Welcome Back to the Plato Campus

Dear Liberty Common Plato-Campus Friends and Families,

 

The Plato-campus faculty, staff, and I are thrilled to welcome everyone back for another school year full of knowledge and wonder as we point our students to the good, true, beautiful, and perfect.

 

In this first week of school, the Plato Campus has felt electric; there is palpable joy among the students and staff, scholarship is earnestly underway, and we’ve added a few new features and traditions.

 

It is always appropriate to extend gratitude and admiration to the school’s founders for having the vision, tenacity, and grit to lead a true revolution in education in Poudre School District.  At the Plato campus, we now have the honor of having the grandchildren of many of our founders.  Their legacy is far-reaching, extending to their own children, grandchildren, your children, and mine.  I’m grateful.

 

Last year, we commemorated 25 years of excellence in education through both celebrations and memorials.  We ceremonially buried a time capsule and commemorated the permanency of Liberty Common School with the bronze 25th-anniversary seal.  We anticipate the next ceremony, in 2048, when we open the vault and remember what it was like to be a Liberty Common student in 2023.

 

The new stone archway residing in the Stoa, designed and built by two of our talented Liberty Common School community members, Mr. Isaac Howe, husband of fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Elizabeth Howe, and Marc Greenacre, husband of third-grade teacher Mrs. Tara Greenacre, also commemorates the school’s permanency and beautifully reflects our emphasis on character development through timeless virtues.

 

Our elementary campuses started this school year with a new tradition – guidons.  At the Plato Campus, Mr. Schaffer ceremonially presented each homeroom teacher with their class’s identifying guidon.  Essential classical virtues are emblazoned upon each guidon.  Click here to watch.

 

This new tradition will introduce young Liberty Common scholars to the first elements of teamwork, school culture, and rudimentary leadership.  Guidons, carried by the guidon bearer, now lead the way for each classroom of students throughout their day.  Liberty Common scholars are carrying their class’s guidons with pride and dignity, and displaying them with prominence.  Click here to read more.

 

Although we’ve grown and developed in many ways since the school’s founding—we now have a thriving high school, a second elementary campus, and we call the “blue-side of the gym” the “Agora”—we continue to be firmly rooted in our founding mission and principles.  Truly, very little has changed at Liberty Common School over the years, and this is intentional.

 

We are one school, three campuses (soon to be four with the opening of a junior-high campus in 2025), united around a single enduring mission, “…to provide excellence and fairness in education for school children through a common foundation by successfully teaching a contextual body of organized knowledge, the skills of learning including the Thinking Framework, and the values of a democratic society…”

Parents lead the way at Liberty Common School, and we continue to stand on the principle of parental rights and the universal truth in education – that it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of children.

 

As we embark on another remarkable year, I am exceedingly grateful to be on mission with passionate parents and committed professional teachers and staff. 

 

Welcome back!

 

Warmest regards,

Sandy Stoltzfus, Principal (Plato Campus)