School Spotlight: Palmer Ridge High School, the Bears on the Hill

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 started at the beginning, with Lewis-Palmer. Now the school D38 built to relieve it: Palmer Ridge High School, the newer campus on Monument Hill that went out and won three straight football titles — and, quietly, edged the original in the rankings.

Map © OpenStreetMap contributors

If Lewis-Palmer is the original, Palmer Ridge is the sequel that nobody in Monument wanted to sit through — until it turned out to be pretty good. By the mid-2000s, D38’s lone high school was bursting, and the district resolved to build a second one. The first plan, in 2006, was to take rancher Mary Wissler’s land by eminent domain. The town revolted, threatened a school-board recall, and gathered thousands of signatures; the district retreated and chose a different parcel, high on Monument Hill beside Interstate 25. Palmer Ridge opened in August 2008 with roughly 530 students, 70 staff, and — a detail that still delights the engineers — the largest public geothermal system in Colorado at the time, buried under a 217,000-square-foot building. Eighteen years and a crosstown rivalry later, every relocating family gets the same dinner-table debate. We promised Lewis-Palmer fans we’d let them referee. Here is the other side.

Academics: top of the class, quietly

On paper, Palmer Ridge is the higher-ranked of the two Monument high schools. US News puts it #58 in Colorado and #1,837 nationally; Niche gives it an overall A and ranks it #29 of 445 Colorado public high schools; SchoolDigger and Public School Review both file it in the top 10% statewide. Its 91% graduation rate clears Colorado’s ~82% comfortably, and on the state-administered SAT, about 80% of PR juniors are proficient or better in reading and writing — against 62% statewide. Because Colorado gives every 11th grader the SAT, there’s no opt-in inflation here; that is the whole junior class.

The asterisk, as at Lewis-Palmer, is math. Roughly 43% of PR students test proficient — still well ahead of the state, but a visible step behind the school’s own reading numbers, and the one line on the report card the school itself would circle. Self-reported SAT averages on Niche run around 1240, against a national average near 1024. Official school-level SAT means are published by CDE, and we’ll update this profile when the 2026 file drops.

AP, concurrent enrollment, and the shared Career & Innovation Center

Palmer Ridge offers about 20 Advanced Placement courses, and roughly 54% of students take at least one — the full slate lives in the PRHS course handbook on the school site. Students can also bank real college credit through concurrent enrollment with UCCS ($175 per credit hour) and Pikes Peak State College, and pick up occupational training through partnerships that run from the trades to a licensed cosmetology track.

The newest option is one both Monument high schools share: the Career & Innovation Center on Synthes Avenue, opened in August 2025, where about 200 students from Palmer Ridge and Lewis-Palmer study welding, advanced manufacturing, homebuilding, aerospace engineering, healthcare, and computer science. For a district that spent years watching career-tech students commute to Colorado Springs, it’s a genuine shift — and the school board has already approved expanded coursework for next year.

Sports: a football town’s football school

If Lewis-Palmer’s trophy case is broad, Palmer Ridge’s is tall in one place. Bears football is the program that put the young school on the state map, winning three consecutive Class 3A championships from 2017 through 2019 — beating Erie 46-21 for the first, Pueblo East for the second, and Pueblo South 35-13 for the third. The quarterback of that first run, Ty Evans, was the 2017 Colorado Gatorade Player of the Year before going on to college ball; junior Luke McAllister took championship-game MVP honors in 2019.

The Bears then moved up to Class 4A and kept knocking on the door, reaching the state final in both 2023 (a 20-6 loss to Erie that ended a 13-1 season) and 2025 (a 38-14 loss to Dakota Ridge). Two title-game trips in three years, one classification up, is not a fluke. Beyond football, Palmer Ridge fields around 18 varsity sports and lands in Niche’s top 60 Colorado schools for athletes; in a few sports — field hockey, gymnastics, girls lacrosse — the Bears and Rangers actually field co-op teams together. It’s very Tri-Lakes: feud on Friday, carpool on Saturday.

Clubs: DECA to the mountain-bike trail

The activity list rewards browsing. Résumé-builders anchor it — DECA, FBLA, Science Olympiad, Speech & Debate, Knowledge Bowl, National Honor Society, Key Club — alongside the distinctly Colorado entries: a Mountain Bike Club and a Rock Climbing Club, because this is the Front Range and the trailhead is basically in the parking lot. Ridge Rage runs the student section; PR Ambassadors give the tours; and service-and-wellness groups such as Friends of Rachel, RAD, Voices of Change, and a student-mentorship program round out the roster. Performing arts run through band, choir, orchestra, and a theater program that stages full productions.

What Palmer Ridge does well

The fundamentals are strong and, in places, best-in-town: top-decile academics, the higher US News and Niche marks of the two D38 high schools, a 91% graduation rate, and a football culture that has produced a Player of the Year and a decade of deep playoff runs. The building helps, too — a 2008 campus with a geothermal plant is a more modern place to spend four years than most Colorado high schools, and the mountain-facing site on Monument Hill is hard to beat. Parents and students in survey data consistently praise the teaching and the community; the Bears’ problem, if it’s a problem, is that they are compared to Lewis-Palmer rather than to the state as a whole.

Where there’s room to improve

Three themes recur in the data and in reviews, and two of them are shared with every school in D38. Math scores: good relative to the state, but the school’s own reading numbers prove the ceiling is higher. Teacher pay and retention: average district salary trails the region, a strain D38 has wrestled with since a teacher-pay mill levy override narrowly failed in 2022, and “my favorite teacher left” is a familiar refrain. Class sizes and funding: Palmer Ridge’s roughly 21:1 student-teacher ratio sits above the ~16:1 national average — a direct consequence of Colorado’s bottom-ten national rank in school funding, where per-pupil spending trails the national figure by thousands of dollars. None of it is unique to the Ridge; all of it is worth asking about on a tour.

The question every Monument parent asks: Palmer Ridge or Lewis-Palmer?

Both are A-range schools, and D38 families effectively choose between them. Palmer Ridge counters Lewis-Palmer’s deeper history and broader trophy case with the edge in the national rankings, the newer geothermal building, and a football program that spent the better part of a decade playing for state titles. Lewis-Palmer’s partisans will point to nine volleyball banners and a 28-0 basketball season and ask what a single sport really proves. Our honest read hasn’t changed since the Lewis-Palmer spotlight: you’re picking between two of the best public high schools in the Pikes Peak region, and the right answer is the one whose culture fits your kid. Now you’ve heard both sides. Referee accordingly.

Flavor file

Palmer Ridge nearly began with a land seizure: the 2006 plan to condemn the Wissler ranch triggered a recall threat before the district blinked and moved up the hill. The campus it built instead was, at the time, the largest public geothermal project in the state — 217,000 square feet heated and cooled from the ground up. The motto is a mouthful (“Ignite, Engage, Encourage and Expect Excellence”), the colors are navy and gold, and the mascot is rendered, out front, as a bronze grizzly rearing off a plinth — the most-photographed bear in Monument that isn’t raiding a bird feeder.

Sources & further reading

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

Enrollment, staffing & history: NCES Common Core of Data (2024–25); Palmer Ridge High School and the Colorado Springs Gazette on the Wissler family and the eminent-domain fight.

Test scores, accountability & rankings: Colorado Department of Education SchoolView; US News Best High Schools (2025); Niche (2026); SchoolDigger; Public School Review.

Athletics: CHSAA results, with title-game and career detail via Colorado Preps and the Colorado Springs Gazette.

School site: lewispalmer.org/o/prhs.

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

Next in the series: Monument Academy.