Two Colorado shop teachers just won $100,000 national prizes: Warren Tech’s welding instructor and a Cherry Creek construction teacher

Frank Loeblein, who teaches welding at Jeffco’s Warren Tech, and Jim Dosky, who teaches construction at the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus, are two of only five grand prize winners in the 2026 Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence: $100,000 each, with $70,000 going to their programs.

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· Published

October 15, 2026

· Updated

More than 550 skilled-trades teachers from 49 states applied for this year’s Harbor Freight Tools for Schools Prize for Teaching Excellence. Only five won the grand prize, and two of them teach in the Denver metro. Frank Loeblein, a welding instructor at Warren Tech, Jeffco Public Schools’ career and technical education school with campuses in Lakewood, Arvada and Littleton, and Jim Dosky, a construction teacher at the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus in Centennial, were named 2026 grand prize winners when the awards were announced Sept. 29.

Each grand prize is $100,000, split $70,000 for the school’s skilled trades program and $30,000 for the teacher. Twenty more teachers around the country won $75,000 prizes ($50,000 for the program, $25,000 for the teacher). Harbor Freight Tools for Schools raised the total pool to $2 million this year, up from $1.5 million, to mark the prize’s 10th anniversary; the organization says it has now awarded more than $12 million to 208 teachers and their programs since founder Eric Smidt started it in 2017. Winners are chosen over three rounds by independent panels drawn from education, industry, nonprofits and philanthropy.

Why it matters here

Warren Tech runs 32 programs across its three Jeffco campuses and offers college credit to Jeffco high schoolers, and the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus at 8000 S. Chambers Road lists a construction trades pathway among its programs. A $70,000 program award is real money for a welding or construction shop, where consumables, steel and equipment eat budgets fast, and the teacher’s share is a rare public thank-you for people who spend their days teaching teenagers to run a bead or frame a wall. Jeffco Public Schools posted its own congratulations to Loeblein on Oct. 1.

If you know a student weighing a trades pathway, the Warren Tech program catalog and the Cherry Creek Innovation Campus site are the places to start, and both schools’ pages are linked below.

Sources

More like this: Find the Good · Teachers · Lakewood · Arvada · Littleton · Learn

Source: Harbor Freight Tools for Schools. Verified Oct. 15, 2026.

Details verified with the source on October 15, 2026. See something wrong? Send a correction.

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