Blame the Buildings? What D38’s Test Scores Actually Show

A familiar grievance has resurfaced in the Tri-Lakes: that new apartments are pulling down test scores at Lewis-Palmer School District 38, and that the lower-income families presumed to live in them are to blame. The argument has the shape of common sense. It does not survive contact with the data. District 38’s scores have barely moved in a decade and still sit fifteen to twenty points above the state; the town has almost no apartments to begin with, and the two it has rent at market and luxury rates, not low-income ones; its school enrollment is shrinking, not swelling; and the lowest-scoring part of the district is not an apartment block at all but its own charter school, which has gained ground in the district even as overall enrollment falls. The claim fails on multiple counts, and the research it leans on points the other way. If anything inside the numbers is nudging the district average down, it is composition — who enrolls where — not a parking lot full of renters.

The claim

The complaint is repeated often enough to have hardened into local lore: Monument is letting apartments go up, apartments bring in families of lesser means, and the schools — long the region’s pride — are slipping as a result. It is worth taking seriously, because each link in that chain is testable. Were apartments actually built, and when? Who can afford to live in them? Did scores actually fall, and when? And does the evidence support the mechanism — that adding apartments lowers what children learn? Taken in order: barely; at market rents, not subsidized; no; and no.

Are the scores actually down?

Lewis-Palmer’s results on the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS), the state’s grades 3–8 reading and math test, have been remarkably stable. English-language-arts proficiency has hovered around 60 percent for a decade; math around 50 percent. Both remain fifteen to twenty points clear of the Colorado average — the gap that actually defines the district. Neighboring Academy District 20 is shown for scale.

Spring	D38 ELA	D20 ELA	Colo. ELA	D38 Math	D20 Math	Colo. Math
2019	62.4	62.0	45.8	51.5	49.8	34.7
2022	61.9	60.5	43.2	52.2	47.2	31.5
2023	59.6	60.4	43.7	53.3	48.6	32.9
2024	60.4	61.1	44.1	47.9	50.4	34.2
2025	59.2	61.1	44.8	51.9	51.9	35.9

Read down the columns and the “collapse” disappears. District reading has eased by about three points since 2019 — real, but slight, and consistent with a national reading slide discussed below. District math is essentially where it was in 2019, the 2024 dip having reversed in 2025. Neither line tracks a building boom; both wobble within a narrow band well above the state.

High school is measured differently, by the SAT that most Colorado eleventh-graders take, and there the district’s edge is narrower. Its two comprehensive high schools post mean SAT scores above the state — Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge average around 550 in reading and writing, against roughly 505 statewide. But on the College Board’s benchmark, which a large majority of Colorado students clear, they sit near the state rather than far above it: about 78 to 80 percent met the reading-and-writing benchmark in 2025, against 79 percent statewide, while math was mixed — Lewis-Palmer slipped to 42 percent, Palmer Ridge cleared 46. The high-school picture is solid but unremarkable; the district’s dramatic margins are in the grade 3–8 results above.

The one genuine soft spot is graduation, the figure critics most often cite. District 38’s four-year rate, close to 95 percent for the classes of 2015–2018, fell to a low of 91.4 percent for the class of 2023. But it has since recovered — 91.9 percent in 2024 and 93.2 percent in 2025 — and the dip coincided with the pandemic-affected cohorts. Colorado’s statewide rate, notably, kept rising over the same span, from about 81 to 86 percent; D38 stayed well above it throughout, but its own decline did not track the state’s trend.

Class of	D38	Colorado
2018	95.5	80.7
2022	94.0	82.3
2023	91.4	83.1
2024	91.9	84.2
2025	93.2	85.6

Were there even apartments to blame?

Here the argument runs out of road. For most of its history Monument had essentially no apartments. As recently as January 2018, a commercial broker marketing the town’s Vistas at Jackson Creek described it in the trade press as “the only newly built, market-rate property in the entire town.” That complex — 267 units, built in two phases in 2014 and 2016 — and the 264-unit Alta25, which held its ribbon-cutting in June 2024, account for the overwhelming majority of modern market-rate apartment units inside Monument. Add a 48-unit income-restricted building from 1982 and a 2018 senior-living facility, and the town’s apartment stock runs to roughly 530 conventional market-rate units across those two complexes, plus the 48 income-restricted units and about 130 senior-living residences — a small inventory by any measure, and these are its principal communities.

Property	Units	Opened	Type
Monument View	48	1982	Income-restricted
Vistas at Jackson Creek	267	2014 & 2016	Market-rate
Jackson Creek Senior Living	~132	2018	Senior (55+)
Alta25	264	2024	Market-rate (luxury)

The timing alone defeats the theory. The only large market-rate complex to open since 2019 — Alta25 — admitted its first residents in 2024, far too recently to explain a score trend that predates it; at most a handful of its children could have reached the spring-2025 tests, and only address-level enrollment data could establish even that. And the apartment projects that residents are actually angry about are not built at all: the rezoning for apartments beside Monument Academy off Highway 83 and Walker Road was recommended for denial by the county Planning Commission and awaits a final Board of County Commissioners vote on July 23, and the Conexus development inside town was approved only in late 2025, with a groundbreaking targeted for 2027. A grievance about buildings cannot be settled by buildings that do not exist.

A further fact cuts against the narrative. A new development can add students even as a district shrinks, so totals alone cannot settle the question — but if apartments were swelling the schools, it does not show in the totals. As this newspaper reported in its review of the district’s 2026-27 budget, the district projects its operating enrollment down nearly 900 students — about 15 percent — from a 2018-19 peak, the fact around which it is now cutting some 35 positions. (The October pupil counts later in this article, which count students on a different and smaller basis, show the same downward direction.) Whatever pressure the schools face, a net influx of apartment-dwelling children is not visible in it.

And they are not low-income apartments

The premise underneath the complaint — that these are units for the hard-up — does not hold either. Monument’s two market-rate complexes rent at or above the going rate for the region. At Vistas at Jackson Creek, one-bedrooms recently advertised around $1,425–$1,540 and two-bedrooms around $1,740–$1,965 a month. At Alta25, which markets itself as “luxury,” one-bedrooms start near $1,509, two-bedrooms near $1,759 and three-bedrooms above $2,300.

For comparison, the average apartment rent in Colorado Springs runs about $1,500, and Colorado’s statewide average is higher still, in the neighborhood of $1,800 (estimates vary by source and unit mix). Monument’s newest apartments, in other words, are market-rate, not income-restricted, and their advertised rents sit at or above the local metro average. Asking rents shift constantly and households differ, but as a rough yardstick a renter would need an income around $70,000 to spend the customary 30 percent on an advertised two-bedroom at either complex, and more for a three-bedroom at Alta25. The only designated income-restricted apartments in town are the 48 units built in 1982 — not the new construction at the center of the dispute. By their pricing, these are plainly not low-income housing.

A look inside the district: the charter

If one wants to know where Lewis-Palmer’s lower scores actually sit, the answer is not an apartment complex. It is Monument Academy, the district’s own public charter — the very school beside which the disputed Highway 83 apartments are proposed. Because the charter is part of D38, its results are already folded into the district averages above. Broken out, the charter scores below the district-run schools almost without exception, in both subjects and both recent years — the lone exception being its secondary reading in 2025, which edged a single elementary. Weighted by students tested, the gap is unambiguous.

CMAS English Language Arts — % met/exceeded, by school

School	Grades	2019	2024	2025
Monument Academy, elementary	PK–5	—	53.9	50.9
Monument Academy, secondary	6–12	43.6*	42.8	53.6
Bear Creek Elementary	PK–6	68.5	69.4	59.8
Lewis-Palmer Elementary	PK–6	69.6	63.9	59.4
Palmer Lake Elementary	PK–6	57.0	60.7	51.5
Prairie Winds Elementary	K–6	73.6	60.3	61.1
Ray E. Kilmer Elementary	PK–6	60.8	68.2	66.4
Lewis-Palmer Middle	7–8	58.8	59.2	63.4
Benchmark: The Classical Academy elem. (D20 charter)	3–6	66.7	74.6	70.8
Benchmark: The Classical Academy Middle (D20 charter)	7–8	58.5	67.5	69.8

CMAS Math — % met/exceeded, by school

School	Grades	2019	2024	2025
Monument Academy, elementary	PK–5	—	43.1	43.0
Monument Academy, secondary	6–12	33.7*	31.3	42.5
Bear Creek Elementary	PK–6	51.6	53.8	58.1
Lewis-Palmer Elementary	PK–6	54.4	46.9	51.5
Palmer Lake Elementary	PK–6	37.4	49.7	55.7
Prairie Winds Elementary	K–6	62.3	56.3	60.9
Ray E. Kilmer Elementary	PK–6	46.6	62.5	65.7
Lewis-Palmer Middle	7–8	56.2	44.7	46.1
Benchmark: The Classical Academy elem. (D20 charter)	3–6	59.2	64.8	66.1
Benchmark: The Classical Academy Middle (D20 charter)	7–8	50.3	53.9	54.7

Grouped and weighted by the number of students tested, the gap is plain: in 2025 the charter trailed the district-run schools by roughly nine points in reading and eleven in math; in 2024 the gaps were wider. The practical consequence is that D38’s published district average understates how its neighborhood schools perform: strip the charter out and the district-run schools post reading proficiency around 61–63 percent, two to three points above the headline district figure.

None of this, however, is a charter trait — and the region’s strongest charter proves it. The Classical Academy, a classical-model charter in neighboring Academy District 20 with waiting lists hundreds of families long, is among the highest-performing schools anywhere near Colorado Springs. Its elementary grades, shown for comparison in the tables above, posted 71 percent proficiency in reading and 66 percent in math in 2025 — roughly twenty points above Monument Academy in reading and more than twenty in math, and ahead of every district-run school in D38 that year. Its scores rose after 2019 rather than fading. Charters, in short, do not “test lower” as a class; a well-run one outscores almost everyone. Monument Academy’s place at the foot of its own district is specific to Monument Academy, not a feature of charter schooling. The comparison is admittedly imperfect — the Classical Academy enrolls a self-selected population in a different district, under a selective classical model with demand it can turn away — but it disposes of the lazy version of the argument.

High school is the one place the charter looks strong, but the comparison is unreliable — and the reason is the school’s youth. For most of its history Monument Academy was a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school; an earlier high-school program had closed, and the academy did not begin planning a new one until 2017, cutting the ribbon on its secondary (East) campus in August 2020. The high school is thus barely five years old, first appearing as its own school in state data in 2021-22, and it remains small. Only about two dozen students sit the eleventh-grade SAT each year — too few for a stable percentage. Its results are public (its 2025 reading-and-writing benchmark rate was a high 84.6 percent), but a cohort that small swings sharply from year to year and should not be read as a verdict on the school.

School	2024 reading/writing	2025 reading/writing	2024 math	2025 math
Monument Academy Secondary (n~26)	96.0	84.6	60.0	53.8
Lewis-Palmer High	79.8	77.7	48.3	41.5
Palmer Ridge High	83.5	80.2	57.4	46.0
Colorado	—	79.0	—	43.9

This is no indictment of Monument Academy, which serves a self-selected population under a different instructional model and lifted its own reading scores after 2019. It is simply to locate the district’s softer numbers accurately — and they are not where the apartment narrative points.

The composition the critics miss

There is, however, a real relationship worth examining — and it is internal, not external. Monument Academy has grown as a share of the district even as the neighborhood schools contract — though its own head count peaked in 2023-24 and has since edged down. As the budget review noted, the charter now educates roughly a fifth of the district, up from about 14 percent a decade ago. The October enrollment counts tell the story:

School year	Monument Academy	MA share of D38	District-run schools
2018-19	1,014	15.3%	5,606
2019-20	1,000	14.8%	5,766 (peak)
2021-22	1,021	16.1%	5,328
2023-24	1,190	18.3%	5,326
2025-26	1,143	18.1%	5,175

Here is the mechanism critics are groping toward but misattributing. A district’s reported average is a weighted average of whoever is enrolled. When a lower-scoring group — the charter — grows as a share of the whole, the district’s headline number can drift down by arithmetic alone, even if no school teaches a single child less well. That is a composition effect, and it is plausibly nudging D38’s reading average down.

The effect is modest, and it should not be overstated. Most of the district’s small reading dip is the district-run schools themselves easing — Bear Creek slid from 68.5 to 59.8, Lewis-Palmer Elementary from 69.6 to 59.4 — the national reading slide showing up in Monument’s own classrooms. A lower-scoring charter growing as a share of the whole can only pull the districtwide average a little further in the same direction; quantifying that pull precisely would require grade-by-grade enrollment and testing figures the district has not published, so we put no number on it. In math, where the district ended 2025 essentially where it began, there is nothing to explain. None of this says the charter caused the dip — only that the arithmetic of who enrolls, not any apartment, is the place to look.

So the honest verdict on the internal question is this: the modest softening in D38’s reading average reflects, in roughly descending order, a broad national reading slide felt in its own classrooms, and a smaller composition effect from a growing, lower-scoring charter. It is a correlation worth watching, not a proven cause — and conspicuously, none of its moving parts is an apartment.

What the research actually says

The intuition behind the original complaint is not baseless: family income and test scores are tightly linked, and that correlation is one of the most robust findings in education research. The Stanford scholar Sean Reardon estimates the gap between high- and low-income children has grown to roughly 1.25 standard deviations — wider, now, than the gap between racial groups. Where the argument fails is in the leap from that correlation to the conclusion that building apartments lowers achievement.

We found no credible research showing that ordinary market-rate multifamily construction, on its own, lowers what students learn. The claim conflates two different things — the same two that the charter discussion separates. The first is the composition effect just described: a change in who is counted, not harm to anyone counted. The second is a genuine causal effect on learning, and the evidence there runs the opposite way. Studies of housing vouchers, of moves into stable housing, and of relaxed zoning generally find positive effects for lower-income children; housing instability, eviction and homelessness are what depress attendance and scores. Reducing exclusionary zoning — allowing more apartments — has been estimated to narrow a metro area’s school achievement gap by several percentiles, by reducing segregation. The lever the critics want to pull is, if anything, attached to the wrong end.

How D38 compares

Against every relevant benchmark, District 38 remains a strong performer. Its CMAS proficiency runs about fourteen to twenty-one points above the state, depending on year and subject; its high-school SAT mean scores run above Colorado even where its benchmark pass-rates are closer; its graduation rate exceeds the state’s by roughly eight points. Nationally, the comparison is even more flattering: federal NAEP results show the country had not recovered its pandemic losses by 2024, with reading scores falling at grades 4 and 8 — a decline that, researchers note, began before COVID, around 2017. Colorado itself has fared better than the nation, with statewide CMAS math back to pre-pandemic levels by 2025 and reading nearly so. A district outrunning both is not in decline.

What has changed is the company D38 keeps. Neighboring Academy District 20, which a decade ago trailed Lewis-Palmer, has caught up: after a dip in 2022 it recovered to match D38’s 51.9 percent in math in 2025 and to edge ahead in reading. When a ranking site reports that D38 “slipped a few slots,” this is the likeliest explanation: not that Monument’s schools got worse, but that its peers got better. That is a real competitive story. It has nothing to do with apartments.

The honest verdict, then, is unglamorous. Monument’s schools are not collapsing; they are roughly where they have been for ten years, near the top of the state. The town has scarcely any apartments, the newest arrived too late to matter and rent at premium prices, and the ones generating the most heat have not been built. The lowest scores in the district belong to its own growing charter, not to any apartment block — and even that exerts only a slight, arithmetic pull on the district average. The research used to indict the buildings does not support the charge. If there is a worry worth the community’s attention, it is the slow erosion of reading — a national problem that predates the pandemic and has nothing to do with a parking ratio — a graduation rate that, having dipped, is already climbing back, and the quieter question of why a fifth of the district’s families are choosing a charter that tests below its neighborhood schools.

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Methodology & sources

Test scores. District, school, and state CMAS figures are the percentage of students who met or exceeded expectations, grades 3–8 combined, from the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) and its school-level results files, confirmed against the CDE-derived CMAS explorer; 2025 state figures were cross-checked against Chalkbeat Colorado. CMAS was canceled in spring 2020 and only partially administered in spring 2021, so no comparable district figure exists for those years. High-school figures use eleventh-grade SAT results (CDE / College Board); Monument Academy Secondary’s SAT rests on roughly two dozen test-takers per year and is statistically volatile. Graduation rates are CDE four-year adjusted-cohort rates by class year; D38’s pre-2019 rates are from archived CDE District Performance Framework reports. A note on participation: CMAS proficiency is the share of tested students who met or exceeded expectations, not of all enrolled students. D38’s testing participation runs below the state — roughly four-fifths in math in 2025 against about nine-tenths statewide (CDE), partly reflecting opt-outs common in higher-income districts — so the percentages should be read as results among those tested, and small-cohort, school-by-school comparisons carry more uncertainty.

Charter breakout. In state data, Monument Academy reports under two codes — Monument Charter Academy (PK–5) and Monument Academy, secondary (6–12); there is no separate “East Campus” line, and in 2019 it tested as a single K–8 entity, so its 2019 figure is not directly comparable to later years. The charter-vs-district-run averages are weighted by students tested. We deliberately put no number on the compositional effect: precise grade-3–8 enrollment by school by year was not resolved, so it is described qualitatively, as direction only. The Classical Academy appears only as an external benchmark; it is a charter in Academy District 20, and Colorado already reports its three elementary campuses under a single school code (grades 3–6).

Enrollment. School-level October pupil counts are from CDE (via the district’s published October-count history) and CDE SchoolView for 2025-26. These actuals differ slightly from the operated/funded counts in D38’s budget document owing to projection years and the handling of the district’s home-school program; both series show the same trend.

Rents. Figures for Vistas at Jackson Creek and Alta25 are advertised base rents (not all-in monthly costs) from listing aggregators, retrieved spring 2026, and fluctuate with availability and concessions. The Colorado Springs and statewide figures are averages across all unit sizes, so the comparison is indicative rather than like-for-like.

National context. NAEP trends are from the National Assessment Governing Board’s 2025 releases; recovery comparisons are from the Stanford/Harvard/Dartmouth Education Recovery Scorecard (2025 and 2026 editions) and the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research. Research on income and achievement draws on Sean Reardon (Stanford) and reviews by Brookings and the Urban Institute.

A note on interpretation. Correlation between family income and test scores is well established. It does not establish that constructing apartments lowers achievement; a shift in a district’s average reflects who enrolls, not a causal effect on any child’s learning. This distinction — composition versus causation — runs through both the apartment question and the charter question.

Sources and further reading

• More in this series: A quiet downgrade: how D38 lost its “Distinction” · Four million dollars, frozen: the levy behind D38’s teacher exodus
• Colorado Department of Education — CMAS Data and Results
• CDE SchoolView — Lewis-Palmer D38 profile
• Chalkbeat Colorado — 2024 CMAS results
• Chalkbeat Colorado — 2025 CMAS results
• Monument Academy — Our History
• The Gazette / The Tribune — Monument Academy cuts ribbon on new secondary campus (2020)
• Colorado Real Estate Journal — Vistas at Jackson Creek (build years)
• Alta25 — listing and rents
• Vistas at Jackson Creek — listing and rents
• RentCafe — Colorado Springs average rent
• The Gazette — Jackson Creek Senior Living grand opening (2018)
• Our Community News — Monument Planning Commission / Conexus
• Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) — 2024 reading and mathematics
• Education Recovery Scorecard (Harvard CEPR / Stanford)
• Harvard CEPR — Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a Generation-Long Decline (May 2026)
• Brookings — Housing costs, zoning, and access to high-scoring schools
• The Monument Independent — D38 2026-27 budget