A History of Telluride Academy By Founding Director Wendy Brooks

Telluride Academy began in Founding Director Wendy Brooks' backyard in 1980 as a daycare option for single working mothers. It was organized by Wendy's 8 year old son, Dylan, for him and his friends who all wanted to go to camp. The first week the five boys in the camp named their group Camp Telluride. Their main goal was to get out of town, so every day the counselors, Wendy Brooks, and her 12-year-old son, Demian, took the boys in the back of the family pickup truck to some nearby, fun place for the day. Tuition was $10 a week. The second year, there were more kids wanting to go to camp, and by the third year, Brooks rented two rooms and two 12 passenger vans from the Telluride School. A second group of kids, ages 4-6, were enrolled and their counselor was Donna Fitzpatrick, the local Montessori teacher.

In 1983, a dynamic new school superintendent Margaret Hatcher was hired and she wrote a grant to the Town of Telluride to fund an economic diversification project which supported enrichment education for the community via a Telluride Academy. With the $10,000 grant she received, she hired Brooks to work for the district to organize after-school programs, adult night school and summer programs for all ages. Camp Telluride was folded into the District's offerings. More than 100 people attended the new Telluride Academy programs in the summer of 1984;of those 37 attended adult fall classes. The Academy's goals were to diversify the limited curricular offerings of a small rural school district, to provide meaningful employment for a core of extraordinary local outdoor educators (winter ski instructors) and to offer safe affordable child care for parents who worked in the growing summer tourist industry.

During the winter of 1985, the Academy began expanding in a number of different directions. A Ski Academy was established in hopes of boosting revenues and enrollment in Telluride High School which, at that time, had only 37 students. Seven students, mostly second homeowners' children, attended the first 10-week winter Ski Academy program. They lived with host families, attended five hours of classes and four hours of ski lessons daily.

The Ski Academy ran for six successful winters, until the high school's enrollment reached a point where additional students were a burden, not a pleasure. A grant was written and funded to begin a satellite college campus in Telluride, via Western State College ; five classes began during the fall of 1986 and the "college" offered classes for three years, until grant funding was exhausted. The Academy partnered with the Telluride Baseball Camp, founded by local coach Doug Nurnberg and his friends from Phoenix, and administered this three week camp of 200 boys for 12 years. The Academy also partnered with the Telluride Jazz Festival to offer a summer Jazz Camp for more than 100 middle and high school musicians. This camp was based in Telluride for eight years before moving to Boulder.

The Academy also became the administrator for the Telluride Summer Research Center, a global think-tank of chemists and physicists who began meeting in Telluride for one or two week workshops during the summer. In the mid-80s the Telluride Schools already had a computer laboratory which was attractive to them. Participation in the TSRC programs grew from seven founding members to more than 250 by the time the Academy handed the TSRC administrative function over to the Pinhead Institute in 2002.

The Academy's summer offerings and total enrollment continued to grow each summer.

In 1987, the Academy first hired Sally Davis to begin a theater component for the Academy and hired Dee McAdams from the North Carolina Outward Bound School to begin a rock climbing program. Because rock climbing was considered so risky in those days, a supplemental insurance premium of $1,700 was added to the Academy's $2,900 annual premium!

Then, in 1989, the school board voted to discontinue Academy programs. After the state re-allocation of school tax funds, ski towns lost revenue and the district could no longer afford to underwrite enrichment programs. In 1990, the Telluride Academy, under the guidance of Erik Fallenius and Steven Gluckstern, became a 501c3 non-profit organization, and Wendy Brooks became executive director of the new non-profit. The school district rented rooms and vehicles to the organization so that services continued uninterrupted.

In the early 1990s, program diversification continued in earnest in an effort to retain older students and to help kids use the skill sets they acquired in their younger years. Camp Telluride fostered "Enrichment Camps" where camp veterans could study a particular subject during their Camp Telluride day.

Regional trips were initiated for the 8-14 year olds where camping and climbing skills were honed and new terrain was explored. Theater programs multiplied with the addition of Moving Mountain Theater and Circus Holus Bolus as well as introductory one week programs for the youngest thespians.

Enrollment grew as the second homeowner population in Telluride exploded and their children fell in love with camp. In 1990, there were more second homeowner children in camp than there were locals for the first time, and total enrollment topped 300 kids per summer. The staff grew as well, and the Academy became an organized and efficient local non-profit. Without the School Board as overseers, it was necessary to build a strong and cohesive Board of Directors and to create efficient operating policies.

Under the oversight of Gluckstern and Fallenius, this began to happen. The board grew to nine members by the mid-90s. The cost of operations soared once the Academy broke with the school district in the form of classrooms, vehicles, insurance, accounting and legal aid. Consequently, tuition was raised. At the same time, grants, fundraising events like Casino Night and a private donor solicitation drive were initiated to close the gap and to allow the Academy to begin offering financial aid to local students so that it did not become a camp full of out-of-town children to the exclusion of locals.

In 1990, the Academy's first international program began with a visit to Telluride by 17 Soviet baseball players and coaches. Inquiries for beginning a Soviet-American exchange were initiated through Stephen Rhinesmith, a Ski Academy parent who was Ronald Reagan's State Department director of Soviet Affairs. The Soviets would interact with us, he said, if we could offer them baseball, a new Olympic sport with which they were very unfamiliar. After hosting the Soviets in Telluride, the Academy went to the Soviet Union (later Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine after the break-up) for four summers. Lead by Wendy Brooks, coach Doug Nurnberg and translator/coordinator Leyla Wefalle, the Academy boys of summer broke new ground offering clinics for kids throughout the western republics of the old Soviet Union. In 1994, this program was discontinued due to graft, corruption and declining security in the republics.