Dear AHS Families, Staff, Friends and Supporters:
As a Board we want to take a moment and congratulate the graduating
class of 2013 on their outstanding performance. You are the true groundbreaking
leaders of our school and a genuine inspiration to us all. Foremost we wanted to recognize the
exceptional college admission results of this first class. With
48 students applying to colleges we were thrilled to see all 48 students
accepted to one or more schools of their choice. The list of schools is
truly impressive: Stanford, Brown,
Amherst, UC Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Baylor, Middlebury, Tulane, Gonzaga,
Lewis and Clark, ASU, CU-Boulder, Fort Lewis, CSU, UC Santa Barbara, and many
more. Congratulations to all of you!
Our first priority is to provide services that enable our students to
reach their academic potential through a rigorous college preparatory
curriculum.
As a result, we want to provide some highlights to this exceptional year
and preview some things to come as we build on the academic success of the
Class of 2013.
• As many of you know, last year we received the John
Irwin Award recognizing AHS
as one of the top performing schools in Colorado.
• We secured a new
facility that allows us to support a larger community of families who aspire to
a college-bound academic experience.
• We completed a
recruiting bonanza of exceptional teachers focused on academic achievement.
• We welcomed a
second generation of board members dedicated to building a world-class institution
recognized for its success both inside and outside the classroom.
• We promoted Jake
Lauer to Head of School with the goal of maximizing our college prep curriculum,
while raising Michael Ackerman to the position of Executive Director so he can
focus on growing our resources, completing our move to the new facility and
expanding our capacity to realize the dream of becoming a destination for
families who aspire to an exceptional academic experience as they prepare for
college and beyond.
Renewing our commitment to providing a personalized college preparatory
curriculum, we have a lot of work ahead of us.
That said we already have some exciting announcements as we continue to
take steps to ensure parity with the nation’s most competitive secondary
institutions.
- In the fall we will begin offering four years of both foreign language and science
- We are extending our honors programs to freshmen and sophomores.
- We are increasing the focus on academic achievement by
- Revising and improving our SAT
and ACT prep class,
- Expanding our math offering to
include Statistics, Discrete and Calculus 2,
- Improving our college
counseling department by adding a full-time counselor in addition to our
current counselor and implementing comprehensive college advisory services
starting in 9th grade,
- Improvements in measured quantitative
tracking of academic performance,
- A commitment to continuing
facets of project based learning where it directly supports academic
achievement,
- Adding a school counselor to support our students socially and emotionally
- Additionally, we'll be rounding out our programs of excellence by accelerating the development and refinement of AHS’s art and music programs.
- Expanding sport, club and extracurricular opportunities while building upon the success of our state champion mountain bike team, award winning robotics and rock climbing teams and wildly popular AHS clubs and student groups like backcountry skiing, STAC (student government), the Student Ambassador program, the Friday Show and the Animas Quill.
- Finally, we'll be growing into our new home at Twin Buttes and utilizing the trails, open space, gardens and livestock in support of our programs of excellence.
These accomplishments and next year’s goals would not be possible
without the amazing teachers and staff that work tirelessly to help these
students realize their dreams, so we would also like to publicly recognize and
thank them for their fantastic work. You
are all incredible. We are truly grateful for your dedication and hard work.
In closing, we are confident in Jake’s ability to lead us as we step up
our game academically and continue to focus on building a world-class
institution. In partnership with
Michael’s amazing big picture vision and leadership, we believe this is an
unstoppable leadership team and we look forward to seeing their continued
success!
Congratulations again to the Class of 2013, and thank you to the entire
staff for your hard work and wonderful dedication. We are extraordinarily proud of you.
Sincerely,
The Board of Directors
Animas High School
Animas High School
On Wednesday, May
8th, the Durango Herald published a feature on Animas High School
and our first graduating class. The article reports on our “school’s stunning transition from being what just three
years ago was widely viewed as a precarious teaching venture into an educational
Cinderella story.” An amazing video and photo gallery accompany this piece. We
encourage you to READ IT HERE!
