What Five Charter Schools in One Rural Colorado County Tell Us About Public Education

But nearly 400 miles southwest of Denver, Montezuma County offers a very different picture of public school choice.

The rural county is home to five charter schools. Together, they include a Montessori school, an Indigenous-designed elementary school, an experiential alternative high school, and two small community schools deeply connected to the students and families they serve.

Montezuma County Charter Schools

They are not five versions of the same educational model. They exist because different communities identified different needs and concluded that a conventional, standardized approach to public education was not enough.

That makes Montezuma County an important reminder: in rural Colorado, charter schools are not necessarily competitors operating at the margins of the public school system. In some communities, they have become part of the infrastructure that keeps public education local, relevant, and accessible.

Battle Rock Charter School serves students in kindergarten through sixth grade in McElmo Canyon, due west of Cortez. Its multi-age classrooms bring students of different grade levels together, and its program emphasizes exploration, community service, social-emotional development, and hands-on learning.

Children’s Kiva Montessori School, located in Cortez, provides another distinct option. The K–8 school combines Montessori-inspired instruction while integrating community projects and expeditionary learning.

These schools demonstrate one of the most basic promises of public school choice: families do not all want precisely the same educational environment, and students do not all learn best in precisely the same way.

But the story of Montezuma County’s charter schools extends beyond instructional preference.

Kwiyagat Community Academy, located in Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, opened in 2021 as Colorado’s first public charter school located on Indigenous land. The school was created through the vision and leadership of the Ute Mountain Ute community.

Its curriculum emphasizes Ute language, culture, and identity alongside academic learning and social-emotional development.

Kwiyagat represents something much larger than the addition of another school option. For generations, American education systems were frequently used to separate Indigenous children from their languages, cultures, and communities. Kwiyagat reverses that relationship, as public education becomes a vehicle for cultural restoration and continuity.

Pleasant View Charter School tells yet another story. The school became a charter in 2023 after the Montezuma-Cortez district planned to close the existing rural elementary school. Rather than accept the loss of a community institution, local residents organized to preserve it.

Today, Pleasant View serves students in small, mixed-grade classrooms and incorporates the surrounding community’s agricultural identity into its educational vision.

In a small rural community, the closure of a school can represent something very consequential. The next closest school may be many miles away. A community gathering place disappears. Families spend more time transporting children. And another institution connecting residents to one another is lost.

Pleasant View illustrates how charter status can provide a mechanism for a community to maintain a public school that might otherwise disappear.

Southwest Open School, meanwhile, serves a very different student population. The Cortez High School uses experiential education, project-based learning, field experiences, work-based learning, and close advisor relationships. Its program is designed especially for students who need a more flexible or personalized path through high school. The school grew out of a program serving students who had dropped out or were at risk of leaving school altogether.

For a young person who has become disconnected from conventional schooling, a smaller, more relational setting may represent not merely another preference but a final viable path toward a diploma.

Across Montezuma County, these five schools collectively serve students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Some are relatively new. Others have served the region for decades. Some were created to offer a specialized educational philosophy. Others were established to protect a local institution, affirm an Indigenous identity, or reconnect students who had struggled elsewhere.

Too much of Colorado’s school choice debate treats charter schools as though they constitute one uniform category. That framing obscures the varied reasons communities create them, and families select them. In rural Colorado, public school choice is often an expression of community self-determination.

Sometimes it looks like a Montessori classroom in Cortez. Sometimes it looks like students learning the Ute language in Towaoc. Sometimes it means keeping a small agricultural community’s school open. And sometimes it means giving a teenager one more opportunity to reconnect with public education.

That is not a retreat from public education. It is an example of communities reshaping public education to meet the people and places they are supposed to serve. Their differences are precisely the point and demonstrate the importance of public school choice and charter schools across communities and geographies.

Montezuma County Charter Schools
Battle Rock Charter School: https://battlerockschool.org/
Children's Kiva Montessori School: https://www.kivacharter.org/
Kwiyagat Community Academy: https://utekca.org/
Pleasant View Charter School: https://www.pleasantviewcharterschool.com/
Southwest Open Charter School: https://southwestopenschool.org/