The Hourglass

How students move through six years

Stoca electives follow an Hourglass Architecture: broad exposure early, a deliberate narrowing to one specialization, then a widening back out as a student combines that Major with a continuous skills Minor to become a distinctive, credentialed professional.

Exploratory Foundation (Grades 6-8) - Broadest exposure and foundation-building. Students build core mastery, a Tech Literacy Floor, and an emerging Science Identity, and sample all four sectors so later choices are informed.

Broad exposure: the Studios  (Grades 9 to 10) - Every student takes the same four interdisciplinary Studios that crash health, environment, finance, and civics together. These generate all foundational Science and Social Studies credits and satisfy Colorado's Civics and Holocaust and Genocide mandates.

The pinch: declare a Major  (end of Grade 10) - Informed by two full years of Studios, each student commits to one of three Career Majors. This is the one hard commitment in the model.

Deep specialization: the Majors  (Grades 11 to 12) - Intense, career-connected coursework in the chosen sector, culminating in a Senior Capstone the student defends to industry partners, city officials, and community leaders.

Majors

  • Epidemiology, bioethics, and public-health systems design. Partners such as CU Anschutz and UCHealth. Capstone: a defended public-health intervention plan.

  • GIS spatial mapping, climate data modeling, and sustainable infrastructure. Partners such as CDOT and environmental agencies. Capstone: a zoning redesign or infrastructure prototype. 

  • Financial modeling, venture architecture, and community wealth-building. Partners such as local business chambers and FinTech firms. Capstone: a defended business or community land-trust model. 

Minors

  • Digital fabrication, generative AI, data engineering, and cloud architecture. Targets: IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, Google AI Essentials, IBM Data Foundations, AWS Cloud Practitioner.

  • Asset-based language, technical localization, and restorative mediation across cultures. Targets: the Colorado Seal of Biliteracy (heritage speakers) or a Cross-Cultural Leadership credential (non-heritage speakers). 

  • Strengths-based team leadership, restorative circle facilitation, and municipal governance, grounded in T.R.U.S.T. Targets: Gallup CliftonStrengths, a Civic Leadership and Governance badge.

  • Agile frameworks, workflow automation, ledger management, and risk underwriting. Targets: PMI Project Management Ready, Intuit QuickBooks Certified User. 

The result is intersectional.  By combining a declared Major with a continuous Minor, Stoca Academy graduates enter the workforce with a highly customized, intersectional skillset. A student who majors in Environmental Ecology and minors in Applied Linguistics graduates as a fully credentialed, bilingual environmental advocate. A student who majors in Economics and minors in Technology graduates as a data-driven financial modeler. This Hourglass Architecture ensures our graduates are not merely college-eligible; they are comprehensively equipped to operate as highly skilled "Founding Architects" in a complex global economy.

Phase 1: Interdisciplinary Studios (9th and 10th)

During their freshman and sophomore years, students do not take siloed, single-subject electives. They participate in "Interdisciplinary Studios" designed to intentionally crash multiple industry sectors together. The pedagogical goal of Phase 1 is maximum exposure and the explicit instruction of "cognitive transfer"—teaching students how to apply data from one sector to solve problems in another.

Representative Interdisciplinary Studios include:

  • The Industrial Health Nexus (Healthcare + Environment): Students map Commerce City’s environmental data (e.g., air quality and industrial zoning) directly to localized respiratory and public health outcomes, learning that human biology is inextricably linked to municipal engineering.

  • The Economics of Well-being (Healthcare + Economics): Students audit the financial structures of regional healthcare systems, examining how zip codes, insurance algorithms, and neighborhood wealth distribution determine life expectancy and medical access.

  • Sustainable Urban Finance (Environment + Economics): Students analyze the financial incentives behind municipal zoning, auditing the operational costs of greening industrial supply chains and calculating the localized economic impact of climate-resilient infrastructure.

Phase 2: The Specialization Clinics/Majors (11th and 12th)

At the conclusion of their sophomore year, having gained a holistic understanding of how these systemic challenges intersect, students formally declare a Career Major. In their junior and senior years, their elective blocks narrow into intense, specialized coursework that culminates in their state-recognized PWR Capstone project.

Students select from one of three Majors to build deep, industry-specific context:

  1. Healthcare & Bio-Systems: Advanced coursework in bioethics, epidemiology, and medical systems design, preparing students to advocate for public health access.

  2. Environmental & Urban Ecology: Advanced coursework in GIS spatial mapping, climate data analysis, and sustainable architectural prototyping.

  3. Economics & Community Wealth: Advanced coursework in financial modeling, private liability tracking, venture pitching, and local resource allocation.

Stoca Middle School: The Exploratory Foundation

Stoca defines the middle school by its outputs and guardrails, not by a prescribed course of study. This is deliberate. The founding middle-school principal will design the specific sequence, schedule, and pedagogy that carry students to these outputs, in the same steward model the school uses for leadership succession: Stoca specifies the destination, and the principal designs the route. This protects the principal's professional space while giving the authorizer a clear, accountable definition of what the middle school must produce.

Know

(Academic Readiness)

Grade-level or accelerating mastery in Mathematics and English Language Arts, delivered through the same mastery-based model and 90% mastery floor used in the high school, as dedicated daily courses. Foundational scientific sensemaking and data literacy. An age-appropriate Tech Literacy Floor: using digital and AI tools, questioning their outputs, and beginning to build with them under the T.R.U.S.T. standard.

Be

(Identity and

Character)

An emerging Science Identity across the four dimensions that anchor the Graduate Profile (Fascination, Competency Beliefs, Values, and Scientific Sensemaking). Middle school is where academic identity forms, which is why reaching students at these grades is central to the school's thesis, not incidental to it. The school's values and Science Mindsets, practiced at an age-appropriate level, and grounded in the restorative, Mentor-mindset culture

Prepared

(Transition Readiness)

Informed exposure to all four sectors (Human, Planetary, and Economic Health, and their intersections) through exploratory experiences, so that the 9–10 Studios and the end-of-10 Major declaration are informed choices rather than blind ones. Practiced habits of publicly defending work, a middle-school analogue to the high school's Application Finals. Sampling of the Minor skill tracks so that Minor selection in high school is informed.