{"id":39788,"date":"2022-06-27T23:48:08","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T05:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montezuma-cortez-school-board-renews-swos-charter\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T02:51:42","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T08:51:42","slug":"montezuma-cortez-school-board-renews-swos-charter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/montezuma-cortez-school-board-renews-swos-charter\/","title":{"rendered":"Montezuma-Cortez school board renews SWOS charter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
The class of 2014 at Southwest Open School listens to speakers at the graduation ceremony. (Journal file photo)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

The Montezuma-Cortez school board unanimously voted during last week\u2019s meeting to renew the Southwest Open School charter for two years and possibly a third year.<\/p>\n

The new charter aligns the alternative high school with the district\u2019s other two charters, Children\u2019s Kiva Montessori School and Battle Rock Charter School. Previously, SWOS held a 10-year charter, which was \u201cpretty unprecedented in this state these days,\u201d said Parr, executive director of student academic services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to get into that cycle where all the charters are on same contracts and they have performance criteria,\u201d Parr said at the board meeting June 22.<\/p>\n

The charter went into effect May 17. If SWOS achieves the academic and financial benchmarks stipulated by the charter through June 30, 2024, the contract will be extended through the following school year.<\/p>\n

SWOS Director Casey Simpson echoed Parr\u2019s statement regarding the need for an updated, more abbreviated charter.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause education is changing so much, there\u2019s a lot of room for discrepancy as time passes, and also a more frequent contract process allows school and district leaders to review the benchmarks and metrics used to evaluate school performance and stuff like that,\u201d Simpson said.<\/p>\n

SWOS was formed in 1986 by the Southwest Board of Cooperative Services, and 12 years later became a charter school with the Montezuma-Cortez School District RE-1 serving as its authorizing agent, according to the SWOS website. The school is designated as an \u201cAlternative Education Campus\u201d by the state because more than 90% of its students are considered \u201cat-risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

SWOS is unique in that it offers its programming to a large region, serving as an educational option for the Montezuma-Cortez, Mancos, Dolores, and Dolores County school districts, Simpson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout SWOS, there would be no alternative for brick-and-mortar high schools in the area,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Much of the SWOS programming focuses on experiential, outdoors-based classes, such as consumer science, a bike technician program, and even kayaking, in addition to emphasizing social emotional learning and character education.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe focus a lot on SEL and character education in a time when a lot of the data is showing increased student trauma and anxiety about school and life in general, so I think our programming is well suited to address those issues,\u201d Simpson said.<\/p>\n

The school\u2019s non-traditional structure, with small class sizes, plenty of outdoor classroom spaces and social-emotional supports already in place helped it handle the COVID-19 pandemic in the past few years, Simpson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the health precautions we took allowed us to stay in school,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Learning loss from the COVID pandemic is still an issue that SWOS \u2013 along with other schools in Montezuma County \u2013 will look to address in the coming year, however. SWOS will participate in a \u201cFriday Academy,\u201d which will allow students to take classes from Pueblo Community College on Fridays, and the school has brought on an academic interventionist, Simpson said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

charter will align with Kiva, Battle Rock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[718,1183,28,216,445],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-39788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-battle-rock-charter-school","tag-charter-schools","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-cortez-school-district-re-1","tag-newsletter-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39788","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=39788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84449,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39788\/revisions\/84449"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39788"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=39788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}