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Southwest Open Charter School enrolled total of 131 students in 2024-25 school year
Among the student body, 55.7% were boys and 44.3% were girls.
The most represented ethnicity among Southwest Open Charter School students was white, with 46.6% of students identifying as white.
The grade level with the highest enrollment was tenth grade, with 41 students enrolled that year, accounting for 31.3% of the total student body.
The school is located in Montezuma-Cortez School District No. Re-1, and has a central office in Cortez.
In total, there were 881,065 students enrolled in Colorado during the 2024-25 school year.
Colorado’s K–12 enrollment has gradually declined each year since the pandemic, with about 3–4% fewer students in 2024 than the state’s peak enrollment in 2019.
The declines are concentrated in the early grades and certain rural areas, while some metro districts are holding steady or growing. Lower birth rates and pandemic disruptions are driving the trend. Colorado’s public schools are now serving the smallest number of students in a decade, a shift that has implications for funding and planning even as per-pupil resources increase to compensate.
Colorado’s teacher workforce faces persistent shortages and pay challenges. In the 2023–24 school year, nearly 7,000 teaching positions were vacant statewide at some point. Districts managed to fill only about 75% of those openings with fully qualified hires, leaving many to be filled by short-term substitutes, retirees, or emergency credentials for the rest, while 9% remained unfilled for the entire school year.
| School | Total Enrollment |
|---|---|
| Montezuma-Cortez High School | 598 |
| Montezuma-Cortez Middle School | 505 |
| Mesa Elementary School | 359 |
| Kemper Elementary School | 339 |
| Southwest Open Charter School | 131 |
| Children's Kiva Montessori School | 130 |
| Lewis-Arriola Elementary School | 125 |
| Battle Rock Charter School | 94 |
| Beech Street Preschool | 70 |
| Pleasant View Elementary School | 35 |