them to become virtuous, productive and self-reliant individuals.
FOLLOW US
Follow our Facebook and Instagram pages to stay up to date with all things regarding Montrose Classical Academy! We also just launched our YouTube Channel!
https://www.facebook.com/ montroseclassical/
MCA EVENTS
What is CLASSICAL Education?
How to Think, Not What to Think
By classical education, we refer to the type of education developed and passed down through centuries, from the ancient Greeks, to our Founding Fathers. Classical education describes the time-tested curricula, materials, methods, and aims traditionally used to educate our youth, and serve to build and preserve our Western civilization. This liberal-arts tradition includes teaching objective standards, the instillation of real knowledge, and instruction in moral character and civic virtue. Classical schools seek to cultivate virtuous habits of thought and action in order to orient students’ minds and affections.
The time-tested classical model achieves these aims through a curriculum that emphasizes the histories, literary works, and achievements that shaped our society and inform our understanding of what it is to live a meaningful life. It challenges students to master the works and subject matters of Western civilization’s greatest thinkers. In the true and original sense of the liberal arts, it provides an education that is fitting for free men and women, and that fits them to be free. It prepares youth to become flourishing individuals capable of personal self-governance. It fortifies the foundations for political self-governance in our Republic, so that future generations may profit from its strength and longevity.
The TRIVIUM (or how to learn) is in three parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric
01
GRAMMAR
This is the first part of how to learn and it is characterized by memorizing a broad range of facts and soaking in knowledge. The grammar of any subject area is its facts, its fundamental parts.
02
LOGIC
This is gaining understanding by asking "how, what, and why" of the grammar that was previously learned.
03
RHETORIC
This is the "and what does it mean" and "how do I express that" part of the learning process.
Why MCA?
What sets Montrose Classical Academy apart from other educational options in Montrose? What is our educational model? How do our core values influence an enhanced learning environment?
Academics
Montrose Classical Academy will offer a classical education for students in grades K-5 (adding one grade per year until fully reaching K-8). All students will study literature, mathematics, history, the sciences, the fine arts, Latin and physical education. Students will gain a solid foundation in the core subjects and become Exemplary Leaders who are taught how to think, not what to think.
Academic and personal integrity are essential to the success of our educational mission. MCA will partner with parents to develop the student’s intellect and character by grounding them in strong morals and responsible citizenship. By investing years of character education into the lives of its students, MCA will provide scholars with the moral tools needed to live in a democratic republic and share in common virtues.
"Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot…Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts…”
- PLATO'S REPUBLIC
Curriculum
At MCA, a commitment to the Core Knowledge Sequence and classically-oriented curricula, virtue-focused character education, professional classroom instructors, and extraordinary parental engagement will prepare MCA graduates for successful citizen leadership.
CORE KNOWLEDGE
MCA will follow the Core Knowledge Sequence© in grades k-8. This curriculum encompasses language arts, mathematics, science, history, geography, fine arts, and physical education.
Core Knowledge is founded on the idea the ease with which one learns new information is highly determined by the amount of background knowledge one has already learned on a given topic. The more you know, the more you can learn. Reading with comprehension, speaking and writing fluently, and critical thinking all rely on a rich vocabulary and broad knowledge base. The curriculum is characterized by knowledge that is:
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Context-rich – lasting, unchanging knowledge such as important events of world history;
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Cumulative – a planned progression building on students’ previous knowledge and eliminating excessive repetition and gaps;
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Content-specific – clearly defined knowledge at each grade level ensuring fairness for all students;
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Coherent – explicit knowledge identifies what children should learn at each grade level to ensure an articulated approach to building knowledge across all grade levels.
THE GREAT BOOKS
It is not because they are old, but because they add to the enduring conversations about life. The great books seek to answer the hard questions of life. How ought we live? How ought we order things? How ought we engage with one another? Stemming from the great books is the backbone of civil discourse itself. Reclaiming the great books for young minds teaches them first how to listen, then how to think, and finally how to persuade.
PHONICS
Phonics instruction teaches children how to decode letters into their respective sounds, a skill that is essential for them to read unfamiliar words by themselves.
Explicit – directly teaching children the specific associations between letters and sounds, rather than expecting them to gain this knowledge indirectly.
Systematic – English has a complicated spelling system. It is important to teach letter sound mappings in a systematic way, beginning with simple letter sound rules and then moving onto more complex associations.
SINGAPORE MATH
Singapore Math is a cohesive, deep, and focused mathematics curriculum for kindergarten through seventh grade with the goal of developing algebraic thinking. In typical U.S. math programs, students get a worked example, then solve problems that very closely follow that example, repeating all the same steps with different numbers.
In U.S. math programs, concepts and skills are more compartmentalized within and across grade levels than in Singapore math, where a strong sense of connectivity to past learning is woven throughout.
Singapore math not only helps students become more successful problem solvers, it helps them gain a sense of confidence and resourcefulness because it insists on conceptual depth. This naturally prepares students to excel in more advanced math.
For more information visit: https://www.singaporemath.com/
HISTORY
At MCA, students of history will become armed with background knowledge and sufficient analytical skills to objectively evaluate our nation’s place in the world through a deep appreciation of its history, and intensive study of related civilizations including their rising and falling. They will be able to grasp nuances of relevant cultures including their languages, religions, governments and economies.
This means more than learning dates and important historical figures. It is the story of how people subsisted, how economies worked, and what influenced the growth and decline of civilizations. This necessarily includes geography, agriculture, economics, technology, health, transportation, and other factors.
FINE ARTS
Classical educators understand the importance of truth, beauty, goodness, and perfection and there is no better way to cultivate a love and appreciation for beauty than by learning to create beauty for oneself. When a student learns to make music or paint, they also learn to see and enjoy the details and skill in someone else’s music and art. The fine arts also overlap, perhaps inextricably, with the liberal arts. For instance, the fine arts of painting and music also express ideas — the goal of rhetoric — and music is itself listed as one of the liberal arts.
LATIN
Latin is both a language and a discipline. Decoding Latin instills logical and precise thought. The goal of Latin instruction at MCA will be to empower students to think, speak, and write with clarity and precision in English thereby expanding their vocabulary as well as their world.
CURRICULUM MAPS
Montrose Classical Academy plans to model much of its curriculum after the outstanding curriculum used by Liberty Common Charter School in Fort Collins. This curriculum has proven to be extremely successful for students attending Liberty Common and it has been made available to schools who embrace this style of education. Below are the curriculum maps for grades K-5 and other specific subject maps; as MCA adds grades in the future, the Liberty Common curriculum will follow, up to grade 8.
What is a CHARTER School?
How does a charter school differ from public or private?
01
Public- Tuition Free
A charter school is a public school that operates as a school of choice.
Charter schools cannot be religious schools.
Colorado Charter Schools must be non-profit by law.
Charter schools use non-discriminatory enrollment practices.
There are no test-in requirements to attend charter schools.
02
Autonomous
Charter schools have local parent governing boards.
Charter schools have the flexibility to design and utilize a different curriculum from district-run schools.
Charter schools receive certain waivers from the Colorado Department of Education which allow for greater autonomy over the operations.
03
Accountable
Charter schools rely on families choosing to enroll their children, and they must have a written performance contract with the authorized public chartering agency.
Charter school students must take state assessments.
Charter schools are subject to the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Colorado charter schools are geographically dispersed across the state and serve urban, suburban and rural communities across 70 localities.
04
Student Specific
Charter schools make decisions close to the students, empowering teachers to provide innovative, high-quality instruction and giving them the autonomy to design a classroom that fits their students’ needs.
Charter schools are led by principals who have the flexibility to create a school culture that best fits the needs and demands of their surrounding community.
Charter schools serve a broad range of students, including: low-income students, racial and ethnic students of color, and students with disabilities or other special needs.
Charter school programs and academic designs are as diverse as the students they enroll. Some charters implement longer school days, while others implement curricula specifically designed for at-risk students, gifted children, pregnant/parenting teens, juvenile offenders, and more.
Let's Look at the STATS!
51%
of students in Montrose Area Schools qualify for free/ reduced lunch programs. All eight elementary schools are Title 1 schools. This population presents a unique opportunity to benefit from a Public Charter School.
DIVERSE STUDENT POPULATION
During the 2018 and 2019 school years, charter schools served a higher percentage of students of color and English language learners than non-charter Colorado schools statewide.
4%
higher graduation rate.
Charter schools have a 4% higher graduation rate than district run schools according to Colorado Department of Education in 2019. CDE also notes that over the past three years, performance on statewide English and mathematics for grades 3-8 and on the PSAT/SAT for grades 9-11 has been higher at charter schools — for students overall.
Today, 268 public charter schools in Colorado serve over 137,000 students (2022-23)
Charter school enrollment in Colorado is 15% of total public school enrollment in the state
Ways You Can Support MCA
Thank you for your interest in making this school a reality! Below are a few ways you can help:
1.) SPREAD THE NEWS
We need your help to spread awareness about MCA to all of your friends, families, and colleagues. As part of our application, we need a visible outpouring of support from the families in Montrose and Olathe to demonstrate to the District that this is an option people are seeking for their children.
2.) INTEREST FORM
We need ‘a tsunami of support’ to reach our goal for these forms; please ask everyone you know with children in grades K-5, who may be interested in a classical education, to fill out the form.
3.) DONATE
Marketing materials, events, website fees and many other start-up expenses are very expensive. The board has been paying for these costs personally, but we need help. We are looking forward to receiving donations so that we can ramp up our efforts and reach even more families within our communities of Montrose and Olathe.
TO DONATE: Please email us at montroseclassical@gmail.com. Tax donation receipts are available.
4.) WRITE LETTERS
People with children who might attend this school, as well as those without children, may write or email the seven current MCSD school Board Members to express their desire for this educational option in our town. Attached, is a document with the contact information for each Board Member along with helpful hints for writing your letter. Please email us with any questions.
5.) VOLUNTEER
People with children who might attend this school, as well as those without children, may write or email the seven current MCSD school Board Members to express their desire for this educational option in our town. Attached, is a document with the contact information for each Board Member along with helpful hints for writing your letter. Please email us with any questions.