Pioneer’s beautiful garden was made
possible by Bryce Winton Brown and the
Growe Foundation.
INTRODUCTION
Escuela Bilingüe Pioneer, an elementary school in
the Boulder Valley School District, is a duallanguage immersion school. Approximately 50
percent of Pioneer’s students come from families
where the primary language is Spanish, says
Principal Kristin Nelson-Steinhoff. And although
Pioneer had established itself as one of the leading
models for bilingual education in Colorado, the
staff and community saw the need for change.
“About half of our kids were doing really great and
about half weren’t,” Nelson-Steinhoff says. “We had
become somewhat stagnant when it came to
growing and learning.”
As the staff began examining the root cause of this
circumstance, Nelson-Steinhoff kept hearing a
recurring theme: not enough time in the school day.
All staff agreed that there wasn’t enough time
during the day to work with students, and too much
time was wasted during nonlearning moments. To
better enable student learning and for help in
redesigning its school day, Pioneer joined the
TIME Collaborative.
1
Snapshot of pioneer:
an expanded learning School (2014)
1
473
42%
Total students
Students receiving
free lunch
42%
English language
learners
1 . Student Demographics, Escuela Bilingüe Pioneer, Boulder Valley
School District, 2014. Available at
http://www.bvsd.org/elementary/pioneer/Pages/demographics.aspx.