2387 US Highway 34
Drake, CO 80515

The town is a very expensive place to live. As such, this school experiences high teacher turnover because teachers can not afford to live here or are forced to community 40+ minutes. Students perform below State averages. The community is anti school-choice and there has been resistance to bringing charter schools or other alternatives to the Estes Valley. My son attended Estes Park Elementary. We moved to give our children better educational opportunities.

Terrible school DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS GO HERE!

I was enrolled in the Estes Park School District until my 9th grade year, when the high school experience became unbearable. After my Freshman year, I found myself in an extremely poor mental state, which required therapy and lots of medication to get myself back to normal. This mental state was the result of my high school experience and included extreme academic pressure, anxiety, depression, and terrible teachers who do not care about your life after high school or how the academics apply to the real-world, but rather they treat their courses like academic competitions. Therefore, after seeing what only one year at the high school had down to me, I immediately enrolled in online school programs that would end up being the best choice I have made thus far in my life. So, to any parents or students considering the Estes Park School District, and specifically the high school (EPHS), I must warn you of the severe risks and consequences these schools pose to students, and I highly recommended entertaining the idea of online school programs before putting your children (or yourself) through this experience. I can assure that you (as a student) or your children will develop high stress levels and a rapid increase of anxiety, even if you or your children are not prone to such symptoms; metaphorically, this school is a prison, and is not a place of education and learning, but rather stripping a student of all their color. With this in mind, here are some points to my high school experience that must be noted: • Academics: Even though I have always excelled in academics, the high school puts unreasonable strain on students to complete an unrealistic amount of assignments that will never benefit them in the real-world. An example is the “Olympic Games” activity. To summarize, this “activity” was a rigged academic competition amongst groups of students where teachers were able to live out their strange fantasies. Not only that, but the activity was very intense, and the teachers would aggressively students to perform strange tasks that did not pertain to a realistic education. •Social Environment : The social environment at the high school is awful; both teachers and students bully and act “wild.” In fact, I had a teacher who engaged the class in making fun of me for wanting to leave the course due to its unreasonable workload. This is common behavior from most teachers. Students, on the other hand, have the freedom to do whatever they want to their peers.