The Cherry Creek School district (Englewood, Colorado) is a growing district of 37,000 students in the Denver area. The 1988 Colorado State School Finance Act required district-set proficiencies (standards), and forced agreement on a set of values for student knowledge and skills. State-adopted standards added additional requirements for the district. Cherry Creek has a high graduation rate, low dropout rate, and generally high average test scores, so that these externally imposed standards were not met with great enthusiasm. However, staffs have embraced positive features of the standards and are working toward a high level of student proficiency on these standards. The political background in the state and area is traced, and the way Cherry Creek met requirements, making the standards their own is described. Teachers and administrators are invested in the standard system because they feel it is their own. A guiding principle in Cherry Creek is student growth over time, data that is not provided by most state assessment programs. Cherry Creek realizes that it must control its own local assessment plan, for it cannot depend on the state to provide the information needed to plan interventions in a timely manner. Furthermore, each state legislative session will probably bring revisions to the state plan. Seven attachments present supplemental information about Cherry Creek's standards, beginning with the district student achievement objectives, and including some sample assessment items. (SLD)