School Spotlight: Lewis-Palmer Middle School, the Bridge Every Ranger and Bear Crosses

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 spend seventh and eighth grade together as Patriots — before the fork in the road that sends them to Lewis-Palmer or Palmer Ridge.

Map © OpenStreetMap contributors

Every school in this series so far has been a place families choose between. Lewis-Palmer Middle School is the one they nearly all share. Built in 1994 on Woodmoor Drive, about seventeen miles north of Colorado Springs, LPMS takes the graduates of five D38 elementary schools — Bear Creek, Lewis-Palmer, Palmer Lake, Prairie Winds, and Ray E. Kilmer — runs them through seventh and eighth grade, and hands them off to both district high schools. It is, in other words, the last time the future Rangers of Lewis-Palmer and the future Bears of Palmer Ridge are all under one roof. Roughly 730 students spend two years here as Patriots before the split.

A “true middle school”

LPMS is unusually compact — just two grades, seventh and eighth, with the district’s elementaries carrying students all the way through sixth. That leaves the school a narrow, intense window, and it leans into it with a model it calls being a “true middle school.” Teachers are organized into interdisciplinary teams across English, math, science, and social studies; each team shares the same group of students and meets daily to compare notes on curriculum and on individual kids, with counselors and administrators joining weekly. The idea is that no adolescent slips through the cracks in the two years they’re here — that a struggling student is a shared conversation rather than one teacher’s problem. The mission statement, “A Community of Learners Achieving Success,” is doing real work: the whole structure is built around connection.

Academics: strong scores, split reviews

On the state’s CMAS tests, LPMS clears the Colorado bar comfortably: roughly 65% of students test proficient or better in English and 54% in math, against state averages that sit in the mid-40s and mid-30s. Niche gives the school an overall A and ranks it #32 of 563 Colorado public middle schools; US News slots it #56 in the state. Here the report card gets interesting: GreatSchools, which weighs academic growth and equity more heavily than raw proficiency, gives LPMS a middling 5 out of 10. That gap — an A from one rater, an average score from another — is a useful reminder that a middle school’s numbers depend a lot on what you decide to measure. The through-line most parents care about is simpler: a gifted-and-talented program, real special-education and multilingual services, and enough academic press that students arrive at Lewis-Palmer or Palmer Ridge ready to run.

Where it gets fun: the elective list

For a two-year school, the menu is deep and a little delightful. Alongside the expected art, band, choir, drama, and physical education, LPMS students can spend a semester on Forensic Science or Medical Detectives, build things in the Project Lead the Way “Gateway” engineering pathway, produce a yearbook, take Spanish, run a leadership class — or, memorably, sign up for Ukulele or Yoga. There is a full career-and-technical-education strand introducing students to career fields, a multimedia design track, and, for families who need it, an online middle-school option that allows part- or full-time remote enrollment. The library carries more than 15,000 physical titles plus a growing e-book collection. It adds up to a school that treats thirteen-year-olds as worth taking seriously — and worth entertaining.

Sports and Patriot PRIDE

Middle-school athletics is about turnout, not trophies, and LPMS fields the full developmental slate: football, volleyball, basketball, wrestling, cross country, track, and softball. These are the seasons where future varsity Rangers and Bears learn the sports they’ll later play against each other, often on the same middle-school rosters before the rivalry ever starts. Off the field, the school’s culture runs on “Patriot PRIDE,” the behavior-and-character framework that gives the place its identity — the tricorn-hatted Minuteman on every door, and a two-year push to turn elementary kids into high-schoolers.

What Lewis-Palmer Middle School does well

The fundamentals travel with the D38 name: above-average test scores, a gifted program, small-district attention, and a teaching model deliberately engineered so that students are known rather than processed. For a stage of school notorious for kids getting lost, the team structure and embedded counselors are a genuine strength, and the elective breadth means a seventh-grader can discover a passion — robotics, forensics, music, a sport — before the higher-stakes years begin. Because it feeds both high schools, LPMS is also where the district builds a shared culture: the friendships and academic habits formed here carry into whichever building a student lands in next.

Where there’s room to improve

The honest caveats are mostly the ones every D38 school shares. Math proficiency, while well above the state, trails the school’s own reading numbers — the same asterisk that follows the high schools. GreatSchools’ middling grade, whatever one makes of its formula, is at least a prompt to ask harder questions about academic growth for students at the top and bottom of the class. And the compressed two-grade format is a double-edged sword: it keeps the school small and focused, but it also means students spend barely two years here before another transition, with less runway to steady a kid who arrives struggling. None of it changes the basic picture — this is a well-regarded, high-performing middle school — but a spotlight owes readers the fine print.

Then comes the fork

What makes LPMS distinctive in this series is that it doesn’t ask families to choose — it prepares them to. Eighth grade at Lewis-Palmer Middle is the last shared chapter before the decision that has animated this whole series: Lewis-Palmer or Palmer Ridge, Rangers or Bears (with Monument Academy pulling some families a different way entirely). For two years, though, none of that matters. Everyone is a Patriot first.

Flavor file

The mascot is a Revolutionary-War Minuteman in a red tricorn hat, a small “lp” stitched into his collar — a patriotic emblem for a school on Woodmoor Drive named, ultimately, for the same district founders as the high school down the road. The building dates to 1994, making it younger than Lewis-Palmer’s campus and older than Palmer Ridge’s. And in the detail that best captures the place: this is a school where a seventh-grader can dissect a mock crime scene in Forensic Science first period and learn three chords in Ukulele after lunch.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: our companion School Spotlights on the Tri-Lakes high schools — Lewis-Palmer, Palmer Ridge, Monument Academy, and The Classical Academy.

Enrollment, staffing & profile: NCES Common Core of Data (2024–25); the school’s own School Profile; Colorado Department of Education SchoolView.

Scores & rankings: Niche (2026); US News; GreatSchools; Public School Review.

School site: lewispalmer.org/o/lpms.

Statistics reflect the most recent year published per source. Spotted an error or have a Lewis-Palmer Middle School story we should know? Email [email protected].

Next in the series: the Tri-Lakes elementary schools.