Zealous Schools is a Village Center
Zealous Schools is a space that is placed by the rocky mountains, the high desert, a myriad creeks winding through willow and sage and the memories of pastures, hardscrabble cattlemen and wheeling red-tailed hawks.
Zealous Schools is a village center. It is a maker’s space. It is a sanctuary and a slingshot. This year, at Zealous our students have spent almost as much time high up in the spruce and aspen, building team dynamics and leadership skills on a historic ranch, as they have in our school building. We’ve debated the nature of reliability in historical documents and plied our river, for both trout-habitat-suitability and for the joy of being swept along by the current. Students are designing airplanes in CAD software and learning the finer points of woodworking on any number of passion projects. We learn the wisdom of Dinè grandmothers, weaving tributes to their incredible blankets, as we tackle more advanced math than any other group of middle school students in our county. We delve into classic literature and the scrawlings of an unscrupulous art dealer with equal zeal, searching for a treasure purported to be buried somewhere in the Rockies, revealed only through careful reading.
If you live in Eagle Co. you’ve seen us biking or longboarding most mornings. We bike to popular trailheads and to the disk-golf course for our brand of physical education (morning activity.) We bike to the public library, the county building, the City of Eagle building, and sometimes, just to grab snacks at the everything store. As we bike, we practice shifting into the best gear, body positioning and sound judgement/ decision making skills. We practice signaling, clustering in our lane and being predictable in our movements. Our muscles grow stronger and our lungs are charged with the cooling air of mid-September; blue skies often crown our adventures. Our bikes are keys to mobility that make each of us our own captain: all together, all autonomous, but we are excited to get our bus in on the action!
Through generous donor support and a series of grants, Zealous has recently purchased, “Z Bus,” a glorious, 30 seat, real-life, yellow school bus. Z Bus sports official CDE specified paint and body modifications, including a wheel-chair ramp and reflective patches. It is numbered 149 (a number as magical as the bus itself- ask Geoff) and it turns heads everywhere it goes! Zealous students look forward to taking the bus on far flung treasure hunting expeditions, to backpacking trailheads and, again, maybe just to the everything store for snacks. Zealous staff are super excited to have a safe, reliable mode of transportation that will allow us to be more mobile as a school, and free us from the need to ask our parent population to drive on our weekly “Friday in the Field” trips.
As Zealous grows, adding more students, a vehicle, more programs after school and more resources in our physical building we maintain a focus on what we started in order to become: a family, an academy, a proving ground for the incredible, the implausible, the most passionate ideas in our community. As Zealous Schools moves into the fall of its second year, we do so with an ardent spirit of adventure, looking to new horizons for the promise of becoming that enveloped our every action last year at this time!
Our building stands in what was once a run of cottonwood and tall grass, unbroken into the pińyon and juniper hills. In the future, our little town in the Rockies will be further changed. Our students leave this place as Gibran describes, “arrows shot forth,” from the heavy pull we put to bowstring, shot into a future of renewable energies, high speed communication, smart-grids and new community modalities. What that world will look like when they are old, we cannot say, but we know that they will be well equipped and well aimed, bringing a pioneer’s spirit and a listening ear to every new horizon: autonomous and co-working; free thinking and respectful of tradition; passionate, compassionate and ready to change the world.