With a growing focus on career-readiness classes, these Summit High and Snowy Peaks graduates say they’re ready for what’s next
Class of 2024 graduates say they’ve benefited from a host of non-traditional classes during their time at Summit School District, where educators are continuing to emphasize career-readiness programs

Summit School District/Courtesy photos
For Summit School District’s 2024 graduates, high school was a lot more than just sitting at a desk.
Amid an evolving workforce landscape, where trade jobs are in demand and new fields like artificial intelligence are on the rise, local educators are responding with a growing emphasis on hands-on learning that they say will provide a multitude of career pathways.
As students at Summit High School and Snowy Peaks High School, this year’s graduates have taken on a bevy of projects from building a boat from scratch to shadowing doctors and nurses in hospital rooms.
Here’s what five graduates have to say about time in high school — and how it prepared them for what comes next.
Lily D’Onofrio, Summit High School
Lily D’Onofrio has always had a love for nature.
“Growing up here, you’re constantly outdoors,” D’Onofrio said. “You’re constantly skiing, fishing, mountain biking — just really enjoying the nature that surrounds us.”
Over the past years, D’Onofrio has become more attuned to changes in her environment, from snowfall to mining waste leaching into rivers.
“It just makes me want to protect the nature that surrounds us,” she said.
As a senior at Summit High School, D’Onofrio took an environmental science class that bolstered her passion for environmental advocacy. The class offered a new way to interact with the county’s watershed, with D’Onofrio taking samples of the Blue River to test pH and oxygen levels, identifying different bug species in the river and touring the water treatment plant that neighbors the high school.
“They walked us through the whole cycle of water treatment and how we’re trying to turn it into a cyclical thing where we can keep maintaining the same water that we have to its level of purity,” she said.
With the class offering credit through Colorado Mountain College, D’Onofrio will be entering college with additional credit when she attends the University of Vermont for environmental law this fall.
“It really helped to prepare me for what I’m going to be doing in my future,” D’Onofrio said. “I’m going to be taking courses on climate change and on water testing and on agricultural protection. It was the perfect starter course.”
And another college-credit class, one where D’Onofrio learned to make her own skis, will serve her in college in its own way.
“I’ve learned all these super interesting skills that I know I’ll be taking with me to Vermont — especially edge tuning with how icy it is out there,” she said.
Brooke Wagner, Summit High School
Brooke Wagner sees the world of artificial intelligence as full of possibility.
“You can use AI for a lot of different things,” said Wagner, who hopes to use it to specialize in business analysis.
At Summit High, Wagner took an Advanced Placement Program computer science class her sophomore year that she says gave her the basis for coding she’ll need in college and beyond. Another class on engineering and technology that year also challenged her analytic thinking skills — but in a different way.
“You pick a project for the whole year, and I created clothes,” Wagner said.
Wagner said she sticked together small patches of fabric to make skirts, shirts and pants, documenting her design and creation process in a journal. While Wager was interested in fashion design at the time, she said she’s since shifted towards “the business side of things.”
Still, the course proved to be valuable for Wagner’s future ambitions in the tech world.
When she attends the Colorado School of Mines for business engineering and science management later this year, Wagner will be taking classes “where you have to build a project to solve a world problem,” adding that her time at Summit High helped hone her problem-solving skills.
Wagner is also looking forward to joining Mines’ cheer team after becoming one of the inaugural cheerleaders at Summit High, which formed its first team during her junior year.
“I’m just so thankful to my coaches … for making that possible,” Wagner said.

Doussouba Sylla, Summit High School
Born in Summit County, Doussouba Sylla spent several years of her early childhood living in Mali, Africa, where she lived with family members before returning to Colorado.
“I’ve seen what happens when there’s not very good access to health care,” Sylla said. “Being in all the health sciences classes in Summit (High School), I’ve had teachers who are super, super passionate about health sciences and medicine, and I feel that has added on to how much I like providing care.”
Since sophomore year, Sylla has taken medical classes that have provided hands-on learning with the added bonus of college credit.
For an emergency response class her junior year, Sylla took part in ambulance rides and heard talks from health care workers. A different class this year allowed Sylla to shadow doctors and nurses at a nursing home in Evergreen and at St. Anthony Summit Hospital in Frisco.
“We were literally in the room while doctors were operating on people,” Sylla said. “They even told me how to read a CT scan.”
The hours Sylla spent at the hospital will also go toward gaining her certified nursing assistant certification this summer.
While Sylla said she’s enjoyed the experiential learning of her classes, what’s been most inspiring is the passion of her teachers.
“I like being in those classrooms because everyone is so passionate about health care, about what they’re teaching,” she said.
Sylla’s aunt is a pharmaceutical assistant in West Africa, and Sylla hopes to use her education to follow in similar footsteps by expanding access to medicine both in Africa and the U.S. She plans to attend the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis for college basketball with a pre-med track in pharmaceutical sciences.
Izzy Esposito, Snowy Peaks
School wasn’t always easy for Izzy Esposito.
“Before I came to Snowy (Peaks High School) I had a very rough time in school,” Esposito said. “I wasn’t happy with where I was. But when I got to Snowy and met these absolutely amazing teachers and people, I realized how much of an influence a teacher can have on a student’s life.”
Now, Esposito wants to be that figure in another student’s life by becoming a general education teacher for elementary schoolers.
At Snowy Peaks, Esposito has looked for ways to advance her educational skills. This school year, she worked with her former eighth-grade science teacher as a teaching assistant, shadowing her in the classroom and helping with student questions and conflict resolution.
“The biggest thing that I learned is students have a vision in mind and to let them do that vision,” Esposito said. “Rather than trying to change what they’re doing, just help them, because a lot of times they have a great idea.”
Through taking college-level classes through the school district’s partnership with Colorado Mountain College, Esposito said she’s gained a broad appreciation for and experience with a host of general education topics, including biology and English.
One of the most unique, however, was a class on multicultural education.
“We got to look into a lot of different types of education that you don’t normally get to think of when you think about being a teacher,” Esposito said, adding that the class focused on “how a student’s background and upbringing affects how they view school and how, as teachers, you can support students.”
Later this year, Esposito will attend Endicott College near Boston where she plans to pursue a teaching degree and eventually teach at the elementary school level.

Joss Quarantillo, Snowy Peaks
Joss Quarantillo has always been a hands-on learner.
Since starting at Snowy Peaks, Quarantillo has taken a project-based learning class. For three of those years, he worked on the same project: building a 13-foot-long boat virtually from scratch.
“It was really challenging because I had never really taken on a project like that,” Quarantillo said. “But, you’re able to learn so many things from building from nothing.”
Starting with an empty hull, Quarantillo worked with another student to build a usable wooden boat inspired by his love for sail racing on the Dillon Reservoir during the summer. For him, the project was a lesson in building something that will last.
Quarantillo hopes to carry that lesson with him when he attends WyoTech, a trade school in Laramie, Wyoming, in the fall. There, Quarantillo wants to learn to be a mechanic, specifically specializing in diesel engines. Eventually, he’d like to run his own car repair business, he said.
“I’ve always just thought it’s cool to work on stuff and fix something that is broken,” Quarantillo said. “When I learned about WyoTech, it checked all the boxes for teaching me about the fine details and how everything makes another thing work.”
Reflecting on his time at Snowy Peaks, Quarantillo said, “They give you what you need.
“You have a lot more control over what you’re doing in classes,” he said. “I think it helps you have a better idea of what you want to do outside of high school and what you need to do in order to be successful.”

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