Dear STEM School Highlands Ranch Community,
Wow! Can you believe it? We finally opened the newest addition to our campus this past week and there is a buzz of electricity across the campus. I saw so many of you there to help us celebrate and it just filled me with so much joy.
The energy was so positive and exciting that it has brought our campus to life. I am grateful for so many people who helped make this all possible.
- Thank you to Robert Hoornstra (Chief Operations Officer), who led this project from start to finish, Star Ake (Chief Financial Officer), who helped secure and continues to manage the funding for this project, and to our Leadership Team for adjusting to all of the twists and turns throughout the project.
- Thank you to the architects from Hord, Coplan and Macht and our construction team at Franzen Pittman, who helped bring this dream into reality.
- Thank you to our students who have been so incredibly amazing throughout the construction impacts on their classrooms, commons spaces and hallways. As our student government president Tjaden Litwiler shared, “…we’ve been through a lot of change. From sitting by grade level in the gray matter cafe to hanging out in the old middle school commons, where a lot of memories have been made. This gym means that we are growing as people and as a community.”
- Thank you to our staff for being so accommodating. We’ve had several classrooms impacted by the construction and our staff was so patient and understanding that it made this journey less stressful.
- Thank you to our parents, who have adjusted to driveline impacts and traffic, and those who volunteered and donated for our grand-opening event. We had several parents who stayed for hours serving food to our community and we could not have pulled off this event without you.
- I would also like to make a very special thank you to two of our amazing staff members, Annette Nason and Terri Irish. Both went above and beyond during our Grand Opening Event to help clean up throughout the event and after while also assisting the entire day with setting up for the event. We truly have two gems on our team!
There are so many more who took part in making this event happen, so I’d like to extend Thank Yous to our whole community.
As we now move forward with this amazing facility, we want to ensure that all of our students have access to use it. However, since the gym is an active classroom during school hours for our secondary PE students, we have to exercise patience and understanding.
The STEM Administration Team has a process in place to request access and use to the Secondary Gym so that we are not impacting instructional time and use. We will do our best to accommodate all students who would like to use the gym when it is not in use for instruction.
With that in mind, we’d also like to share with our entire community that we need everyone’s help in ensuring that we take care of our facility. In order to protect the gym floor, no black-soled Vibram shoes will be permitted on the court. Students who would like to use the court for activities will need to wear athletic shoes. I know this can sound like an inconvenience, but we want to do our best to maintain the floor as best as possible so that our athletic teams have a safe and appropriate playing surface.
Additionally, we are actively searching for additional custodians to join our short-staff facilities team to assist with keeping up with the new facilities and additions to our building. I’m sure you can imagine the challenges of the current employment market, so we are asking our community to help us spread the word that we are hiring for custodians and a Facilities Manager. Please see our Employment page on our website for complete job descriptions.
Thank you all for your continued support and dedication to students and staff.
In partnership,
LynAnn Kovalesky, Executive Director