Welcome to Glenwood Springs High School (GSHS), an oversubscribed high school serving students in grades 9 through 12.

The Roaring Fork School District’s mission statement reads as follows. Roaring Fork schools will ensure that every student develops the enduring knowledge, skills and character to thrive in a changing world. We enthusiastically subscribe to this mission and we supplement it with our own mantra that encapsulates the purpose of GSHS: Changing Students’ Real-Life Chances. Our intention is that as a result of attending this school, the life trajectory of every student will dramatically improve.

What does that mean in practice? Preeminently it means that we seek to educate every student to the level that will gain him or her admission to college. Much of the chatter we hear today is about whether college is worth it, in anecdotes about unemployed graduates and student debt. But anecdotes are not data and the evidence is unambiguous. Data from 2013 reveal that those with a four-year college degree made 98 percent more an hour on average than those without a degree, a difference that has only increased since the 1980s when the difference was 64%. This reflects the demand that an advanced technological society has for educated and agile brains and the decreasing dem

As MIT economist David Autor puts it, If you had to give a person a single piece of economic advice… It would be: Go get a college education at a decent school.

To put a dollar value on it, a four-year college degree is worth about $500,000.

Of course we recognize that there are equivalents to a college education arrived at by other routes. Each year we send students to learn to be diesel mechanics, electricians, HVAC technicians and so on. These are splendid careers and of course make demands on the mind as well as the hands.

Ultimately if a student who is able to go to college chooses not to, that is very different from a student who is unable to go to college because they would not be admitted. We want all of our students to have the choice.

The intensity with which we pursue academic excellence, however, is matched by our commitment to building student character, promoting healthy physical activity and camaraderie through athletics, and in our passion for the arts.

We offer the only Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps on the Western
Slope. Our Mock Trial team has won the State Championship multiple times. There
are numerous clubs and societies. In short there is a niche for every interest.

In partnership with parents and our mountain community we promote the education of our students in the fullest sense of the word.

Paul Freeman

Principal