Cherry Creek Innovation Campus (CCIC) is widely considered a state of the art facility in education. It has provided students useful and prestigious levels of education typically not offered in high school curriculum. It offers 24 different career opportunities with certificates that can be applied to  the real world. As of this summer, a large expansion of CCIC will make this number 33.

Prior to the Campus opening up in 2019, Construction teacher Mike Degitus has been planning to expand because of the overwhelming amount of students interested in enrolling. 

“We fit about 2,000 students in this building, and we reached that almost immediately. When we first bought this property, we built on 20 out of the 40 acres that we owned, always with the intent of a future expansion,” Degitus said. 

New pathways added to CCIC are carefully chosen through hours of research and data surveyed from middle school students to measure the interest between each class and predicted labor demands across the next two decades to figure out which would be the most beneficial to the students of Colorado. Through student opinions film and media design pathways emerged as the most popular. 

 “If you ask middle schoolers today what programs they would want, they would tell you anything that would make them a social media influencer,” Degitus said. “So we shaped that into more of a media and design pathway with stop motion film, audio and visual editing, so while that doesn’t exactly make them a YouTube star, it pushes them in the direction of being a developer.” 

Whether you continue to follow the pathway you study at CCIC or not, every class teaches professional skills required for every job across the state. 

“Workforce readiness, professionalism, showing up on time, being dependable, and conflict resolution are all kinds of workplace skills right here outside of high school classrooms that our employers tell us over and over again that they want graduates these days to have,” Degitus said. 

Alongside these traditional basic skills taught at the campus, certificates and credentials are obtained to give a headstart for students getting into the workforce which can be used immediately after graduation. 

“Students in the welding program are gonna have their D11 certification, which is a structural welding search opening them up to multiple positions,” Degitus said. “Students in HVAC will get their EPA 608, which is gonna qualify them to handle certain types of refrigerant, which is like a non-negotiable, the bare necessity certifications that you need to go into those fields.

Demand for enrollment at CCIC has always been a challenge since the initial open has been a challenge and a burden to the campus’s principal Steve Days.

“It breaks my heart when we have 300 students on the wait list every year. I know while maybe some of them were just exploring; there could be students on the waitlist who know they want it as a career, and are hungry for it,” Days said. “And if they don’t get in here they don’t have an opportunity like that at their home high school.” 

This constant demand has pushed school leaders to start thinking beyond even what is being built now to another plot of land further out in later years. 

“We have one more lot that we could feasibly expand to on the other side of the 100 year floodplain. And so 3.0 will include maybe a bridge over to a new campus in the future,” Degitus said.