At the Gold Hill School there are no strangers. The school serves a small community tied together by mountain topography, and has done so continuously since 1873. The school owes its record of 136 consecutive years of operation to its proximity to the city of Boulder below, and the vast wilderness of the Continental Divide above. Bringing young children to Boulder for schooling, either by horse and wagon, or bus, is out of the question. So what has endured is one of the best kept secrets in modern American public education –a real community school.

At the Gold Hill School each parent knows every family, and each child knows not only every other child’s name, but details of their daily lives. Further, it’s a school in which the teachers have known the majority of children since preschool, and will know them intimately through their entire elementary school years. As teacher, Sue Kidder, puts it, “Each new school year is not a starting over, it’s the continuation of a growing relationship. Such intimacy puts me into the best possible position to meet a given child’s educational and social needs.”  In 2009, Sue was awarded the Impact on Education Teaching Award, Boulder Valley School District’s highest teaching honor.

The Gold Hill School is part of the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). For more information, please visit the school’s BVSD site.