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Justice High Puts Students in the Courtroom

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Cole swallowed that medicine. After high school, he went to Colorado College, where he majored in political science and fell in love with the block system, in which a student takes one course for three weeks straight, then moves on to another.

"It's more conducive to the real world," Cole says of the system, which inspired the course structure at Justice High. "It gets you ready for jobs where you have time deadlines, expectations that need to be met; it shows you how to compartmentalize, get things ready to go, finish a project and move on."

Cole attended law school at the University of Denver, then earned a master's in international politics at La Salle University. After working as a state public defender for five years, he applied to become a magistrate and secured part-time positions on district-court benches in both Boulder and Pueblo. Finally, he was appointed to a full-time post as magistrate in Boulder, where he presides over a wide variety of cases, with an emphasis on juveniles. And somewhere along the way, he managed to earn a master's in judicial studies in juvenile and family court from the University of Nevada in Reno. (Cole still teaches an occasional seminar there as an associate professor.)

And then in 1993, the so-called Summer of Violence hit Denver, and cries of alarm over the state's wayward youth came from every sector of society. In terms of raw statistics, the number of murders that summer was no higher than average, but gang violence seemed to be spilling out everywhere, affecting people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. To clamp down on that violence, the Colorado Senate pushed through an expanded SB 94, bumping up an already in-place project calling for collaborative community planning groups to change policies surrounding the incarceration of youths.

"There was some really great, creative programming that came from that," Cole says. "But I remember thinking that the piece that was not really getting covered well was the educational piece."

And it particularly irked him that as a result of get-tough legislation, if a student was kicked out of school, he was now kicked out for a calendar year — which meant that if he were suspended in November 1994, he could not return again until January '96, once the new semester of the following year had started. So that meant kids might be out of school for more than a year.

"That got me stirring, thinking that there has to be something else," Cole remembers. "You can't just say 'peace' to the student and not have another plan for him. So me and a probation officer were sitting in the office having lunch and we started kicking around the idea of starting our own thing. We figured we could use some of the back rooms, maybe go to the University of Colorado and have some of the master's-level teachers come here who wanted to practice anyway, and then next thing you know, another P.O. wanted in on it, and then a lawyer who was very passionate about kids wanted in. And the idea just kind of grew."

Greg Brown, now chief probation officer for the 20th Judicial District, was the probation officer who started thinking about a new way of schooling troubled students. "Myself, Andre Adeli, a local defense attorney, and Roxanne Nice were brainstorming about options for kids who were coming out of boot camp, detention or home placement who were unable to transition into local schools," Brown says. "Plus, there were other kids on probation who had not done well in the traditional school settings. So we thought that by providing some short-term success for them to reach for, we could re-engage them in the love of learning, and they would be able to be successful in school."

They started doing some research, and determined that about 80 percent of the delinquents passing through Cole's courtroom had educational issues — a figure that Cole still repeats in disbelief, citing it as a statistic that politicians should seize on when they're stumping for education. When Cole pitched the concept of a new school, he'd quote that figure to everyone.

"We had a great community here that kind of saw it from the get-go," he says. "People realized that if we really want to make a difference and get our bang for our buck, it goes back to what I've always believed: Education is the key to having a decent life and having a decent shot. Recognizing that, it wasn't hard for everyone in the justice system and the legal system to say, 'Hey, if we can make some inroads into education and we can make some positive changes, we really might be able to reduce the recidivism rate.' As time evolved, essentially everyone involved said as long as you don't cause craziness and you can get it all done, go for it. And that's how Boulder Prep started. Eventually, that grew up and moved out and we had this space again, so Justice High was born. It's not like truancy, delinquency and kids dropping out just stopped."

"Both Prep and Justice have exceeded my wildest expectations," Brown says. "Now we have students at the schools who are referrals from other parents, siblings or friends of students who have found success there. Both schools have waiting lists for kids who want a different educational experience."

Justice High operated as a non-profit school for truant and delinquent teens until it attained charter status in the Boulder Valley School District in January 2006, following the same template Cole had designed for Boulder Prep and operating under the same guidelines as the five other charter high schools in the district. While Justice High receives around $6,000 per student from the district to pay for everything from textbooks to teachers, the space in the courtroom comes free of charge, which leaves funds for such things as sports uniforms. And it's all money well spent, according to Chris King, superintendent of the school district.

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