Ingenuity excels at the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus. But what is the program?

All students at Creek understand the school’s daily setup. Eight periods of desk-based learning, notes, lectures, tests, and quizzes.

But at the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus, students are in more hands-on, future career based settings. The school is designed to allow students to fully immerse themselves in whatever they choose to study, and help them learn techniques, receive certifications, and more things that will help them on their path to a career, trade school, or college.

“I think it’s really important to understand that for a long time, we were all about college. Schools were college, college, college,” CCIC Principal Steve Day said. “And the dynamics of employment have shifted significantly…nowadays there’s so many careers as a mechanic, there’s so many careers in machining, there’s so many careers in healthcare, where the college degree is either not important or less important.”

Other administrators, like Career & Technical Education administrator Lawson Miller, who works to organize programs like those in CCIC, agreed with Day’s sentiments.

“A student could come to the CCIC, take a construction class, get a certification credential, start working for a company in the construction industry and do one of two things with that,” Miller said. “They can start their career right then and there, or they can be working part time while they’re putting themselves through school.”

CCIC is organized in a vastly different way than Creek is. Each day is organized into an afternoon and a morning session, and then days where students attend classes alternate. Inevitably, this means that students alternate days of attendance, and either attend CCIC classes in the morning or afternoon, and continue learning at their original high school when done at CCIC.

Students who attend CCIC often find this schedule to be extremely effective. “I go to my home school on my B days, and for half the time I’m here during my A days,” Eaglecrest culinary student Jon King said. “It’s really good to build my exploration on my pathway to purpose and [build] what I’m really trying to do as a career later in life.”

Across the district, students in grades 10-12 can apply to CCIC through an online portal that opens in the spring. Not every student is accepted, not because of grades, but because there are too many students interested in CCIC. Most years, the school sees around 300 students on the wait list.

When students apply to CCIC, they’re able to select one of seven pathways that the school currently offers. (See next page for new course updates.) Within the building, students can take courses in the Aerospace Manufacturing, Criminal Justice, Health & Wellness, Infrastructure Engineering, Transportation, Business Services, Future Educator, Hospitality & Tourism, and IT & STEAM pathways.

For students, the fact that there are multiple pathways that have students in them from across the district allows them to find friends who have similar interests as them. “We are all about choice. Our students will describe that they love the fact that now they’re making friends from Eaglecrest, even though they’re from Creek,” Day said.

What does the future hold for CCIC?

Over the course of its life, the CCIC program has seen extreme success, but also extreme demand.
Each year, there’s an application open for students to apply for, but it’s highly selective, and the school only offers its current seven pathways. But in the coming years, the program is about to change.

“The positive part is, there’s so much interest,” CCIC Principal Steve Day said. “The positive part is this allows us to expand. We’re going to double the size of the building in the next 18 months, and all sorts of different pathways.”

After the 2024 Mill & Bond Election in November, the CCIC campus was granted 100 million dollars to expand its campus, and introduce nine new pathways: Veterinary Medicine, Welding, Heating and Air Conditioning, Film and Motion Design, Aerospace Engineering, Advanced Electronics, Baking and Pastries, Emergency Medical Technicians, and an expansion of the existing Auto Mechanics and Manufacturing program.

For many students, this expansion provides new opportunities to study the subjects they love, outside of a standard school setting. Applications for the 2025-26 school year are already open, and closed on Feb. 28, but students can apply to the nine new pathways in the spring of 2026.

“I’m interested in doing the veterinary program because I’ve always loved animals and always wanted to be a vet, so if being a nurse doesn’t work out I have a backup plan,” junior J Ryan said. “Even the baking program looks cool, [because] I can’t even bake a cookie without burning it.”

The new pathways offer a more focused view of study areas; things like aerospace engineering, emergency medicine, and baking. As programs tend towards specific career paths, more students can study niche subjects that have previously been touched upon in other pathways, something the school had been planning to do from the beginning.

“There are probably new pathways coming in [that] students would choose if they could,” Day said. “There are probably actually students who aren’t even applying now that will, because now we have these new pathways.”

Construction began in January, and the building will be open for students in August 2026, meaning that this years’ freshmen and sophomores will be able to attend the school. It will build off of the existing campus, adding two new wings to the building, which will open up new spaces for the new pathways’ classrooms, study spaces, a coffee shop, and more.

Planning began a while ago, as admin began to see what students would want from a larger school. “We spent the last two and a half years meeting with students, understanding what they would want to see,” Day said. “We met with teachers. We met with the industry.”

Day highlighted some of the newer additions going into the building, things like a student-run coffee shop, kennels for rescue dogs in the veterinary programs, and immersive 3D rooms.

“We’ll have a coffee shop, and that coffee shop is going to be cool, because it straddles the line between our building, between where the students are, and a large event center that our students will be running,” he said.

As the opening approaches, students are looking forward to the new areas the school will provide. “It’s important to have these opportunities through CCIC because the campus offers classes not offered at schools or at levels high schools couldn’t reach,” Ryan said. “They give each student a chance no matter their background or financial issues.”