30 years strong: Boulder Country Day School celebrates learning

Boulder Country Day (BCD), a K through eighth grade school in Gunbarrel, will be 30 years old on Sept. 16, marking three decades of commitment to academic excellence and character development for local students.

BCD’s focus on small class sizes has been one of its guiding tenets. The school limits enrollment to 18 students in each elementary grade, and it’s a commitment the school intends to keep as it moves into the future.

“Our middle school is a little more flexible, as far as class sizes are concerned,” said Diana Emerson, BCD’s assistant director of marketing and communication. “We added a second story to the middle school building in 2009, and this year we have about 100 students enrolled in it. But we’re committed to the smaller classes for kindergarten through fifth grade.”

The school currently has a little over 350 students. While it has no intention of adding a high school program, BCD does have a preschool program that takes children from two and a half to pre-kindergarten.

“We could grow the preschool program,” noted Emerson, “and we intend to grow our middle school. But we really just want to remain the K-8 option for parents that are looking to have their kids in a safe—and I don’t just mean physically safe—but a safe academic environment where they can be risk takers and grow as a whole person.”

BCD also provides an International Baccalaureate (IB) program for grades six through eight. IB programs foster the development of communication skills, intercultural understanding and global engagement.

Opening in 1988, BCD was first house in a building on Diagonal Way, which was later occupied by the Boulder JCC. In 1998, it moved to its current five-and-a-half acre campus next to Twin Lakes in Gunbarrel. The campus has buildings for preschool, elementary and middle school, as well as a full gymnasium, art studios, science and innovation labs and a library.

The school’s facilities allow it to offer parent education events and to host community events. And while it is a private school, it does offer tuition assistance to qualified candidates.

In 30 years of educating children in Boulder County, there have been changes in location and enrollment, but much of BCD has remained the same.

“We see each child for who they are and where they’re at,” said Emerson. “We’re not just rigorous academically. We want to help with social-emotional learning, too. We want to continue our commitment to be the ‘whole child’ education option for parents.”