Who We Are, by the Numbers: A Demographic Portrait of the Tri-Lakes

Almost 40,000 people live inside the boundary of Lewis-Palmer School District 38, on 128 square miles of prairie and pine between Monument, Palmer Lake and the Air Force Academy. They are older than their neighbors in El Paso County, considerably richer, far more likely to own the house they live in, and, set against Colorado as a whole, more than twice as likely to have served in the military. This is what the federal and state data say about who lives here — and what those numbers cannot tell you.

Communities describe themselves in stories: a small town, a bedroom community, a place people move to for the schools. The census describes the same place in counts. The two accounts are worth reading against each other, and the second one is rarely published anywhere a resident can find it.

What follows is a plain profile of the Tri-Lakes population, drawn from the 2024 American Community Survey, a companion Census tabulation built for school districts, and the Colorado Department of Education’s October 2025 enrollment collection. The Independent has published the underlying figures as a downloadable baseline document; this article is the readable version of it.

A Note on the Map

There is no census geography called “the Tri-Lakes.” The Census Bureau publishes data for towns, for ZIP-code approximations, for county subdivisions and for school districts — but not for a region defined by local usage.

The closest single boundary that captures the community as residents understand it is the Lewis-Palmer School District 38 boundary: 128.5 square miles, running well past Monument’s municipal limits, and the geography every household here already shares whether or not it has a child in school. It is what this article uses.

It is a proxy, and it is imperfect in both directions. The boundary includes households that would never call themselves Tri-Lakes residents, and excludes some that would. It is not the Town of Monument, not Palmer Lake, and not ZIP code 80132. Where the numbers below say “the district,” they mean everyone living inside that line — not parents, not voters, not district employees.

Older Than the County Around It

The median resident here is 44.4 years old. In El Paso County the figure is 35.1, and across Colorado it is 37.7. That is not a rounding difference; it is roughly nine years, and it shapes almost everything else in this profile.

The age curve explains why. Two bands dominate — residents in their fifties and residents in their sixties, at about 16 percent each. Together, those two decades account for nearly a third of the population. The twenties are the thinnest of the working-age decades at under 9 percent, which is what a community looks like when young adults leave for school or cheaper rent and return, if they return, with children and a mortgage.

Those children are visible in the data too. Residents under 20 make up about a quarter of the population, a share consistent with a district that enrolls more than 6,000 students. What is missing is the middle: the renters, the early-career workers, the household formation that fills in a city’s age pyramid between 22 and 35.

An Affluent Place, by Any Comparison

Median household income inside the boundary is $160,525. El Paso County’s is $90,363. Colorado’s is $95,470. The district figure is more than one and a half times either.

The distribution matters more than the median. More than a third of households — 5,144 of them — report income of $200,000 or more. Another third fall between $100,000 and $200,000. Roughly one household in eight, 1,715 in total, lives on less than $50,000 a year.

Poverty is correspondingly rare. About 3.9 percent of residents fall below the federal poverty line, against 8.5 percent countywide and 9.4 percent statewide. Among children the rate is lower still, under 3 percent, though that estimate rests on a small enough sample that it should be read as a range rather than a figure.

The commute is long and overwhelmingly solitary: 28.4 minutes on average, with 65 percent of workers driving alone. Twenty-eight percent work from home, a share well above the state’s. Public transportation registers zero riders in the survey — not a low number, but no reported riders at all, which is a fair description of the transit options available.

A Community of Homeowners

Eighty-nine percent of occupied homes here are owner-occupied, against 63.7 percent countywide and 65.9 percent statewide. Ninety-four percent of all housing units are single-unit homes, detached or attached. Ninety-eight percent of units are occupied at all.

Those three numbers together describe a housing market with very little of anything else in it. There are 1,580 renter-occupied households in the entire district, and fewer than 550 units in buildings of five apartments or more.

The price of entry reflects that. The median owner-occupied home is valued at $775,300 — more than one and a half times the county median of $461,000 and about 1.4 times the state’s $539,400. Only about one resident in ten moved at all in the year before the survey, against roughly one in five countywide, which is what a low-turnover, high-cost, owner-dominated market looks like from the inside.

Degrees and Service

Fifty-eight percent of adults here hold a bachelor’s degree or higher — about 16 percentage points above El Paso County and 12.5 above Colorado. Ninety-eight percent finished high school.

The more distinctive figure is military. Some 5,028 residents are veterans, 16.9 percent of the adult population. The county rate is 15.6 percent, high by national standards because of the installations that surround Colorado Springs. The state rate is 7.5 percent. The Tri-Lakes veteran share is more than double Colorado’s and above even its own county’s — the mark of a community that sits within commuting distance of the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever, and that a good number of people chose to retire into rather than leave.

The population is also notably native-born. Just 4.3 percent of residents were born outside the United States, against 7.2 percent countywide and 9.8 percent statewide.

The Classrooms Look Different From the Neighborhoods

Here the two datasets diverge in an interesting way.

Among all residents, 83.8 percent are white and non-Hispanic. Among the 6,318 students enrolled in D38 schools this year, 75.6 percent are white. Every other group is larger in the classroom than in the census tract: Hispanic or Latino students are 13.3 percent of enrollment against 8.1 percent of residents; students of two or more races are 7.3 percent against 4.8 percent.

Put simply, roughly one resident in six is something other than white and non-Hispanic. Among students it is closer to one in four.

Two mechanics account for most of that gap, and neither is mysterious. Younger populations are more diverse than older ones nearly everywhere in the country, and this is an unusually old resident population sitting on top of a normal-aged student body. And D38 enrolls school-choice students from outside its boundary, so the classrooms are not drawn purely from the households the census counted.

Sixteen and a half percent of D38 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch in the state’s October count. That is a low figure by Colorado standards and a high one relative to a district where the median household clears $160,000 — a reminder that a wealthy median is an average of unlike things.

The Shape of the Student Body

Enrollment is top-heavy. Every high-school grade is larger than every elementary grade. The twelfth-grade class numbers 601; the first-grade class numbers 379. Full-day kindergarten enrolls 282, with another 33 in half-day.

Grouped up: 2,028 students in grades one through five, 1,452 in the middle grades, and 2,332 in high school.

This is a single October snapshot, and one year of counts is not a trend. But it is the shape of the district right now, and any conversation about buildings, staffing or boundaries starts from it.

What the Portrait Adds Up To

The Tri-Lakes, as the federal government measures it, is a high-income, highly educated, overwhelmingly owner-occupied suburban district with low poverty, expensive houses, an unusually large veteran population, and residents meaningfully older than the county and state around them. Its schools are more diverse than its neighborhoods.

None of that is a verdict. It is a baseline — the set of facts a reader should have in hand before the next argument about growth, water, school funding or a rezoning, all of which will be conducted in the language of who lives here and what they can afford.

The numbers are now on the table.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: Tri-Lakes Demographic Snapshot (PDF) · Blame the Buildings? What D38’s Test Scores Actually Show · A Quiet Downgrade: How D38 Lost Its “Distinction” · Four Million Dollars, Frozen · Home Place Ranch: Who Runs the Ranch · At Highway 83 and Walker Road, a Test of the County’s Own Rules · After the Denial: What the County’s Vote Does

Census record: American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates, Lewis-Palmer School District 38 boundary, via Census Reporter · NCES ACS-ED District Demographic Dashboard, 2019-23 · NCES Common Core of Data, district detail 2024-25

State record: Colorado Department of Education, SchoolView enrollment, Lewis-Palmer 38

Entities: Lewis-Palmer School District 38 · Town of Monument · Town of Palmer Lake

Methodology

Resident figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates for the Lewis-Palmer School District 38 boundary, Census/NCES geography 0805820. The Independent recomputed every share in this article from the published counts in the underlying tables rather than copying rounded profile percentages: age bands from table B01001, race and ethnicity from B03002, household income brackets from B19001, tenure and structure from B25002, B25003 and B25024, commuting from B08301, and child poverty from B17001. Medians, margins of error and the county and state comparison values are as published in the same release.

Student figures come from the Colorado Department of Education’s October 2025 pupil enrollment collection for Lewis-Palmer 38, school year 2025-26. Shares were recomputed from the reported counts, which sum exactly to 6,318 by race, by sex and by grade. The free and reduced-price lunch share comes from that same collection and is a count of students who qualify, not a measure of household income. School count and the 17.13:1 student-teacher ratio are from the NCES Common Core of Data for 2024-25; that file reports a different enrollment total, 6,332, because it is a different collection year, and the two should not be used interchangeably.

Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, American Community Survey values are estimates from a sample and carry sampling error; where a margin of error is large relative to the estimate — child poverty and several small age and race categories especially — small differences should not be read as real. Second, residents and students are different universes: the survey counts everyone living inside the boundary, while enrollment counts students attending D38 schools, including those who live outside it. Third, several household measures cited in the companion baseline document come from the NCES ACS-ED tabulation, a separate collection on a different vintage, and are not directly comparable with the 2024 survey figures; where they appear here they are attributed to their own source.

No estimate in this article is projected, modeled or adjusted.