Our Story

The Fred Tjardes School of Innovation opened in the fall of 2017; however, a lot led to our school becoming a Greeley-Evans Innovation Status school. 

In the Spring of 2014, Courtney Luce enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Northern Colorado. The first class in her program had an assignment involving designing a school. This had long been a dream of hers, as she had seen in her years of being a teacher that traditional school did not meet the needs of all learners. It especially did not meet the needs of her own young learner who was already struggling with traditional school in first grade at this time. 

As she worked on her project, David Edwards and Caitlin Konecny were also separately daydreaming about ways education could look different. David had been observing his young son learn as he was growing up. He watched the natural process that occurred as his son developed new skills and knowledge about the world and how it worked. However, David didn't notice evidence of those same natural learning processes happening in his own classroom. He tried to find ways to incorporate more hands-on learning, but he felt it was limited when it wasn't a school-wide culture. 

Caitlin had recently moved schools and was working at a school where most parts of her day were scripted, but she could tell that the students in front of her needed and wanted more than what was scripted for them. She found ways of bringing hands-on, project-based learning into her classroom. But she wanted to give more students the opportunities she was providing in her own classroom. 

One day, Courtney and David, who were already acquaintances, ran into each other as she was working on her project. When she shared what she was working on, David pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket that had many of the same ideas on it. He had already been brainstorming ideas with Caitlin, and it turned out all three of them had been having the same thoughts. This encounter between Courtney and David turned out to be quite serendipitous. “A seemingly insignificant fortuitous event can set in motion constellations of influences that change the course of lives” (p. 166), and this meeting was exactly this type of “fortuitous event.” David, Caitlin, and Courtney officially met for the first time on December 22nd, 2014 to begin working on the school. 

Their initial plans involved starting as a charter school, but when they met with the superintendent, Dr. Deirdre Pilch in the summer of 2015, they decided their vision would work best as an Innovation Status school in the Greeley-Evans School District. After many meetings with district leadership and the school board to ensure their vision for a school would fit well in the district, the school was approved in the spring of 2017 and began operation in August of 2017. 

David, Caitlin, and Courtney are all still working at TSOI and trying to improve every day while keeping their original mission and vision at the core of everything they do.