History of Liberty Common School – Aristotle Campus

In the early 2020s, Liberty’s single elementary campus on Sharp Point Drive—now the Plato campus—was operating at its designed capacity of roughly 610 students with three tracks of full classrooms at every grade level, k-6^th, and long waitlists year after year.  At the same time, Liberty’s overall k-12 enrollment continued to climb exceeding 1,200 students. 

 

Parents from every corner of Fort Collins, especially the city’s west side, were asking the same question Liberty’s founders once asked:  “Why shouldn’t our children have access to Liberty’s world-class education too?”

 

For years, Liberty’s long waitlist was regarded as an unavoidable reality for those whose children languished on it.  The elementary-school campus was hemmed in by parking lots, roadways, and neighboring properties in an industrial park not particularly designed with a big school in mind.  Expansion there was impossible.

 

However, in 2022, the school was approached by another charter school, Colorado Early Colleges, with a question:  Would Liberty be interested in moving into its facilities in southwest Fort Collins and expanding its offerings there?  

  

The question opened new possibilities the school had previously been unable to consider.  Scores of deserving children on the school’s lottery waitlist compelled a serious discussion about expansion.  Nonetheless, debate about expansion pitted complicated pluses against considerable minuses. 

 

Opinions among BOD Members and the school’s parent population were mixed.  Expanding entailed an intricate calculation of risks and probabilities.

 

Against that backdrop, in April 2022, the BOD voted to approve expansion of the elementary school to a second campus rented on a three-year lease, with an option to buy, from Colorado Early Colleges at 2130 West Horsetooth Road.  The decision did not envision creating a different kind of school but to double the number of elementary classrooms while preserving a single, unified k–12 institution – one school, two campuses.

 

In Liberty fashion, even the naming was deliberate:  The new campus would be called “Aristotle,” and the original campus “Plato,” a reverent nod to the classical inheritance upon which Liberty’s curriculum and character-education program is built.

 

The BOD’s Resolution on the matter contemplated a prudent strategy intended to protect, preserve, and sustain the school’s longstanding academic mission.  Rather than chasing enrollment for its own sake, Liberty would expand in order to provide more individual opportunity and inclusion for students whose families actively sought a same Core Knowledge Sequence and classically-oriented education for which the school was nationally renowned.

 

Under the plan, elementary-classroom capacity would roughly double over time.  The Aristotle campus would ultimately grow from an initial 250-student enrollment to more than 500 at full build-out—an increase that would ease the pressure of long waitlists without compromising ambitious academic standards.

 

While the BOD’s internal deliberations focused upon sustainable growth projections, the picture visible to the broader community was straightforward:  With only about 610 elementary seats serving the entire Liberty system, demand from Fort Collins families had outgrown a one-campus, three-track model.  The property at 2130 West Horsetooth Road made sense.

 

The property had a prior history in the local charter-school movement.  It was originally constructed by an immersion-language charter school with a footprint totaling roughly 52,500 square feet including a gymnasium and an additional classroom wing.

 

The original school operated there until 2019.  The facility then housed a partnership between AXIS International Academy (a k-5 language-immersion charter) and the new building owner, Colorado Early Colleges Fort Collins West Middle School (grades 6–8).  The partnership created a preschool-through-eighth-grade campus at the corner of Taft Hill and Horsetooth. 

 

Those arrangements eventually changed as both entities, somewhat pressed by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, no longer found the space ideal.  By 2022, the building became available as a ready-made school facility in a part of town wherefrom Liberty had long accommodated families commuting across the city to reach the Sharp Point campus.  Other potential LCS families were simply underserved by existing nearby options.

  

When the opportunity emerged, Liberty’s Board moved to lease the Horsetooth-and-Taft facility from Colorado Early Colleges.  In doing so, the BOD avoided the time and expense of ground-up construction while gaining a modern structure that could be quickly refitted for Liberty’s Core Knowledge program.

 

Headmaster Schaffer appointed LCS Elementary Principal Casey Churchill to head the expansion and lead the new campus.  Schaffer named Sandy Stoltzfus to replace Churchill as principal at the mothership campus. 

 

With less than a year to move in, the school launched a fundraising appeal “A Million Dollars, One Reason.”   Expansion planning triggered a frenzy of hiring, curriculum ordering, and enrollment work.  Truckloads of surplus furniture from a recently closed elementary school were donated creating a frugal but cheerful starting point for dozens of classrooms that would soon be filled with young scholars.

 

The expansion strategy was intentionally phased.  Aristotle would not launch all six grades at once. Instead, in August 2022, the campus opened to roughly 250 new students serving two tracks of grades k–4.  This first cohort allowed Liberty to plant its flag on the west side of the city, replicate its LCS culture in a new campus, and align every classroom with the Core Knowledge Sequence and Liberty’s character-education framework before adding the upper elementary grades.

 

Over the next years, fifth and sixth grades were added and a third track was phased in, starting with kindergarten, toward an operational capacity of three tracks of k-6 under the Aristotle roof.  This made a total of six tracks of k-6 instruction spanning two campuses unified by one charter and one governance structure. 

 

Opening the Aristotle campus required more than good intentions.  Liberty sought philanthropic partners and competitive state grants rewarding high-performing charter schools for expansion opportunities. The Denver-based Daniels Fund provided a $400,000 grant expressly to help open the Aristotle campus.   Liberty also won a multi-year federally-funded award under the Colorado Charter Schools Program (CCSP) totaling approximately $840,000. 

 

Even as a renter, Liberty treated the Horsetooth building as a long-term investment.  By December 2024, the Board and the Liberty Common School Building Corporation moved to purchase the property outright using a bond sale to acquire and improve the Aristotle campus as part of Liberty’s permanent-campus network.

 

During this time, the campus underwent visible changes signaling new ownership.  The exterior signage was replaced with Liberty’s emblem and name.  Inside and out, Liberty invested in improvements characteristic of its campuses:  Playground and gymnasium renovations and aesthetic updates reflecting the school’s classical and patriotic character. 

 

From the outset, Liberty’s Aristotle campus opened as a fully integrated part of the LCS elementary school, not an offshoot, with new families quickly embracing Liberty’s culture, customs, expectations, and traditions.

 

The Aristotle campus stands as proof our charter school could grow without surrendering the core principles that made it worth expanding in the first place.  In that sense, naming the campus after Aristotle was more than a flourish.  It was the fulfillment of a classical vision for proper education and timeless virtue.  

 

As demand mounted and waiting lists lengthened, Liberty’s Board chose not to lower the bar or outsource its mission, but to extend it and strengthen it—carefully, prudently, and with a clear strategy—two campuses, one school.  

 

Today, families on the west side of Fort Collins daily drive past the school’s American Flag and a big sign that reads “Liberty Common School – Aristotle Campus, Grades K–6.”  They know what happens inside the LCS Aristotle campus is a fulfillment of the same revolution in education that began with a handful of determined parents three decades earlier – a leading academic institution offering to Northern Colorado schoolchildren and their families “Common Knowledge, Common Virtue, and Common Sense.”