Molly Harrington, a skilled and passionate counselor, a deeply respected colleague and school leader, and a gifted, tireless advocate for D’Evelyn Jr/Sr High School and its students, was selected as the recipient of 2025 Excellence in Education Award.

Molly’s rich professional story below demonstrates how she serves and leads. She does so with a passion both for people (be they students, parents, or educators) and for the results which they achieve with the benefit of her passionate support of them. Molly embodies Excellence in Education by first listening to others’ stories, then helping them expand their ambitions, supporting them in setting steps and goals, and helping them find the tools and resilience to turn those ambitions into reality.

Molly has been and remains a key driver of the success of the school, one who both preserves D’Evelyn’s longstanding best practices and brings innovations that respond to the needs of students, families, and colleagues as they face evolving challenges amidst technological and societal and personnel change. In a school and department that is seeing increasing churn in staffing, Molly’s fearless and tireless service ensures that D’Evelyn remains truly exceptional: counselors, teachers, and administrators alike depend on her institutional knowledge, her leadership, and the valuable professional connections that she builds and maintains. Molly’s counseling work with the students alphabetically assigned to her is deft, responsive, compassionate, and thorough, but her dedication to schoolwide counseling initiatives benefits all students, their parents, and their teachers, as well.

Molly’s arrival at D’Evelyn in 2014 generated a remarkable upswing in the number, relevance, and effectiveness of opportunities for career and college readiness opportunities. Molly’s academic background (a B.A. in Classics) gives her foundational insight into the Liberal Arts at the heart of the D’Evelyn curriculum, and her years of work in the telecommunications industry gave her a keen awareness of employers’ priorities and the skills that graduates need for career success. Molly’s unique set of talents from both academia and business have added tremendous richness to D’Evelyn’s counseling program:

  • Upon coming to D’Evelyn, Molly instituted monthly lunchtime career exploration sessions open to all high-school students which, in each session, featured a D’Evelyn parent presenting about his or her experiences, challenges, and opportunities in professional life. Molly drew upon the richness of careers represented within our community so that students could learn from and ask questions of practitioners. The latter in turn shared experiences to help the former identify the sorts of preparation required and the skill sets most helpful in diverse career paths.
  • Molly strengthened ties between D’Evelyn’s counseling team and the admissions staff of universities by attending two National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) conferences. In the wake of Molly’s learning and outreach at these conferences, the number of college reps making visits to D’Evelyn skyrocketed, and awareness of D’Evelyn as a premier public school in Colorado elevated seniors’ profiles when they applied to highly selective universities.

Molly’s learning and networking at NACAC bore fruit in other ways: Molly instituted seminars for juniors so that they could be prepared to use summer before senior year to get a jump on admissions: the four-seminar sequence featured panels of D’Evelyn alumni/alumnae, training on writing the personal essay, Q&A with college admissions reps, and a goal-setting session for summer. The latter promotes outreach to faculty recommenders, initial work on the personal essay, and the like.

Molly instituted application-readiness nights for students and parents to engage in case studies, looking at anonymized applicants from previous years and analyzing which were effective and why; again, college reps come at Molly’s request to conduct these sessions with actual applications from their colleges.

Molly established valuable connections with experts in the field of college admissions, including author Rob Franek, now Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Review. Mr. Franek’s books made his reputation, and Molly has been able to bring success in college applications. In keeping with the adage that respect is a two-way street, the Princeton Review recruited Molly to serve on its National College Counseling Advisory Board, a fact which further raises D’Evelyn’s profile in the world of post-secondary admissions.

Molly’s valuable external connections are ancillary to her work with students. She shepherds 50-60 seniors per year through their personal college-admissions journey, whether that be in the form of applications to Metro State, a service academy, or an Ivy. As part of this process, she writes the Counselor’s recommendation personalized for each of her seniors. Moreover, she plays a critical role for all seniors by ensuring that the school profile represents the rigor and quality of those students’ learning opportunities. In conclusion, it is no exaggeration to say that Molly’s work in career and college counseling benefits every graduate of our school.

Imagine being the only member of your department to hold your ground over a four-year period: 2020 saw the department’s Registrar retire; in 2022 there followed the retirement of D’Evelyn’s longtime Jr. High Counselor; the 2022-2024 academic years saw the retirement of the department’s Post-Graduate Secretary, the loss of the other high-school counselor, and turmoil in the departure of the school’s Social-Emotional Learning Specialist. And all of this occurred after the disruptiveness of COVID, which set back both students and adults in their academic success and their personal well-being. Note also that the school’s administrative team has only one member stay the course through the period from 2022 to present. Being an effective Department Manager under such circumstances, on top of upholding the responsibilities of one’s own counseling position, takes the heart of a Jaguar.

Molly has shown the truest Jaguar heart in rebuilding the new Counseling Department into a cohesive and successful team, retaining key best practices and, where needed, reshaping them to fit current needs and available expertise and resources. Erin Ranum, the other high-school counselor, will, for example, re-institute the lunchtime career exploration series in 2025-2026. The school’s mentoring program, which might have suffered a death blow with the departure of Mr. Northway is now revitalized and attracting and supporting students as before. In the wake of the retirement of so many long-time D’Evelyn teachers Molly and Ms. Ranum offered trainings for new staff in writing top-notch letters of recommendation so that students would continue to have that crucial support in their journeys to college and career. And such easily overlooked but critical matters as testing (SAT and AP exams) and Jeffco’s Executive Internship programs, both of which are among the Counseling Department’s responsibilities, have run smoothly under Molly’s dedicated leadership. Finally, Molly has faithfully upheld her responsibilities to work with the administration and Steering Committee as departmental liaison to secure their awareness and buy-in during this period of churn.

It can be easy to downplay the social-emotional realm and how it affects both students and professionals in the school setting. Hybris can grow out of the pride we have in our virtues, our values, the values and virtues of our peers and co-workers, of our children and parents, of our students and our mentors. Pride is not enough, however, to keep us from the catastrophic effects of the sort of violence that communities just miles from us at Columbine and Platte Canyon experienced. Nor can mere pride prevent the cataclysm of a student’s suicide. Our hope that D’Evelyn remains free from these horrific happenings may well be considered hybris if that hope is not turned into action by members of our community. It’s a fact that Jaguars (students and adults) have crises arising out of social and emotional difficulties. In my years as a teacher, students attempted suicide, and several alumni/alumnae are now lost to their loved ones. Molly’s interventions and leadership have been key in giving members of our community programmatic tools to move from crisis into resilience and growth:

While Tony Edwards was Principal, Molly attended a Jeffco presentation by Scott LoMurray, Chief Executive Officer of Sources of Strength. Impressed by the nature of the program and its leadership, Molly asked Mr. LoMurray to meet Mr. Edwards and the administrative team, who were in turn persuaded that it was a good fit for D’Evelyn. Under Molly’s leadership and with her involvement, D’Evelyn’s new Social-Emotional Learning Specialist instituted the program for grades 7-12, and students have since thrived in it. Since its inception, the program fostered students’ awareness of theirs and others’ strengths so that they could turn to those strengths, those peers, and to trusted adults in a time of potential crisis.

Long-simmering issues of belittling and discrimination based on Jaguars’ religion, ancestry, and other personal traits came to a head in the 2022-2023 school year. Demeaning behaviors and speech that had been made by some students and adults (and tolerated by others) were brought to the attention of all adults in the school. Molly was a key bridge for students whose genetics, family heritage, culture, or religious faith had been demeaned. She listened and facilitated as those students worked alongside D’Evelyn’s adults to find paths to constructive redress and change. One such path was the idea of establishing a Multicultural Night for the entire D’Evelyn community (or at least for all who choose to attend). Before proposing such a night at D’Evelyn, Molly traveled with students to Lakewood High to see their school’s night and to talk with its organizers. Molly and the students had a different vision than Lakewood: fewer booths and performances from outside restaurants and groups, but more booths, presentations, and meaningful interchange as brought to life by D’Evelyn students and families. Students took the lead in presenting their plan for the night to administration, and numerous staff stepped forward to work with Molly and the students.

Together, students, parents, and staff made the vision a reality, successfully launching Multicultural Night in spring of 2024 with 18 informational booths, plus a fashion show and performances of music and dance. At the second Multicultural Night in 2025, the number of booths exceeded 30 offering food and information, and the fashion show and subsequent performances also grew in number. The booths were hosted by families sharing insight into their ancestors’ homelands, faiths, and cultures (from Argentina to Russia, from Germany to Mongolia). Families of Jewish heritage had a table reflecting and celebrating cultural traditions tied to their faith. Multicultural Night features students and families celebrating who they are, not merely blending in, not being singled out in class or in the hallways as can commonly happen. Equally powerful, Multicultural Night invites respectful interchange and understanding of others, helping to create a positive change in school climate.

Congratulations to Molly Harrington! Pierre Habel, retired D'Evelyn Latin teacher, proudly presented this well-deserved award to her.