School Spotlight: Monument Academy, the Charter That Rebuilt Its High School

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 high school once, rebuilt it, and cut the ribbon on a brand-new East Campus in 2020.

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Monument Academy is the odd one out in this series, and it means to be. Where Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge are big comprehensive high schools run by the district, MA is a public charter — the only one authorized by Lewis-Palmer School District 38 — governed by its own elected board and built on the Core Knowledge Sequence, a content-rich, deliberately classical curriculum paired with explicit character education. It is the D38 family’s third door: smaller, older in spirit, and different by design.

It is also, at the high-school level, remarkably new. A group of Monument parents founded the school in 1996 as Lewis-Palmer Charter Academy, renamed it Monument Academy in 2000, and grew it to more than 600 students — but only through eighth grade. An earlier high school program came and went. Then, in 2017, the board decided to try again, and on August 29, 2020, MA cut the ribbon on a new East Campus in northern Colorado Springs for its secondary students. The upshot is a high school that is barely old enough to have graduates: its earliest cohorts have only recently walked the stage. Judge it accordingly — as a young program still writing its record, not a finished one.

Academics: classical by design

The pitch is coherence. MA runs the Core Knowledge Sequence from kindergarten up, so a Monument Academy senior has spent years on a common, cumulative body of content; the high school layers on Latin, a gifted-and-talented program, a National Honor Society chapter, and the school’s trademark emphasis on character. Classes are small — the secondary campus reports a student-teacher ratio around 17 to 1 — which is the whole point of a charter that sold itself on “high academic standards, small class sizes, and respect and responsibility.”

On the state tests it can be measured against, the secondary campus outruns the Colorado average: 2024–25 CMAS proficiency ran about 54% in English and 43% in math against state marks near 45% and 36%. The caveat is the same one that makes this school hard to rank: the high school is new, so its 11th-grade SAT record and four-year outcomes are still thin, and the big ranking outfits reflect that. Niche gives MA an overall B and slots it #179 of 445 Colorado public high schools; US News, which needs several years of graduation data, has not yet ranked the high school at all. Those numbers will fill in as the program ages.

For all its old-fashioned framing, the high school is pointed squarely at college. Like every Colorado public-school student, Monument Academy’s high-schoolers can earn transferable college credit through concurrent enrollment while they finish the classical core, and the school leans on the writing, close reading, and argument a Core Knowledge education is built to produce. In a school this small, that plays out personally: tiny classes mean a senior is known by name, and there are more leadership roles, solos, and starting spots to go around than a much larger comprehensive campus can offer.

Sports: a small program, building

The Lynx are a CHSAA member competing in the small-school classifications, and the athletic slate reads like what it is — a five-year-old program adding a sport at a time. High-schoolers can play basketball (boys and girls), girls volleyball in the fall, co-ed cross country that trains at Fox Run Park and the Santa Fe Trail, and spring track. Eight-man football, golf, and cheer are listed as in development. For the competitive academics crowd there is Matchwits, the regional “brain bowl,” and a Speech and Debate team that runs from October into February. Nobody is hanging a state banner yet, but a school this new fielding this many teams is its own kind of statement.

Arts and activities

For its size, the arts bench is deep. Music runs through concert, women’s, and audition-only advanced choirs; concert, symphonic, and jazz bands; and a strings program. The theater program teaches not just performance but theatrical movement — mime, choreography, and stage combat — and the visual-arts electives include, memorably, Claymation. Add the National Honor Society and the character-education programming that the school treats as core rather than extracurricular, and the picture is of a school trying to offer big-school opportunities at small-school scale.

What Monument Academy does well

The case for MA is consistency and community. A single classical curriculum K–12, small classes, an explicit character framework, and above-average state test scores add up to a coherent, known-quantity education — and families clearly value being known: parent reviews are warm, and the school’s own language keeps returning to “every student is known and supported.” For a household that finds a 1,100-student comprehensive high school too big, or that wants Latin and Core Knowledge rather than a broad elective buffet, Monument Academy is the Tri-Lakes school built for exactly that preference.

Where there’s room to improve

Most of MA’s weaknesses are the flip side of its youth. The advanced-course menu is thinner than at Lewis-Palmer or Palmer Ridge — a small high school simply cannot staff the same wall of AP and elective sections — and the athletic and activities lineup, while growing fast, is still missing pieces a bigger school takes for granted. The track record is short: with only a handful of graduating classes, there isn’t yet the years-deep data on college placement, SAT trends, and rankings that parents use to compare. None of that is a knock on the model; it is a reminder that the high school is still early, and that the honest way to read it is as a program on the way up rather than one that has arrived.

Getting in also works differently from either neighbor. As a public charter, Monument Academy charges no tuition and draws no attendance boundary — any Colorado family can apply, and when a grade fills, seats go by lottery rather than by address or a years-deep list. That makes MA the Tri-Lakes middle path: a deliberate, distinctive choice like The Classical Academy, but without the five-thousand-name wait, and open to families who don’t happen to live inside a particular set of streets.

The other option every Monument parent weighs

D38 families choosing a high school aren’t only picking between Lewis-Palmer and Palmer Ridge. Monument Academy is the third choice, and it competes on different terms: not on trophy cases or national rankings, but on a specific philosophy — classical content, small classes, character first — delivered on a brand-new campus. Our honest read is that the right family for MA knows who it is: if the classical model and the small-school feel are what you’re after, this is the Tri-Lakes school designed around them. If you’re after the deepest AP catalog or a Friday-night football tradition, the comprehensive schools still hold that ground.

Flavor file

Monument Academy began life in 1996 as Lewis-Palmer Charter Academy with about 180 students and took its current name in 2000. It is the only charter school Lewis-Palmer District 38 authorizes, which makes it both a district school and, governed by its own elected board, something of a school-district-within-a-school-district. The mascot is the Lynx — the actual bobcat cousin, not a mythical one — the colors are blue, gold, and silver, and the house phrase is “Excellence Always.” And the high school itself is the rare American high school with a founding date twice: once in the 1990s, and again, on a new campus, in 2020.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: our companion profiles of Lewis-Palmer, Palmer Ridge, and The Classical Academy.

History & the new campus: Monument Academy and the Colorado Springs Gazette on the 2020 East Campus ribbon-cutting.

Enrollment, scores & rankings: NCES Common Core of Data; Colorado Department of Education; Niche; US News; GreatSchools.

School site: monumentacademy.net/high-school.

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

Next in the series: The Classical Academy.