Life Skills Offers Last-Chance High

But the curriculum wasn't the only thing that made Life Skills attractive to the board. The company had some real capital behind it, which made it more likely that the Denver Board of Education would approve it as a charter school. Charters were introduced in Colorado over a decade ago, and today there are 140 in operation — all working with the approval of the school districts in which they are located, all collecting money that otherwise would go to those districts. "In some respects, it's kind of a low-risk venture on the district's part," says Jim Griffin, director of the Colorado League of Charter Schools. "If they succeed and they do a great job, they're making a difference, and if they don't succeed, you can at least say you gave them a shot — and you gave them a shot at something that no one else is trying."

Unfortunately, Jimenez says, the company back in Ohio paid more attention to the physical setup than the makeup of the potential student population. "There's a huge Latino population out here," he points out. "You go to Akron, it's reversed. They didn't seem to recognize that. Their marketing materials had predominantly black students, and you would think they would try to appeal to a wider audience. In my opinion, it should've been a bigger emphasis." He and the rest of the board had told White Hat that many of the students would have limited English, but it took two years before Denver's Life Skills got an English as a Second Language component.

At the end of 2005, Life Skills was nearing the completion of its three-year contract with DPS and getting ready to reapply. By then, the school had received a total of about $5.8 million in funding and had graduated only about a hundred kids, according to DPS figures.

On the one hand, Life Skills was taking kids who otherwise might have dropped out of school entirely, kids no other school would take because they didn't have enough credits for their age, they had long disciplinary records, or they were single parents who couldn't meet traditional school guidelines. On the other hand, Life Skills wasn't living up to the goal of 60 percent attendance, which the DPS board and Life Skills had agreed on back when the charter was granted.

Even so, in February 2006, the DPS board voted to give Life Skills a fourth year.

But this was not the same old Life Skills. There was a new principal at the school: Santiago Lopez.

Santiago knows where the Life Skills students are coming from because he was once there. His parents met at Manual High School, where his mother earned a diploma but his father did not. One of Santiago's earliest memories is of his father taking him and his older brother to a bar in Globeville, where his dad would fill one of his hands with warm cashews and the other with quarters for the pool table, which Santiago could barely reach. While he and his brother played pool, their father got smashed.

It wasn't long before Dad left the family altogether for the bottle. Concerned about providing for her two sons, Santiago's mother went back to school and earned a degree in education. Santiago remembers sitting beside his mom, coloring through her classes at Metro State. His father came back into the picture just long enough to create a little sister, then left his wife to raise the kids alone. "She had to worry about daycare and financially being able to both raise us and pay for school," Santiago says. "Having three kids and trying to go to school would be almost impossible. College may not have been as expensive then, but if you put everything in perspective, it was probably just as difficult."

With money in short supply, the family moved around a lot — more than twenty times, by Santiago's count. But his mother has seven sisters and a brother spread around the metro area, and they helped to create a strong support system. And after Santiago's mother started teaching, things got easier. She was a first-grade teacher at Greenlee Elementary School when Santiago enrolled at Abraham Lincoln High School in southwest Denver. By then, he was a class clown who wasn't afraid to talk back to teachers, and he frequently landed in the principal's office. He got good grades, but he also ditched class a lot. When he cut, though, he usually wound up in his mother's classroom — tutoring her students.