Kent Denver School
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kent Denver School is a private, co-educational, non-sectarian college preparatory high school in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado. It traces its origin back to the 1922 founding of the Kent School for Girls, and has existed as a co-educational institution since 1974.
[edit] History
The Kent School for Girls was founded by Mary Austin Bogue, Mary Louise Rathvon and Mary Kent Wallace on Sherman Street in Denver in 1922. The Denver Country Day School, an all-mens high school, was founded by Andrews D. Black and Tom Chaffee in 1953, and the two schools relocated to the spacious Blackmer Estate in Cherry Hills Village in the 1960s. The schools operated side-by-side and with joint science classes until they merged at the behest of Andrews Black in 1974. Since then the school has been known as Kent Denver Country Day School, a name that continues to be seen on old athletic jerseys, and its current name, The Kent Denver School.
[edit] Campus
Kent Denver is located on the historic Blackmer Estate at Colorado Boulevard and Quincy Avenue in Cherry Hills Village, one of the wealthiest communities in Colorado. The campus is a picturesque 200 acres, centered around two lakes and bordered by the Highline Canal. The campus houses 43 classrooms in four main building complexes. The old girls school is now the middle school, housing grades 6 through 8 at the bottom of what is simply known as "The Hill". Likewise, the upper school, grades 9 through 12, are housed in the old boys' school.
Most student life is centered around the Bogue Common Room, formerly a courtyard that was walled in to create a meeting place for the upper school. Until the recent completion of the Student Center for the Arts, most all-upper-school meetings took place here. Adjacent to the common room and the main upper school hallway is the Boettcher Foundation Library, which contains over 20,000 titles and two dozen computer workstations.
Science classes were held from before the merger to 2001 in the Gates Science Center, situated between the library and the middle school. A significant renovation that year connected the library with the Science Center (known to students simply as "Gates") with new classroom, laboratory and office space. The new building also houses a sundial tower.
The theatre, music and visual arts departments recently relocated to the Student Center for the Arts, completed in 2006, which houses the 500-seat Anschutz Family Theatre. This is intended to replace the El Pomar Hall, which as a converted dining hall was woefully inadequate as a performance space.
