Four Fulgent Footprints

Liberty Common students have doubled their footprints about the town.  Yesterday, the school’s Board of Directors and its Building Corporation officially added two big properties to the previous two.  Here’s the sequence:

 

In 1997, LCS acquired its mothership property, today known as the LCS Plato campus.  Back then, the building was configured to house grades kindergarten through 9^th grade.  As enrollment grew, the building was expanded.  The track and soccer-field area – Everett Field – was eventually added, too.

 

In 2010, we bought the high-school building from owners of a different charter school.  We moved grades 7 – 10 in that first year leading up to the first graduating class – the pioneering Class of 2013. 

 

Those 18 original graduates will always hold a special place in LCS lore.  Four of them were the first “Thirteeners,” students who attended Liberty from kindergarten thus completing a thirteen-year journey as Liberty Eagles.   

 

Moving grades 7 – 12 to the high school created space for a third classroom in each elementary grade.  Adding more elementary students necessitated expanding the high school building which was accomplished in three phases, the Colosseum (gymnasium) being the final phase.

 

In 2022, we expanded our elementary school further adding 50 more students per grade in grades k-4.  This was best accomplished in a rented building we now know as the Aristotle Campus which, until around 11:30am yesterday, was owned by a different charter school.  Now we own it! 

 

Our leading-edge cohort of Aristotle 6^th graders is nearly 50 students strong today.  As planned, enrollment at the Aristotle campus will continue to grow through 2029.  These enrollment-growth projections necessitate a standalone junior-high facility which we also bought yesterday.  The new junior-high property is adjacent to the mothership Plato campus on Sharp Point Dr.

 

The current buildings at the new junior-high location need to be remodeled and enlarged over the next two years.  The first phase of the remodeling will get underway in just a few weeks and will be completed in time for all rising 7^th graders and 8^th graders to move in by August of 2025 for the start of the next school year.  “Phase Two” will take another year.

 

Yesterday’s closing sale effectively doubles the number of official Liberty Common School street addresses – four Liberty-owned mailboxes, four fulgent footprints – from our previous two.  That leaves quite a dazzling impression upon our Northern Colorado community.

 

The price tag on these new property acquisitions, plus consolidating existing debt, comes to just over $70M.  We sold bonds, last week, to generate the income via multiple bond-debt instruments.  Incredibly, the sales window lasted just 90 minutes and generated far more investor interest than we had bonds to sell.  That’s actually a really powerful testimony to the future of our school.

 

Our debt-repayment schedule runs through the mid-2050s…unless, that is, some wealthy Liberty Common School fan (or fans) donates a whole bunch of money to whittle down the debt earlier.  Audacious?  Sure.  But it pays to contemplate bold possibilities like that.  I definitely do.

 

The civic, patriotic, and humanitarian advantages of donating big to our profoundly consequential charity accrue to tens of thousands of young American souls – present and future ones.  Few things can surpass in importance sustaining such a great school as our flourishing community institution.

 

If any readers might be able to take a big bite out of Liberty’s new debt portfolio, let’s talk ASAP!  More likely, however, we’ll spend the next few decades pursuing varied strategies to tackle debt relief in smaller, broader bites spread over more families, alumni, school-reform donors, and grantmaking organizations. 

 

Regardless of what it takes or how we navigate, the school’s vision is a virtuous and noble one.  It’s well articulated by the amazing faculty.  The Mission Statement animates our daily strategies, projects, plans, and tactics. 

 

Liberty Common School’s expansion, the debt to finance it, and the school’s ongoing daily operation are carefully orchestrated to create more opportunity for more Northern Colorado families – to acquaint more young Americans with noble intellectual and moral ideals, to understand and be inclined toward truth, beauty, goodness, and perfection.