{"id":22194,"date":"2025-05-19T20:19:49","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T20:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mesa-elementary-wins-state-excellence-award\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T04:11:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:11:43","slug":"mesa-elementary-wins-state-excellence-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mesa-elementary-wins-state-excellence-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Mesa Elementary wins state excellence award"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure class=\"wp-block-image naviga-inline-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/imengine.public.prod.dur.navigacloud.com\/?uuid=f1dc4437-86ce-57a5-8514-87c39f72b6ce&amp;function=cover&amp;type=preview&amp;source=false&amp;width=2000\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" alt=\"From left to right: Superintendent Tom Burris, Mesa Principal Robert Laymon and board Vice President Ed Rice hold the excellence award presented by the CDE. (Tom Burris\/Courtesy photo)\" class=\"naviga-image\" loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">From left to right: Superintendent Tom Burris, Mesa Principal Robert Laymon and board Vice President Ed Rice hold the excellence award presented by the CDE. (Tom Burris\/Courtesy photo)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>On Friday, the Montezuma-Cortez RE-1 school district was presented an excellence award on behalf of Mesa Elementary School.<\/p>\n<p>The award was presented at the Colorado Department of Education\u2019s School and District Awards Ceremony, and the award for Mesa was the 2024 Centers of Excellence Award. It was presented by Colorado Department of Education Commissioner Susana Cordova and Colorado State Board of Education Chair Rebecca McClellan.<\/p>\n<p>Superintendent Tom Burris, Mesa Principal Robert Laymon and board Vice President Ed Rice were present to accept the award.<\/p>\n<p>The school also received a \u201cCenter of Excellence\u201d poster.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is the only excellence award received, at least in the last decade, if not ever,\u201d Burris told <em id=\"emphasis-f35d3aac50602c35577adfb37db55c69\">The<\/em> <em id=\"emphasis-dfeb1c18982ee82a04e774dadecd6098\">Journal<\/em>. \u201cI am proud of the work that has been done at the schools to implement basic, good teaching skills into the classroom. The effort paid off.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The ceremony took place at the Hydro Confluence Theater on the Colorado State University campus in Denver. Awards presented included Centers for Excellence, John Irwin School of Excellence, Governor\u2019s Distinguished Improvement Award and Academic Growth Award, among others.<\/p>\n<p>When the district announced that they had been invited to the awards ceremony, they said, \u201cWe are so very excited and curious,\u201d via email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>was presented by Colorado Department of Education <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[21,155,28,1855,60,216,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-cortez","tag-education","tag-headlines","tag-mesa-elementary","tag-montezuma-county","tag-montezuma-cortez-school-district-re-1","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77610,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22194\/revisions\/77610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22194"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}