Purposeful Paths: Rocky Mountain Magic
I spent over a decade building schools in Denver. An unfair advantage is that Colorado has a decades-long habit of working collaboratively, across aisles, to try to solve real problems.
Over the last three years, Career Advance Colorado made community college free in high-demand fields. Opportunity Now put roughly $82 million into regional workforce partnerships. Apprenticeship Colorado became a state apprenticeship agency and registered more than 100 new programs in a single year. The Homegrown Talent Initiative started as an eight-district rural pilot and now reaches around 60 districts. The class of 2025 posted the highest graduation rate in state history and the lowest dropout rate on record.
Then, last year, SB 25-315 set a goal that by the class of 2029, every graduate leaves high school with at least one of three things: 12 college credits, an industry-recognized credential, or a real work-based learning experience. Colorado calls it the Big Three. Right behind it, HB26-1317 began folding the state's workforce and labor programs into a renamed Department of Higher Education, with a transition plan due this November and the new agency standing up around 2028, under a governor who has not been elected yet.
A lot is going on, and it's not clear yet what it will look like once we move into implementation.
Which brings me to the two people I want to ask about it.
Scott Laband has been leading education reform efforts, representing the employer side of this for fifteen years at Colorado Succeeds. Nella García Urban runs DSST Public Schools, an organization that has been quietly doing the version of this that works since 2004. Sixteen schools. More than 7,500 students. Seventy percent of the Class of 2025 are first-generation college students, and every one of them is admitted to a postsecondary path. A 2024 Bain study found DSST alumni earn an average of $62,000 against $50,000 for peers at comparable networks, and that 76% earn a living wage for their region against 59% of peers.
DSST is the proof that this is possible. The state is the test of whether it's possible at scale.
Join us to discuss:
The Big Three sounds clean on paper. What actually counts as an industry-recognized credential, or as high-quality work-based learning, and who gets to decide?
Between 2018 and 2024, Colorado averaged one high-school-accessible internship posting for every 27 graduates. Who is accountable for creating the seats? Districts cannot manufacture employers.
DSST has been at this for two decades. What is genuinely replicable at a comprehensive or rural high school without DSST's culture, staffing, and philanthropic support?
About 45,000 Colorado high schoolers are already working, and almost none of it counts toward anything. What would it take to turn that into credit, skill, and evidence?
Hispanic students are 36% of Colorado's young adult population and 7% of its interns. Only 11% of work-based learning sits outside the major metros. As this scales, how do we make sure it closes gaps instead of reproducing tracking?
Career Advance, Opportunity Now, and Homegrown Talent all leaned on one-time federal and philanthropic dollars. What survives when that money is gone?
Who this is for: career, college, and guidance counselors. High school and district leaders. College access and workforce nonprofit leaders. State and regional policy leaders. Employers weighing whether to host high school students.
Scott Laband is President and CEO of Colorado Succeeds, a nonpartisan coalition of business leaders working on Colorado's education and workforce systems. He built the Homegrown Talent Initiative and the Education to Employment Alliance, founded the FutureRise Fund, and sits on Governor Polis's Task Force on Student Success and Workforce Revitalization. He was a founding board member of Rocky Mountain Prep and Third Future Schools. He is a proud Colorado native.
Nella García Urban is CEO of DSST Public Schools, which she has led since 2024 following Bill Kurtz's twenty years at the helm. Before Denver she spent two decades at YES Prep Public Schools in Houston, most recently as chief external officer. Nella is a proud Texan.
Bring your hard questions. This group usually has better ones than I do.