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Justice High Puts Students in the Courtroom

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As Cole sits down behind the bench of Courtroom P, it quickly becomes clear that he could star in his own TV show, if not a To Sir, With Love-style movie. He conducts this Friday's afternoon session like an auctioneer, rattling through his opening remarks with humor and assembly-line efficiency, dealing with four separate juvenile cases — possession of drug paraphernalia, assault, running away from a youth facility, possession of a weapon at school — in under twenty minutes. Parents who hunch sheepishly behind their offending juvenile are addressed as Mom and Dad and children as adults, with courtesy and respect but also with severity — particularly those whom Cole has seen before. Still, he carries himself with an ease and confidence that makes the courtroom seem comfortable, at one moment dropping a Perry Mason joke, at another firing off his own quotable line: "You want to join any more gangs, you're going to join my gang: the Black Robes. You're gonna roll with my set. And we don't get in any trouble in my set. We do the right thing."

When not being directly addressed by the judge, those awaiting their day in court seem to genuinely enjoy the T.J. Cole show. The studio audience is having a good time.

After an hour or so, Cole calls for a recess. He quickly signs off on a few motions and speeds to another truancy meeting. Later, he'll return to the bench and continue to hold court until about five, when he'll speed down to Denver to teach a class at Metro State College before heading back to Arvada and joining his three sons for dinner.

And this is a relatively slow day for Cole. Since it's a planning day at Justice High, there are no kids hustling in and out of his chambers during recess, pestering for help with their moot-court preparation or clamoring for the food Cole keeps in his refrigerator. And football season is over, so Cole doesn't have to squeeze in practice for the eight-man Justice High team, which he also coaches.

"If they had the designation thirty years ago, they probably would have said I have ADHD," Cole jokes. "I don't think I have anything like that, but for me, keeping busy, keeping a full plate, has always helped me be successful. You have to be able to keep a full plate if you want to be the principal at a place like Justice High."

The official motto of Justice High School — school mascot the Phoenix — is "Rise above the ordinary to achieve the impossible." The unofficial motto, however, could very well be "Don't sweat the small stuff." A school dedicated to providing year-round college preparatory education for students who are chronically truant, expelled and/or involved in the criminal-justice system wouldn't last very long if the teachers and administrators did much sweating. So behavior that might be considered unforgivable at private schools and at least discipline-worthy at public ones isn't that big a deal at Justice High. Swearing, while not technically condoned, is fairly commonplace, and the teachers appear highly capable of weeding out modern-day teen parlance from terms too hot for prime time. Smoking isn't a battle that these teachers choose to fight, either. Students absentmindedly spin their packs on tables during class and light up right outside the courthouse afterward, alongside harried assistant district attorneys, citizens awaiting hearings and the innumerable worker bees who keep courthouses running.

But a casual attitude toward smoking and swearing is hardly the only thing that makes Justice High stand out. For starters, there's the school's setting: inside a courtroom. Classes also take place at another building — the North Campus, which is a short walk across Canyon Boulevard — but more than half of them are held inside the small, pre-trial hearing rooms located beyond Cole's courtroom, just behind the doors in back of the bench. While the entrances to neighboring courtrooms are bare save for a docket or two, the door to Courtroom P is festooned with photographs of students at Justice High, framed letters welcoming kids to the National Honor Society, press clippings of young athletes playing basketball and football in the school's blue-and-white uniforms. When court isn't in session, teachers regularly hold class inside Courtroom P, with students sitting on the benches or in the pre-arraignment waiting area. When court is in session, the school's handful of staffers and teachers grab whatever space is available in the courthouse. In addition to the core curriculum, areas of study include management (students can get credit for working at businesses), a popular new class titled "Natural Highs," and even the meditation that English teacher Jason Wikonowski has been dabbling in with some students.

"There is enough room to play around a little bit," Cole says. "We try to make it so that most of our curriculum content is not too far different from everyone else. That said, what we try to recognize is that being a charter school for at-risk kids means that the kids are here because the traditional plan did not work for them, for a myriad of reasons. A lot of our kids are the kids who've been expelled, the kids who are gangsters, the kids who no one else wants. And one of the reasons no one else wants them is because they're in a traditional atmosphere trying to work with an untraditional kid; they're trying to put a square peg in a round hole, and it's not working for those students."

Justice High is actually the second charter school to be run out of the Boulder County Justice Center. The first, Boulder Prep, operated under similar auspices from 1997 to 2002, until it grew too large for the space now occupied by Justice High and moved across town. Cole, who'd started Boulder Prep and served as its principal, then handed off the job to a new principal. The impetus behind that school, like the impetus behind Justice High, was a belief in the fundamentally transformative nature of education. Cole's belief.

Cole was born into what he describes as a "middle-class home in a decent north Denver neighborhood," the only child of a mother who worked as a chambermaid and a father in the Air Force who worked as a radio/television broadcaster and producer, from whom his son no doubt inherited some of his showmanship. There were the traditional Army-brat interludes, including a few years spent in Germany, but when his parents divorced, Cole stayed with his mother in Denver, attending Horace Mann Middle School, then North High School. Despite her busy schedule, Cole's mother still found time to preach education. She would get up at 5:30 a.m. and walk to work, clean hotel rooms for nine hours, then come home and cook a big meal for her son, after which she'd make sure he did his homework, stressing schooling as the route to a better life.

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