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Justice High Puts Students in the Courtroom

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"You need high expectations but a certain amount of honesty and flexibility that you don't need in a normal classroom," says Taimi Clark, a reading teacher who taught at the university level as well as at Brighton Charter School and Brighton High School before she found herself at the school inside the courthouse. "These kids, more than any others, are going to call you on lack of truthfulness. When looking at the types of students who come through Justice High School, one wants to say that you need to have tighter security and discipline, but the reality is that you just need more flexibility. These kids don't play by the normal set of rules, so you have to adapt to that."

Everyone learns to adapt at Justice High — everyone from the teachers who have to learn how to deal with thirteen-year-old students who are barely able to read, to the students who have to learn to be accountable for themselves because someone not only expects greatness from them, but demands it. And they have to adapt to outside expectations, too: Last year, Justice High School failed to make "adequate yearly progress" on its CSAP scores as required by the federal No Child Left Behind guidelines.

"Think about it," Cole says. "We're the school that everyone sends who to? The dropouts, the truants, those kids. Oftentimes we get kids a month before the test, before anyone on my staff has had a chance to assess, to fix, to remediate. If that student was here three years, uninterrupted by his drug and alcohol habit, without going to jail for six months, without all these other issues, if the playing field was fair, I'd say, 'Yeah, we messed up with that student, we did something wrong that he got so low a score.' Of course I want to get those scores up. But I'm more concerned with getting that kid into college. Most of our kids get scholarships, too — not full rides, all of them, but 60 to 70 percent get something, which is a far cry from being a dropout a year ago, a delinquent."

Forty-two students have graduated from Justice High since the school started, and of those, more than thirty have gone on to college. Many more have used Justice High as a place to help them get the tools they need to attend more traditional high schools for the first time, or to return to schools that previously deemed them unteachable. "So given all that, I'd say we do pretty damn good," Cole continues. "It's amazing: There are kids who will get here, take one look around and say, 'I'm out,' and leave. But four or five months go by, and I look up and see that same student knocking on my door saying, 'Hey, I was a little rash, I'm back; I found out that this is where I need to be.' Almost everyone who has left has always come back. I mean, we've lost a few students, but I would say 95 percent of those who leave come back and want to re-enroll. That tells me we're doing something right; that tells me something is okay."

It's Tuesday afternoon, and, as usual, T.J. Cole's office is a hotbed of activity. Students dart in and out, the phone rings off the hook, piles of paperwork nearly obscure him behind his desk. But Cole is looking beyond all that, into the future, staring directly at a To Sir, With Love moment, envisioning this year's graduation. He mentions a moment in that film when Sidney Poitier has successfully weathered the storm of his first year of ruffians — only to return to school and encounter a whole new crop of miscreants. In that scene, he realizes that it's time to do it all over again, to roll up his sleeves and get back to work.

This is a scene Cole can relate to, because he lives it year after year. A while ago, a reporter was working on a story about him, talking about writing a treatment for a film about Justice High. She got pregnant and disappeared, but it's still a hell of a story.

And what would such a movie look like?

"It would be a motivational film about a bunch of students who no one else wanted," Cole says, after thinking for a moment. "A group of kids who no one thought could learn and who, as a final-ditch effort, were sent to Justice High School, where a group of committed, motivated, deeply caring individuals did whatever it took to get those kids where they needed to be. They would work with the kids who had second-, third-grade reading levels and get them up to speed, and they would take the ridicule they would endure and all the crap they got when the school's scores came out in the papers, because they would know those figures were not reflective of who those kids were and what they were capable of. They would just shrug it off, because those special people would know that the long-term payoff is what they were seeking."

And how would that long-term payoff manifest itself on screen? At Justice High's graduation ceremony, of course.

"People often forget just how miraculous it is for these kids to even get a diploma, knowing where some of them came from," Cole continues. "A graduation ceremony would be a triumphant way to end that film."

And who would play T.J. Cole in the big-screen version? Sidney Poitier?

"Denzel Washington," he says with a grin. "He's the only one who could capture the intensity."

And with that, Magistrate Cole excuses himself and slips on his black judge's robe.

"Time to go be me."

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