Alpine Valley School

Another full week at Alpine Valley School! 🎭🎨

Students spent the week planning adventures, building things, and running their community together. Here's a peek:

✈️ Field trips are on the calendar! Students set up upcoming trips to Wings Over the Rockies, the Cat Cafe, and a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest. They're planning and organizing every one of them.

📦 Cardboard creations kept taking over the art room all week long, with bracelet making right alongside.

🗳️ School Meeting gathered to take on several important matters, including a proposed change to our tech-use policy.

The front entrance got a colorful makeover, courtesy of some sidewalk chalk artists.

Rehearsals for the school play are officially underway, starting with a table read!

🐉 Our Dungeons & Dragons groups carried on with their adventures (the dice never rest).

💛 A few graduates dropped by to say hi, including one who stopped in while visiting from out of town. It's always a treat when they come home.

🍅 And Gastronomy Corporation made grilled cheese and tomato soup in their weekly cooking class. Delicious, as usual!

28 years in, and weeks like this never get old.

What a week at Alpine Valley School! 💛

We welcomed a brand new student into our community, and they landed in the middle of a busy one:

🍛 Gastronomy Corporation cooked up butter chicken and pine soda (yes, pine soda)

🎭 Auditions happened for our upcoming play, Magic Treehouse: Twister on Tuesday, and the cast list is officially posted

🦢 One student's "Choose Team Swan" poster on the bulletin board set off a full-blown movement. Rival birds appeared, campaigns were launched, and votes were cast. The Bird Wars lasted all week (and is still going strong).

🏃 A couple of our graduates dropped by for a surprise visit and invited everyone to a game of tag. Most of the school answered with an enthusiastic "YES."

🏠 Staff and students built a miniature house together, and it now lives on our library shelf in all its adorable glory

🥸 Pink moustaches kept popping up everywhere. Nobody has explained this to me. I've decided not to ask.

And of course, all the things that make a week here feel like home: time in the art room with Cait, our artist in residence, D&D adventures, lively School Meeting debates about the business of running our school, Judicial Committee meeting every day to handle accusations of rule-breaking, and plenty of time outside in the Colorado sunshine ☀️

One more highlight: a group of students gratefully accepted a donation from our Board of Trustees, kicking off our season of giving in our 30th year. 🎉 If you'd like to join in, a gift of any amount supports our tuition assistance program, which helps qualifying families enroll no matter their financial situation: www.alpinevalleyschool.com/donate

This is what it looks like when kids are trusted to follow what lights them up, in a community they help run. 💛

What a week. 🎉

We had elections for School Meeting officials, which is one of our favorite things that happens around here - students putting their names forward, making their case, and choosing who fills the roles that keep this place running.

Labor Day gave us a four-day week, and we packed it full:

- D&D at the table more than once (and the campaigns are getting good)
- Tours with new folks, and a new student who decided to join us - welcome! 🙌
- Art projects spread across tables
- 3D prints coming off the printer
- Long, winding conversations that went wherever they went
- Judicial Committee
- School Meeting, where a student gave the rest of us a full demonstration on the correct way to wind up and store a vacuum cleaner

Today our Board of Trustees came by to spend some time with us as part of their annual retreat, which is always a good day.

And tomorrow is a big one - our board retreat during the day, and then our 30th Anniversary Gala in the evening. We are SO excited. ✨

Here's to another full week.

This week at Alpine Valley School:

Tag came back. Loud, fast, joyful, and full of every age we've got, all over the campus.

The Computer Committee bought two new 3D printers, and our system admin (a student) installed them in the art room and reworked the certification so people could start printing right away.

Sewing projects kept going all week long.

The Aesthetics & Use Committee elected this year's Choreganizers: two new, one returning. They're the folks who assign teams to zones for daily chores, which is a bigger job than it sounds like.

Gastronomy Corporation planned two meals, shopped for all the ingredients together, and turned out zucchini brownies and pesto pasta in their weekly cooking class.

Nail art had a serious moment in the art room.

And on Thursday the whole art room got a reset: shelves organized, supplies tidied, in-progress works reunited with their owners.

We also put the finishing touches on everything for our 30th anniversary gala next weekend. One more week. We cannot wait to celebrate.

A look at how the week went at Alpine Valley School 🎨

Sewing projects got underway in the art room. Squishies were being made all week long, by a lot of different hands. Cardboard creations turned up everywhere, including a very tall tower of cardboard blocks that appeared in the Theater.

Dungeons & Dragons campaigns kicked off. Cooking projects took over the kitchen more than once. And one student pointed a telescope at the lunar eclipse and came back with photos of it 🌙

There was a lot of meeting time this week too, students and staff sorting out together how the new school year is going to run. One of our staff members sat down for an interview with authors writing a book about neurodiversity in schools. And we welcomed families in for tours all week, getting to see the whole place in motion.

Thirty years in, this is still the best part: kids chasing what they're actually interested in, inside a community they help run.

School is back in session, and the first week did not disappoint! 🍂

The cardboard has been flying this week, so many creations came through that the community decided a dedicated role was in order. Meet the newly invented Master of Cardboard, a student-created position to keep our cardboard supply organized and put to good use.

Down the hall, a crew has been deep into building a radio antenna. We kicked off our first chore days of the year, gathered for a lively School Meeting, and packed in meeting after meeting as groups across the school got organized for what's ahead.

And in the kitchen, one student baked an entire chocolate cake from scratch, solo, and enjoyed a very respectable slice (not the whole thing, promise).

We are so incredibly grateful to be back in community again, celebrating our 30th year together. So many exciting things are already in motion, and we can't wait to share them with you.

We'll be back with photos every Friday we're in session this year, so stay tuned! 🧡

Almost every student at Alpine Valley School moves through a recognizable arc of growth: the thrill of total freedom, a season of figuring out what they actually want, real ownership of their community, and eventually the confidence to advocate for the whole model. We've watched it unfold since 1997.

We finally wrote the whole map down, including the stage that worries parents most and why it's actually one of the best signs a student can show.

Read "The Ages and Stages of Self-Directed Education" on our blog: www.alpinevalleyschool.com/blog/2026/8/17/the-ages-and-stages-of-self-directed-education