Justice High Puts Students in the Courtroom

Lolita Respectsnothing, a senior of Oglala Sioux descent who's the girls' basketball captain at Justice High, finally found a home at this school as well. Lolita, who never met her father, for years moved back and forth between living with her mother — when her mother wasn't in trouble with the law — and spending time with relatives "on the res" in South Dakota. That life created huge gaps in Lolita's education: She estimates she's been in ten different schools, five different high schools alone. Finally, when a caseworker sent her to live in a group home in north Boulder, she landed at Justice High School — and she says she's never liked a school better. "At other schools, the classes were too big," she says. "Everyone knows everyone here; everyone is really close. It wasn't as easy for me to fall through the cracks and not pay attention or goof off. This is the only school I've found that actually keeps me in school, the only school I've found that I actually want to be at."

Her Sioux last name, which actually means "Fears Nothing," was incorrectly translated years ago, but the breakout basketball star admits it has a nice ring when an announcer calls out, "Respectsnothing with the rebound! Respectsnothing with the three!"

Lolita expects to graduate this spring and hopes to pursue studies in sports management or sports medicine, probably at Fort Lewis College in Durango. And even though she now lives in Denver with her boyfriend, she still manages to make it to class. Her principal drives her there every morning.

"I think why Justice High works is because every kid, no matter how much they like or don't like us, at the end of the day knows we truly care, from the bottom of our toes to the tops of our heads," says Cole, the principal and chauffeur. "We're lucky to have the incredible staff we do. People say, 'Can you duplicate this in San Francisco? Can you duplicate this in Ohio? And I support it and will do whatever I can to assist, but the one thing I can't re-create is the energy, the drive and compassion of the individuals working here with the kids."

"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."