Principal's Message

Dear Nederland Community,

Welcome to the Nederland Elementary website and to our school community. My hometown and lifelong community is Nederland and it is an honor and privilege to serve as the principal of Nederland Elementary. I grew up north of Nederland and attended the Nederland schools from Kindergarten through high school graduation. I am proud to call Nederland home and to be a Nederland native.

I started as principal at Nederland Elementary during the height of the COVID pandemic and I am incredibly proud of the work our staff and community accomplished during that time and in the years since. In fact, since the COVID pandemic Nederland Elementary has led Boulder Valley School District and indeed the state of Colorado in increasing academic achievement, closing opportunity gaps, and creating a school culture where all students thrive.

How have we done this? Well, there are three primary drivers of our success.

First, Nederland Elementary prioritizes fostering a strong school culture and a sense of belonging for all students. This has been a priority for years and we are leaders in this area. Through our partnership with Teens, Inc. we were among the first schools to implement the Second Step Social Emotional Learning curriculum, we have innovative positive behavior support with Panther Paws, bead jars, and spirit assemblies, and we have what I believe are among the strongest mental health supports of any school. This all helps create a strong sense of belonging because ultimately, if students don’t feel they belong they won’t learn.

Second, we have an incredible teaching staff who consistently deliver strong instruction for all our students. Our staff are characterized by being lifelong learners who are always looking for ways to improve and innovate while being sure all students are making progress towards grade level standards. I was telling a parent the other day that our staff has the perfect blend of veteran teachers whose decades of experience keep us on track, combined with teachers new to the profession who come with energy, enthusiasm, and the latest teaching methods. Over the past five years we have also prioritized ensuring all students are consistently working with complex grade level texts, solving challenging grade level math problems, and ultimately meeting grade level expectations.

Third, our priorities are clear. We run every decision through our filter to be sure we prioritize our time, energy, and resources with efforts aligned to our vision. There are a million and one incredible ideas out there, and our job is to select only those that align with our vision. Our vision can be summed up with the following words, which serve as our guiding principles: Adventure, High Expectations, Stewardship, Equity, and Whole Human Beings. This focus has allowed us to say no to certain ideas and fully embrace other ideas. For example, by focusing on high expectations and equity we were an early adopter of a new literacy curriculum and led BVSD in the implementation of that curriculum. This curriculum is rich with high quality and complex texts and tasks that require us to hold high expectations for all our students. We also focused on being sure our students experiencing poverty have everything they need to meet grade level standards. This is some of our most important work as research tells us when students who experience poverty have strong academic outcomes their odds of earning a living wage by the age of 30 increase from 3 in 10 to 6 in 10 (6 in 10 is in-line with students from more affluent families).

This combined work is paying dividends as Nederland Elementary has simply never been better. We are now one of the highest performing schools in BVSD. Data from the 23-24 school year shows the highest percentage of students reading at grade level and doing math at grade level than ever before. Our students experiencing poverty outperform their peers across the state by significant margins and our students with disabilities made tremendous progress towards meeting grade level standards. To put a number on it we can look at our School Performance Framework or SPF. The SPF is the “report card” from the Colorado Department of Education and every public school in Colorado gets a SPF score. This year our SPF score was 88.7 out of 100. This is an increase from 57.2 in 2019 and the highest score ever for NES by 10 points. A score of 88.7 is in the top quarter of scores among elementary schools in BVSD.

When I started at Nederland Elementary my goal was to become the highest performing and most innovative school around. It is incredible to see us fulfilling this goal.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about our school, our community, or just want to chat. My direct phone number is (720) 561-5575.

Best,
Caleb