Holden's Vision for Community Work Lives on Through Scholarship Work Day

TIM O’KEEFE

This year during Scholarship Work Day, students, faculty and parent volunteers engaged in projects the improve the local community: building trails on local open spaces, improving public parks, or serving local organizations, businesses and residences. On one project, students built mountain biking trails at Colorado Mountain College in Spring Valley. These trails will become part of the Colorado state mountain biking championship course that CMC will host starting this fall, bringing hundreds of high school competitors from all over the state.

The $16,675 raised during this year’s event helps make the CRMS experience possible for the 49% of students who received scholarships and/or financial aid this year. Since 1987, Scholarship Work Day has raised almost half a million dollars to support student scholarships and financial aid. Since it’s inception, literally thousands of students have benefitted including a young Kenyan named John Murugi.

In the early 1960s, Murungi wrote a letter to founder and then current Head of School, John Holden saying, I want to attend Colorado Rocky Mountain School. I have funds for tuition but not airfare to travel to Colorado.

Holden passed this information along to students, who, when they heard of the young man’s predicament, set out doing what they knew to do: use their hands to work and raise funds to buy a plane ticket. That ticket allowed Murungi the opportunity to attend Colorado Rocky Mountain School and go on to become a professor at Towson University in Maryland for decades.

The spirit of work and community service has long defined the CRMS experience as early students build dormitories, refurbished the Barn into classrooms, and worked the ranch providing food for the school. As John Holden notes in a 1982 memoire, “Through the years the work experience has been a vital part of each student’s education [at CRMS]... A good many alumni will tell you that the work is the most memorable part of their experience here.” Today, students contribute to their community as they take part in household jobs, service crews, ranch work, and all-school service days such as Scholarship Work Day.

A special thank you to the 2022 Scholarship Work Day sponsors and supporters who generously made gifts to the CRMS Scholarship program for this historic event.