Dawson School

Every day our Dawson School community demonstrates a lot of pride: From our kindergarteners to our 12th graders, we work, strive, play, and create, so we can live up to our commitment to be the best school in Boulder. It takes all of us at school and parents, too, to make this community the best it can be. Dawson School challenges its students to achieve excellence of mind, body, and character through a rigorous college-preparatory program.

Dawson graduates are young men and women who achieve their individual potential, savor life, and meet the challenges of the world. Dawson is committed to the development of character. To facilitate the work of the community in this area, Dawson has adopted four virtues as points of emphasis: respect, compassion, courage, and integrity.

• RESPECT is defined as a sense of the worth of a person, a personal quality or ability, or the manifestation of a personal quality or ability.
• COMPASSION is the humane quality of understanding the trials, challenges, and suffering of others and the desire to do something about it.
• COURAGE is the quality of mind that enables an individual to face difficulty while overcoming apprehension or fear.
• INTEGRITY is a commitment to a set of core virtues, both personal and communal, and the self-respect that comes from doing the right thing, being honest, and being ethical.

Dawson is an exceptional place where students are recognized as individuals and valued for their distinct personalities and abilities. Students not only prepare for college here – they prepare for life. They gain invaluable skills and insights through authentic learning. They grow creatively, socially, in character, and in intellect. Dawson stokes their curiosity and shows them how to satisfy it. They discover ways to uncover answers, to cherish and support the world around them, and to find new ways to view it. They learn to live with integrity, passion, and genuine joy; to be themselves and to do their best.

Education is not a spectator sport, so Dawson makes sure students participate directly in their learning. Your kids are going to get their hands dirty here,” one faculty member explains. Our students use their muscles, their minds, and all of their senses to learn about the world around them. They travel, investigate, and come to fully appreciate countless aspects of nature, culture, history, science, language, and more.

It begins in kindergarten with regular field trips and progresses to overnight trips and then week-long class trips in Middle and Upper School. An overnight Lower School excursion might be to the Denver Zoo where students use night-vision goggles to observe animals in the dark, or to the Plains Conservation Center, where they spend two days livings as Native Americans and pioneers did years ago.

Our all-school Winterim program is a week when students engage in special thematic learning programs, both on and away from campus, depending on grade level. By seventh grade, a student’s Winterim experience might well take pace outside of the country. These experiences are a key way that Dawson fulfills the vision it has for its students: that our graduates are young men and women who achieve their individual potential, savor life, and meet the challenges of the world.

Dawson actively promotes and embraces the exchange of diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds through curricular design, community involvement, and the integration of our four virtues - respect, compassion, courage, and integrity - into every aspect of our community life. It is our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive learning environment for all members of our community, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, ability, or religion, as well as to cultivate in each student the ability to make empathetic, socially responsible decisions.

The Equity and Inclusion Group facilitates programs to offer support for faculty/staff, parents, and students to build skills, support one another, and have open dialogue around how to continually improve the culture and climate at Dawson. We are committed to creating and sustaining multiple avenues to advance this work. Dawson is committed to enhancing diversity and inclusivity within the community by creating an environment of appreciation and respect for the uniqueness of every member of our school. The mission of this committee is to create and facilitate school-based programs and support students and their families from all divisions.