School Spotlight: Monument Academy Middle School, Where Logic Is a Requirement

School Spotlight is a Monument Independent series profiling the schools that serve Tri-Lakes families. We have walked the four high schools and Lewis-Palmer Middle. This is the other middle school in District 38: Monument Academy Middle School, grades six through eight, which shares the charter’s East Campus with a high school a quarter of its size — and asks every student to pass a semester of Logic before leaving.

The other schools in this series ask families to choose between buildings. Monument Academy asks them to choose a curriculum and then keep choosing it. Its middle school is the middle third of a Core Knowledge program that begins in preschool at the West Campus on Village Ridge Point and ends with a diploma at the East Campus on Pinehurst Circle, out at Highway 83 and Walker Road, and what is easy to miss from outside is how much of that East Campus is middle school. Of the 451 students the state counted there last October, 361 — four in five — were in grades six, seven and eight. The high school The Independent profiled in July has ninety students spread across four grades. The middle school is the main event.

It is also the one school here where sixth grade is already middle school. Lewis-Palmer School District 38 keeps sixth-graders in its five elementary schools and opens Lewis-Palmer Middle at seventh grade; Monument Academy’s West Campus stops at fifth. A Monument Academy child changes buildings, teachers and expectations a full year earlier than a district child does, and arrives to find seventh- and eighth-graders already there.

Academics: Core Knowledge, and a semester of Logic

Every Monument Academy middle-schooler takes the same four cores every year — language arts, mathematics, history and science — sequenced against the 2010 Core Knowledge Sequence, the content-specific curriculum the school runs from preschool upward. Sixth-grade literature is mythology, The Iliad, poetry and historical fiction. Seventh-grade history runs from the Russian Revolution through the Depression to the Second World War; eighth grade takes up the end of European empire, the Cold War, the civil rights movement and the Constitution.

Around that core sit three further requirements. Every student takes fine arts every year. Every student takes a full year of a foreign language — Spanish or Latin — in seventh or eighth grade, with accelerated sections that drop a qualifying eighth-grader straight into the second year of the high-school language. And every student takes a semester of Logic, a course whose published purpose is to teach adolescents to identify an informal fallacy, turn a bad argument into a good one, and then defend it standing in front of the room.

Mathematics is a ladder rather than a grade. Students move through Math Connects 1, 2 and 3 to Pre-Algebra, and from there to Algebra I and Geometry, both taught to high-school standards on a teacher’s recommendation. Eighth-graders can apply for Honors English and Honors Science; the honors science course requires an independent investigation, taken either to the Pikes Peak Regional Science Fair or written up as a research project. Each grade has a teacher designated its team lead, which is how a school of this size keeps three cohorts from drifting apart.

What the tests say

Because Colorado’s CMAS examinations end at eighth grade, the score the state publishes for Monument Academy Secondary is the middle school’s score; the high school contributes nothing to it. In 2026 the school cleared the state bar in both subjects, with 47.1 percent of students meeting or exceeding expectations in reading against 44.7 percent statewide, and 41.9 percent in mathematics against 37.3 percent. Its three-year reading line reads 42.8, 53.6, 47.1; mathematics 31.3, 42.5, 41.9.

Those figures rest on a narrower base than the state’s. About 54 percent of eligible students sat the tests, against roughly 89 percent across Colorado and 85.5 percent at Lewis-Palmer Middle — the lowest participation of the three middle schools The Independent compared in August. Colorado publishes a school’s result whoever turns up for it; at Monument Academy the result describes a little over half the middle school.

The rating services do what rating services do, which is disagree. GreatSchools gives the school 7 out of 10, assembled from a test-score rating of 7, a college-readiness rating of 10 and a student-progress rating of 5. Niche awards an overall B and ranks it 89th of 156 Colorado charter middle schools. US News, which ranks on state test results alone, places it 237th of the 468 Colorado middle schools it ranked. The spread is a reminder that a middle school’s number depends on what the rater decided to count — and that all three are describing a school whose grades six to eight sit above the Colorado average and in the middle of the state’s charter field.

Where it gets fun: the elective list

For 361 students the menu is startlingly deep, and most of it is arts. Choir climbs four steps, from a Concert Singers class that needs no audition to an Advanced Choir eighth-graders sing in alongside high-schoolers, with an audition-only Show Choir alongside. Band climbs from Concert to Intermediate to Symphonic to a Jazz Band open only to students already playing in one of the others. Strings get an orchestra per grade — Allegro in sixth, Con Brio in seventh, Lynx Orchestra in eighth. Drama runs three levels and ends in Drama Performance, where students audition for, rehearse and appear in the fall play or the spring musical.

Then the odd ones, which are the good ones. Theatrical Movement teaches mime, dance choreography and safely rehearsed stage combat, and counts toward a physical education, art or music credit. Global Trek books imaginary journeys to real countries, cooks the food and hands out passport stamps. There is a semester of Astronomy, a Leadership course running from conflict resolution to financial literacy, an iPad photography class, a web design class taught in WordPress, HTML and CSS, and a yearbook produced by eighth-graders. The visual art class supplies students with hot glue guns, wood-burning tools and plaster, and sets them to study the artworks named in the Core Knowledge sequence.

Sports, and a quiz league

The Lynx compete in the Central Colorado Athletic League, which fields A, B and C teams and keeps standings and a playoff bracket for the A team only — a structure built to get more children onto a court than onto a podium. The 2026-27 slate covers boys’ and girls’ basketball, boys’ and girls’ soccer, boys’ and girls’ volleyball, football, cross country, track and field, and cheerleading, which runs from June to December and asks for a C or better in every class before tryouts. Football is a seventh- and eighth-grade sport; sixth-graders need the athletic director’s approval. Registration runs from $150 to $195 a season, and home fixtures are scattered — basketball and volleyball in the West Campus gym back in Monument, soccer at Sanctuary Park.

Filed in the same athletics list, at $50, is Matchwits, the regional quiz league the school describes as team Jeopardy. Three teams of three or four answer questions across subjects, scores accumulate through the season, and when nobody can answer, the parents get a turn. It practices during club time in room 3002, and a student who cannot make every session is not penalized for it — a rule written, plainly, so that children in other activities can still play.

How you get in

Monument Academy charges no tuition and draws no attendance boundary, but it does not simply have seats. Its board’s admission policy fills open seats first come, first served, and puts everyone else on a wait list. Families begin with a Letter of Interest, which places a child on that list rather than a roll; the school advises submitting it before the end of January for the following year. Current students re-enroll first, during District 38’s Choice Enrollment window from early January to the first part of February. Seats are then offered in a published order of priority: children of Monument Academy staff, then siblings of current and incoming students, then District 38 residents, then families outside the district, then families who have declined a seat before. An offer arrives by email and expires in 48 hours.

District 38 residents also file a Choice Enrollment application with the district. New students are admitted conditionally until their records — including discipline records — arrive from the school they left, and the policy states that admission can be withdrawn on what those records show, with a right to request a hearing. It also allows a placement test, which it is careful to say is not an entrance exam, to decide which grade or course level a new student joins. Seats are offered on availability into late September. There is no school transport to either campus.

What Monument Academy Middle School does well

The case for the place is coherence and reach. A child who arrives in sixth grade is picking up a curriculum they may already have been inside since preschool, taught by a staff small enough that each grade has a named lead and each student is known. Above-average state results in both subjects, a mathematics ladder that carries a strong eighth-grader into high-school geometry, an arts program with four choirs, four bands and three orchestras, and a required year of Latin or Spanish add up to a catalog most schools of 361 cannot staff. For a family that wants classical content and small rooms rather than a broad elective buffet, this is the Tri-Lakes middle school built around that preference.

Where there’s room to improve

The honest caveats start with the test file. Barely half the middle school sits the state examinations, which leaves every published score — the school’s and this article’s — describing a partial picture, and leaves the school without the years-deep record its neighbors can point to. Attendance is the second: 22.5 percent of the East Campus was chronically absent in 2024-25, and a Core Knowledge sequence is a cumulative thing, less forgiving of missed weeks than a curriculum that circles back. GreatSchools’ student-progress rating of 5, sitting below its test-score rating of 7, is at least a prompt for the questions parents should ask on a tour.

Practicalities follow. The campus sits in unincorporated El Paso County, with a Colorado Springs mailing address and roughly four miles of road between it and the West Campus in Monument; the school’s published profile lists no transport, and the sports a family drives to may be at the other campus entirely. The elective catalog is deep in the arts and thinner elsewhere: the school’s own middle-school course guide lists no engineering pathway of the kind Lewis-Palmer Middle’s Project Lead the Way strand provides. And a waitlist is a waitlist: a family that decides in March is choosing for the year after next.

The other middle school in the Tri-Lakes

Almost every District 38 family reaches the same fork at the end of fifth or sixth grade, and there are only two public answers to it inside the district. Lewis-Palmer Middle is the shared one: two grades, 723 students, the last building the future Rangers and Bears occupy together. Monument Academy Middle is the deliberate one: three grades, 361 students, Latin, Logic, a uniform policy, and a curriculum a child may have been following since preschool. Neither is a fallback for the other. They are answers to different questions, and the useful thing a parent can do is work out which question they are asking.

Flavor file

The mascot is a lynx — the actual bobcat cousin, not a mythical one. A group of Monument parents opened the school in 1996 as Lewis-Palmer Charter Academy, with about 180 children. It took its present name in 2000 and remains the only charter District 38 authorizes. Two details capture the middle school in particular: seventh grade is the biggest class in the building, at 134, larger than the entire four-year high school it sits above; and somewhere in the timetable a twelve-year-old is learning to name a straw man in first period and to throw a stage punch after lunch.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: our spotlight on Monument Academy’s high school, which shares this campus and covers grades nine to twelve · Lewis-Palmer Middle School, the district’s other middle school and this one’s nearest comparison · the 2026 state test results, the source of the CMAS figures and participation rates above · the Highway 83 and Walker Road rezoning, decided on the parcels beside this campus.

The school’s own record: Monument Academy’s middle school page, middle school curriculum, middle school athletics and team pages, its enrollment information and board Admission Policy 1511, mission and vision and history, and the school’s Middle School Course Descriptions & Requirements guide.

Enrollment and scores: Colorado Department of Education, Student October 2025-26 school-level pupil membership (school code 5093) and its 2026 assessment results.

Ratings: US News · Niche · GreatSchools. All three list the school under the Colorado Department of Education’s entity name, Monument Charter Academy Secondary School, and cover grades six to twelve together; two of them print the campus ZIP code and telephone number incorrectly.

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

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