We are headed somewhere — not sure where, exactly — with some precious cargo. Some people, to be exact.
Along the way, the journey occasionally generates high anxiety.
The following photo captures the approximate spot on U.S. 550, driving over Red Mountain Pass, where my knuckles turn white and my knees begin trembling.
I’d driven this treacherous-looking stretch of Colorado highway several times, back in 1999 when my family was attempting to relocate from Pagosa Springs to Paonia, Colorado. The spectacularly scenic and heart-stopping 25-mile stretch, also known as the Million Dollar Highway, runs due north from Durango, through Silverton (elevation 9,320 ft.) and over Coalbank Pass and Molas Pass… before ascending to Red Mountain Pass (elevation 11,018 ft.) and descending through the Uncompadre Gorge, which (in the photo above) drops off as a nearly vertical cliff from the edge of the winding highway.
A winding highway which, as you may notice, has no guardrails.
This was the part of the trip I was dreading, as we set out in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, March 31 on our way to Delta, Colorado — the site of Vision Charter Academy. The precious cargo, in my Toyota van that morning, consisted of my daughter Ursala, my two granddaughters Amelie and Simone, our friend Megan Riddle and Megan’s daughter Liberty.
Ursala, Megan and I serve on the board of directors of the Pagosa Charter School Initiative, a new non-profit corporation that hopes to open a public charter school — open to all children and families, tuition-free — by the fall of 2017.
Megan, Ursala and I were on a research mission — visits to five Colorado charter schools in the Grand Junction area, hoping to learn more about how they are being operated and why they were started. The board of our Pagosa Springs non-profit, the Pagosa Charter School Initiative (PSCI), has planned trips to about a dozen charter schools in various parts of the state, founded upon various educational models. First stop on our three-day trip would be to a campus in the agricultural community of Delta — one of the K-12 campuses of the innovative Vision Charter Academy — where we hoped to meet up with the school’s executive director, Teri Kinkade, and discuss the tribulations, and rewards, of starting a community-supported charter school.
From what I can gather, the Million Dollar Highway was carved into the red and gray quartzite cliffs above the Uncompadre Gorge sometime back in the 1920s, presumably using large quantities of dynamite. The ruins of old gold mines, blasted into the red rock during the 1890s, are still visible from the highway. I haven’t been able to verify why they call it the Million Dollar Highway; some reports suggest that the road cost a million dollars per mile. A million dollars was a lot of money back in the ’20s, and if the 25-mile highway over Red Mountain Pass really did cost a million dollars a mile, that would total about $25 million… for which price you didn’t get guard rails, apparently.
If I am not mistaken, $25 million is now the annual budget for the Archuleta School District, to fund a conventional public school education for about 1,300 children.
Vision Charter Academy started out in Paonia, Colorado, 14 years ago as a parent-run program aimed at giving homeschooling families access to certain public school amenities, such as specialized teachers, textbooks and curriculum assistance. Additional campuses were later opened in Delta and in Surface Creek.
When we arrived at the Delta campus, we found two buildings located on a large parcel. The more prominent of the two buildings was obviously custom designed, in modern Southwest Adobe style. The second building was just as obviously a mass-produced modular with no style to speak of, (unless “Cheap American Modular” can be considered a style.) We were to come across a fair number of modular buildings during our three-day tour of Colorado charter schools.
We’d arrived a few minutes early for our meeting with school director Teri Kinkade, and watched kids of various ages, and teaching staff, working and reading in various corners of the compact main building. The student council was doing some type of project in the tiny kitchen… a space made even smaller because half of the kitchen had been partitioned off for a reading intervention program.
Ms. Kinkade arrived, buoyed by an invisible cloud of administrative energy, and gave us a quick tour of the school — during which it became apparent that the two building were probably being utilized beyond their effective physical limits.
Then we settled ourselves at one of the outdoor tables, overlooking the playground, and got into the real meat of the discussion. How does a community group successfully start and operate a charter school?
How do we deliver our precious cargo?