In Memoriam Mary Pineda (deceased 14 AUG 2026)

Liberty Common School students are mentioned in Mary Pineda’s obituary.   They are her children.  For them, she helped create a great school.  She was a crucial LCS founder and she loved the school’s mission.

 

Mary died unexpectedly on Friday 14 AUG 2026.  Her two sons attended Liberty.  One attended its predecessor template the Washington Core

Knowledge School.  Mary’s time helping shepherd the school through its earliest days occurred decades ago, yet Mary’s passing compels memorializing her heroic efforts here and now.

 

In those harrowing times, our fledgling school had more ambition than resources.  Most founding tasks were led by volunteer parents and often done the hard way.  Mary was always first in line to knock them out. 

 

We had to move tons of rocks – literally.  To make it suitable for play and physical education, truckloads of rocks had to be plucked from the future schoolyard.  Being located along the Cache la Poudre riverbed, nature endowed our grounds with a depth of river rock.  The expense of hiring a contractor to dig it out, regrade infilled soil, and pass a state inspection was prohibitive.   

 

Mary deployed her professional knowledge of landscaping and horticulture to persuade us we could, and should, do this work ourselves and direct the savings into the new classrooms.  We managed to coax grass from the sandy, gravelly soil, wrestle with sprinklers, install sod, and make the grounds look worthy of a splendid school – the one we now call our Plato campus.

 

Mary’s rock-moving campaign galvanized the earliest LCS community.  Whole families turned out over multiple weekends and transformed a swath or rock, sand, and dirt into play areas and grassy lawns.  Parents, grandparents, and kids were everywhere wielding shovels, prybars, buckets, rakes, wheelbarrows.  Most stones were pulled by hand.  Core Knowledge songs occasionally broke out on the jobsite.  Food showed up.  Spontaneous picnics materialized. 

 

What Mary mobilized became somewhat a metaphor for the level of parental leadership required to finish and sustain our school.  We learned we could band together to move rocks.  Big ones no longer scared us.  From there onward, we always figured out, together, how to clear obstacles as our mighty “revolution in education” built momentum.

 

In similar ways, Mary was part of every parent-led effort to conquer other daunting impediments standing between an audacious idea for a new charter school and the vaunted Liberty Common School we know today.  She and her husband Andy enrolled their oldest son, Patrick that year (1997), the year LCS opened.  Their younger son, James, followed.  Mary had become what can only be described as a “supermom” volunteer.

 

She was everywhere.  Mary served on Liberty’s Board of Directors as a Member, Treasurer, and Chair.  She served on its Financial Advisory Committee and Academic Advisory Committee.  She contributed substantially to curricular implementation in language arts, mathematics, and science.  She analyzed our early academic-performance data looking for clues about what was working well and how we could improve.

 

It may be difficult for today’s Liberty families to fully appreciate how tenuous those early years were.  We lacked the decades of institutional experience upon which we rely today.  There was no guidebook labeled “What Every Liberty Parent Needs To Know.” 

 

What we did encounter, however, was a cascade of unforeseen problems requiring institutional decisions and the need to call one audible after another.  Through these trials, we invented systems from scratch, researched best options for curriculum patches, raised money to cover shortages, instituted financial-accountability practices, tinkered with facility improvements, waged political battles for survival, and loved our children who, we all agreed, deserved the best education possible.  Our love for them united us, made us lifelong friends, and drove us to never give up.  Through these episodes, Mary was one of our most creative founders.

 

To wit, Liberty’s earliest writing program yielded lackluster results.  Mary spearheaded use of “copy books” with which students copied, word-for-word, poems and vital passages from the curriculum.  The exercises improved student handwriting, spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and familiarity with beautiful language.

 

The strategy was inexpensive.  It was simple.  It was effective.  It was emblematic of other school solutions Mary envisioned.  

 

Her obituary describes her as having an “intelligent eye for transforming the simple into beautiful, and the mundane into magnificent.”   That particular description recalls Mary the artist.

 

She painted.  She welded.  She worked with wood and tapestry.  She repurposed ordinary things into beautiful ones.  She was a prolific gardener and a brilliant cook.  She read voraciously—fiction and nonfiction on an astonishing range of subjects.  She earned an animal-science degree from Colorado State University and established her professional career in the landscaping industry.

 

These extraordinary and varied talents made Mary a formidable parent leader in the LCS community.  Mary knew how things worked.  She knew how things could be made better.

 

A gardener understands how worthwhile things rarely appear fully formed.  Mary germinated bold ideas about proper public schooling and tended them here at Liberty.  There is a dangerous paradox accompanying the success of Mary’s vision for our charter school:  Eventually, high achievement begins to seem inevitable.  Some no longer question how things here became so.

 

The great four-campus institution our students enjoy today profits from well-established academic traditions, extraordinary teachers, accomplished graduates, and more than 1,600 students annually.   Our journey of accomplishment is still unfolding – rather beautifully – thanks to a generation of determined parents and educators who resolved that “excellence in education” is a worthy ambition, an apposite mission benefiting all children.  Mary applied personal responsibility toward proving it.

 

We still regard extraordinary parental engagement essential to the education and upbringing of well-formed students.  Mary Pineda reminds us what this means.  She did not merely send her boys to Liberty, she helped envision and build Liberty for them—and for every student who came after them.  This distinction matters.

 

Mary’s family remembers her greatest passion being “her three boys”—Andy, Patrick, and James.  There is a noble quality in the way her devotion to her own family carried generously into service for so many other families.   Thousands of children Mary never knew continue to benefit from the school she helped establish and which she has now left behind as a thriving legacy for generations to come.

 

Likewise, current Liberty students and parents may have never heard of Mary Pineda; but they should be brought to know her name and find a conspicuous record of one who was a proud Liberty mother, who sat through countless hours of Board meetings examining finances and policy, who scrutinized student-assessment data, debated mathematics and language-arts strategies, developed writing exercises, mapped irrigation grids, and organized a rock-free schoolyard.

 

All LCS students should know how, during their school’s most difficult days, Mary was a brave voice of reason and a woman of action.  They should know how improvements that now seem primordial depended upon an activist mom deciding, decades ago, it was worth doing – ultimately for them.

 

The young should be taught that good communities always have lore, traditions, memories, cultural obligations, and debts of gratitude owed sometimes to those who have passed on.  In the case of Liberty Common School, Mary Pineda’s significant life deserves everyone’s profound respect and esteem.

 

In the coming months, we will find an appropriate way to permanently attach Mary’s name to the school grounds to properly call the attention of future generations to Mary and how she lived – as a dynamic and engaged LCS parent, a loving mother, an intelligent servant, and a visionary leader who left our town better than she found it.

 

After all, Mary spent much of her life transforming ordinary places into beautiful landscapes.  This she did here at Liberty Common School.  She moved rocks, planted gardens, cultivated young lives.  She grew a great school.

 

Thirty years later, her labors educate for life in abundance.  Accordingly, the Liberty community’s admiration for her life will be abundant indeed.  We will always remember Mary Pineda.