Category: Schools

Lewis-Palmer School District 38 opens to most students on Aug. 12, eighth graders on Aug. 13, and Monument Academy starts its youngest children on Aug. 11. Start dates, bell schedules, bus fees, meal prices and back-to-school events for 2026-27.

Lewis-Palmer D38 and Cheyenne Mountain report almost the same rate of school behavior incidents. Cheyenne Mountain pays its teachers $8,484 more. What separates them is not safety but the size of the override their voters approved.

Lewis-Palmer D38’s voters approved a $4 million override in 1999 and have rejected every operating override since — seven of them. Inflation did the rest. In 2023 the district turned over 27.6% of its teachers, and the reason they gave most often was pay.

School Spotlight is a Monument Independent series profiling the schools that serve Tri-Lakes families. Having walked through the four high schools, we drop down a level to the building almost every D38 student passes through on the way there: Lewis-Palmer Middle School, a compact two-year school in Woodmoor where the district’s future Rangers and Bears […]

In 2025 Lewis-Palmer D38 was the only one of its high-performing neighbors to lose Colorado’s top rating. Not opt-outs, not apartments — a slow slide in student growth, and what a decade of data and the national research say actually explains it.

School Spotlight is a Monument Independent series profiling the schools that serve Tri-Lakes families — every D38 school, plus The Classical Academy, the D20 charter that many Monument students call home. We’ve done Lewis-Palmer, Palmer Ridge, and Monument Academy. Here is the one that isn’t even in our district: The Classical Academy, the highest-ranked high […]

School Spotlight is a Monument Independent series profiling the schools that serve Tri-Lakes families — every D38 school, plus The Classical Academy, the D20 charter that many Monument students call home. We’ve done the two comprehensive high schools, Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge. Here is the third door: Monument Academy, the classical charter that closed its […]

School Spotlight is a Monument Independent series profiling the schools that serve Tri-Lakes families — every D38 school, plus The Classical Academy, the D20 charter that many Monument students call home. We started at the beginning, with Lewis-Palmer. Now the school D38 built to relieve it: Palmer Ridge High School, the newer campus on Monument […]

Critics blame new apartments for D38’s test scores. The data shows scores are flat, far above Colorado, and the district’s lowest scores are its own charter.

Lewis-Palmer School District 38 will hold a public hearing and vote on June 22 on a $53.3m general-fund budget that trims about 35 jobs to absorb a $1.7m fall in state funding. The cause is not scandal but arithmetic — fewer children, flat per-pupil dollars and a reserve that has halved in two years.