Justice High Puts Students in the Courtroom

"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.

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.