Pueblo Bet Its Economic Future on Its Teachers

The first MindSpark training district leader Paula Herraez attended was free. She showed up, spent a day learning computer science alongside other Pueblo educators, and went home that night doing something she hadn't planned. She stayed up building her school's first Hour of Code family night. It happened that year. "I don't think I've ever felt that sparked before," she said.

That was in 2018.

The energy she created moved through the district. One Pueblo City Schools high school teacher who attended MindSpark training with Paula watched her computer science enrollment grow from 8 students to nearly 50. Her next goal is to offer Computer Science A as an International Baccalaureate course, a credential her school had never offered before she got there. Another educator's teaching license tells the whole story: you can see the exact year MindSpark showed up because that's where the technology and CTE endorsements begin.

Pueblo is Colorado's historic steel town, a community where 77% of students come from low-income households and 83.4% are students of color. When Colorado Fuel and Iron shuttered, the city's economic identity went with it. What replaced it hasn't come from outside — it's being built school by school, classroom by classroom, teacher by teacher.

Pueblo City Schools (District 60) and MindSpark Learning have been working together since 2018 across 30 schools, 170-plus educators, and more than 200 hours of professional development. What started with Sphero robots and Hour of Code events has grown into a districtwide AI policy, K-12 computer science scope and sequence, 24 CS lessons embedded into elementary math, and a cohort of teachers now designing their own AI training systems for the district. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report projects that 59% of workers will need reskilling in the next five years. Pueblo isn't waiting for that moment. They've been preparing for it since before the report existed.

None of this happened because a district bought a curriculum package. It happened because educators were treated as the architects of the work, not the recipients of it. Each year, MindSpark worked alongside district leaders, administrators, and educators to build on what came before, co-designing the next step rather than prescribing it: scaffolding computer science into core subjects, integrating AI into the tools teachers already use, and developing internal leaders who could train their peers. That compounding effect is what one-day professional development cannot produce.

The leader who stayed up planning her first family night now mentors other educators. The district that started with 11 schools now has a replicable model other communities are watching.

Sustained investment in educators doesn't just change classrooms. In Pueblo, it's changing what the next generation of this community believes is possible for them.