Note: We are republishing this blog post from Mapleton School District written by Sean Andersen-Vie, Mapleton’s Communications Specialist, about impressive results from their ninth grade on-track work. Mapleton School District is a partner of our Colorado Center for High School Success.
As the school year comes to a close, Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (MESA) is celebrating a major milestone — its highest-ever freshman on-track rate. This year, nearly every ninth grader is on track to graduate, marking a significant success for the school community.
That number is a dramatic turnaround for a school that, just last year, had 14 students retained at the end of ninth grade, and even more in previous years. As of late April 2025, more than 80% of MESA’s ninth graders are now on track to graduate, up from the mid-60% range a year ago. That nearly 14% improvement is one of the highest freshmen on-track rate increases in the country this year.
“It feels great,” said Jared Powell, MESA’s Academic Success Coordinator. “We really look at graduation as a way for students to access careers in at least a middle-class lifestyle. If we’re improving our graduation rates by about 15%, that’s amazing work. We’re really proud of that.”
The shift is thanks in large part to a Ninth Grade Success grant from the Colorado Department of Education, which allowed MESA to partner with the Center for High School Success (CHSS). The Center provided a roadmap of proven, quarter-by-quarter strategies to help students transition successfully into high school, with a focus on proactive supports, not reactive interventions.
Building the Freshman Foundation
One of the most visible changes was the addition of a Freshman Seminar, a course designed to teach students how to be high school students. There they learn how to manage time, stay organized, reflect on progress, and understand the mechanics of credits and graduation. A weekly grade tracker also helps students evaluate what they are missing, make a plan, and assess how that plan is working.
“I think it was really helpful to get the pace of how to fit everything together,” said freshman Yadira L. “The tracker helped me stay accountable with what I was doing because I like to procrastinate.”
Freshman Derek L. credits his turnaround in English class to small-group meetings led by Powell, where certain students set personal goals and learn executive functioning strategies. These goal-setting groups are part of a broader multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) used at MESA to identify students at varying levels of need and respond accordingly.
“We’d come up with steps to reach a goal, and he would show us the right steps to take,” Derek said.
“I started doing my assignments and realized it was easier than I thought. I’m proud that everything I put my mind to, I could do it.”
Getting Everyone on the Same Page
MESA’s staff tracks student progress using a custom dashboard built in Tableau, the district’s data visualization platform. The tool allows teachers and support teams to monitor grades, attendance, and course-specific struggles in real time. Students are grouped into different tiers, based on their grades and attendance, and a student success team meets weekly to tailor strategies and resources to the lower tiers.
“I think that’s been really beneficial,” Powell said. “We can identify and tailor things to individual kids much easier when we have a scheduled time and we take a really deep, data-driven approach together.” Support also comes from peers. MESA launched a peer tutoring program where juniors and seniors—many of whom overcame academic struggles themselves—mentor underclassmen.
For families, MESA hosted parent education events to ensure everyone understood what it means to be on track, how to navigate the high school system, and how to support students at home. And to help students connect school to real-world goals, Powell arranged college and technical school visits so students could see the full range of postsecondary options.
“A lot of ninth graders say they don’t want to go to college, which is fine,” Powell said. “But I tell them I look at college as anywhere you learn a skill and get a piece of paper saying you have a skill, so you’re employable. It could be a four-year university or a trade school, but all those options start with graduating high school.”
Yadira said the visits helped put things into perspective. “It was nice to see what we could be exposed to in later years and explore different things we could do in the future.”
One Student’s Story, Many Students’ Success
One of the most powerful examples of the program’s success in Powell’s eyes was a student who came to MESA with a long history of academic struggles. He had been held back in elementary school, failed nearly every class in middle school, and had poor attendance. Nearing the end of his ninth-grade year at the school, he knows he will move on to tenth grade this fall, thanks to all of MESA’s supports.
“That was a big moment for me when we realized that, like, this is working!” Powell said. “At any other school not doing this work, without this team supporting him, he probably wouldn’t be on track.”
MESA staff are already planning to refine their model for next year, including exploring more academic intervention time in core subjects, and are in conversation with Mapleton’s administration about replicating their model with other district schools.
“We’ve built something that works,” Powell said.
“Now it’s time to make sure every ninth grader in our district has that same opportunity to succeed.”
