Few places in Colorado are growing as fast as the communities served by 27J Schools. Families continue to move into Commerce City and the surrounding Front Range, and the district has worked to expand alongside that growth. When voters approved the 2021 bond program, they supported the construction of new schools and facilities designed to meet the needs of a rapidly growing student population. Rocky Vista High School is the final and fourth comprehensive high school delivered through the initiative, representing a major milestone in the district's long-term plan to serve the region's expanding communities.
Rising at 17655 E. 96th Avenue, Rocky Vista has come together quickly. After just over a year of construction, the campus is moving steadily toward its planned opening in fall 2027, when it will welcome up to 1,800 students. The design reflects how students actually learn and grow today: modern, flexible learning spaces, robust Career and Technical Education (CTE) and STEM programming that opens real career pathways, dedicated performing arts facilities, and a full slate of outdoor athletic venues, including a stadium, courts, and multi-use fields. It is a generational investment, a school built not just for the students who will fill its halls in 2027 but for the families and neighborhoods of Commerce City for decades to come.
Bringing a project like this to life depends on the people building it, and 27J Schools brought together partners with deep roots in Colorado education. To lead construction, the district selected Adolfson & Peterson Construction, a builder consistently ranked among the top construction managers and general contractors in the nation and known for a strong safety record. Family-owned and operating across Colorado, Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, and Wyoming, AP has built its K-12 practice around environments that are safe, student-centered, and delivered with minimal disruption to the school day and the surrounding community.
AP's recent Colorado work shows exactly why the firm was a natural fit for Rocky Vista. The company served on the design-build team that delivered Roosevelt High School in Johnstown, a 230,000-square-foot campus for 1,300 students built around CTE pathways in health and justice, skilled trades and agriculture, engineering and technology, and hospitality and business. That project earned a 2024 ENR Mountain States Award of Merit and a 2024 DBIA Rocky Mountain Region Award of Distinction. AP's Colorado education portfolio also includes the Castle View High School addition in Castle Rock, the Bollman Technical School renovations in Adams 12, and work for Westminster Public Schools, a track record of delivering exactly the kind of comprehensive, career-focused high school that Rocky Vista is designed to be.
Shaping the design is Hord Coplan Macht, a Denver-based architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and interior design firm with a long history of creating learning environments across Colorado. The firm's education work is grounded in how spaces support students, from the renovation of Arvada High School, where redesigned circulation created intimate breakout areas for study and collaboration alongside bold environmental graphics drawn from local nature, to projects for Englewood Schools, Weld County School District RE-8 in Fort Lupton, and the Dawson School in Lafayette. That sensibility, designing buildings around the daily life of students and their communities, runs through every space taking shape at Rocky Vista.
Construction mobilized in spring 2025, and the team has steadily hit the milestones that mark a major build, including a topping out ceremony celebrating the placement of the building's final structural steel. But building a school inside a growing, active neighborhood carries a responsibility beyond the fence line. A site this size generates relentless daily traffic, with excavation, concrete, structural steel, masonry, and a constant stream of deliveries moving heavy vehicles in and out from dawn to dusk. Each of those vehicles can carry mud and sediment onto the public roads that residents use every day, which is both a neighborhood concern and a regulatory one under the area's Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) requirements. Colorado's Front Range adds its own challenges, with freeze-thaw cycles, snowmelt, and clay-heavy soils that turn sticky and muddy fast. For a team committed to being a good neighbor throughout construction, keeping the surrounding streets clean was not an afterthought. It was part of the job.
To honor that commitment while managing construction trackout cleanly and cost-effectively across a multi-phase project running into 2027, the team deployed the FODS Trackout Control System at the site's construction entrances and exits. FODS mats are modular 12' wide by 7' long sections engineered with rows of pyramids that flex the tires and dislodge mud, dirt, and debris as vehicles roll across, capturing sediment before it ever reaches public roads. The system installs fast and is built from durable, 100% recyclable HDPE that holds up through the toughest conditions.
The fit for a project like Rocky Vista is clear. FODS has been third-party tested to reduce trackout up to 59% more effectively than traditional gravel and aggregate entrances. Because it is rockless by design, with no loose aggregate to migrate onto adjacent roadways, it eliminates a common source of secondary trackout and keeps the public right-of-way and storm drains cleaner for the surrounding neighborhood. The mats are reusable across every phase, so rather than rebuilding rock entrances as the site evolves, the crew simply relocates and reuses them as access points change, saving time, labor, and the cost and traffic of repeated aggregate deliveries. Compared to traditional aggregate entrances, the reusable system reduces ongoing maintenance requirements and eliminates the need for repeated stone replacement throughout the project. There is a local connection, too: FODS is headquartered in Centennial, Colorado, a Colorado solution helping build a Colorado school.
As Rocky Vista High School moves from structural steel toward its fall 2027 opening, the work of the full team continues to advance the vision behind the 2021 bond initiative. When the doors open and up to 1,800 students walk into their new CTE labs, performing arts spaces, and stadium, they will enter a school built thoughtfully, safely, and with respect for the community around it, by partners who understand that delivering a great school means caring for the neighborhood it serves every single day of construction.
