Seth Brigham fits right in at the Penny Lane coffeehouse. A longtime Boulder resident, he produces an off-color program for the city’s public-access CATV Channel 54, during which he makes political statements against corporate greed and government censorship. And although Brigham is bipolar and suffers from anxiety, he handles his…

Kim Benson doesn’t know why Teller Elementary has such a bad reputation. She just knows that many parents who live around Congress Park won’t even consider enrolling their children there. “I’ve heard from families that have moved into the neighborhood that they’ve been told they shouldn’t even look at Teller,”…

Andrew Hartman is only in his second year of teaching, and already he’s out of a job. The teacher’s problems began last November, when students in the Thornton High School chapter of Students 4 Justice began distributing anti-military literature during a visit from armed-forces recruiters. It was the students’ idea…

The concept behind the Original Dinner Party isn’t original. Ever since 1886, when the first Avon Lady in Winchester, New Hampshire, started peddling cosmetics to her friends, women have understood the importance of networking to make it in a man’s world. And businesses have understood that women are usually the…

Wendy is the birthday girl for the second time in six months. On her first “birthday,” in September, she got $20,000. And she’s hoping to receive another generous gift soon. The money couldn’t have come at a better time. Wendy, a 51-year-old single mom, lives in a mobile home in…

To prevent their schools from being converted into charter schools because of poor performance on the annual Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) exams, principals at Del Pueblo, Maxwell and McGlone elementary schools are trying a new strategy that they hope will help them raise their historically low scores: operating year-round…

The man who gives — and takes — the flak for decisions made by Denver Public Schools is smarting from the recent false alarms the district sounded over possible budget cuts that had been slated for next year. The announcement that the district was short by $17 million to $25…

If they went to a traditional high school, Wendy Ginther and her three best friends would probably be in different cliques. Wendy, who is articulate beyond her seventeen years, is the writer. Erick Mudge, who’s wearing a T-shirt with a Celtic design and a crystal around his neck, is the…

Curtis Park residents have reported a creepy blue glow hovering above their neighborhood for the past seven months. Is it a blue moon? No. Aliens? No. It’s…the Qwest building at 1801 California Street. The light, which emanates from the gigantic neon sign on the telecom company’s building (one of three…

Twelve weeks into the school year, Joy Kay got the surprise of her teaching career. A parent who had come to her biology classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School to pick up her child’s progress report wondered why her kid had gotten a B at the six-week grading period and…

In November 1998, an employee of a local hospital called the Denver Department of Human Services child-abuse hotline to report that a patient, four-year-old Ben, had been admitted with bruises on his body. Ben’s father had taken him to the emergency room after he fell off a bookshelf he’d climbed…

All teachers dream of having smaller classes so that they can give more attention to their students, and in Denver, at least, average class sizes have remained fairly steady for the last four years, at 24 to 26 kids per teacher. But that’s only because Denver Public Schools has been…

The hair-netted men and women who prepare and serve lunch every day in school cafeterias across Denver are fed up. They have been for years. Until recently, they kept silent out of fear for their jobs. But concerns about low wages that max out at about $10 an hour, little…

Friday, May 5, started out cloudless and hot. By 8:30 a.m., Ron Ruhr’s girlfriend had left for work and her ten-year-old daughter had gone to school. But Ruhr, a self-employed carpenter, had set aside this day to have some fun. Bill, a man he had taken goose hunting, was so…

Denver District Juvenile Court Judge Dana Wakefield surprised everyone and baffled some last week when he ruled on the 21-month-old Ponciano Lazaro-Avina case. Ponciano, a Mexican immigrant, had been fighting to have his daughter returned to him and his family ever since she became a warden of the state shortly…

Penelope Jones was born with spastic cerebral palsy and is unable to control the right side of her body; she is also deaf in one ear and mentally retarded. When she enrolled in a special-education class at Denver’s George Washington High School seven years ago at the age of twenty,…

The small neighborhood where David Rapier lives used to be a quiet place. The ranch homes in this agricultural area west of Old Wadsworth Boulevard are spread far apart; most houses sit on one-acre lots. Some people keep horses, others raise llamas. There are no streetlights or sidewalks, just semicircular…

Ponciano Lazaro-Avina is a shy 26-year-old with a soft smile and an even softer voice. He works six days a week mowing grass, trimming hedges and planting flowers so that other people’s lawns will look nice. In the winter he shovels walks, blows snow and rakes away the soggy leaves…

Anyone who knows Rita Montero and Joseph C’de Baca knows they’re persistent. Some might describe them in less diplomatic terms: arrogant, in-your-face, sharp-tongued, downright troublesome. Whatever their adversaries’ adjective of choice, it would be hard to argue that Montero and C’de Baca are driven by anything but a passion for…

Mendel and Mindle Glouberman were born and raised in the tiny Polish town of Stolin. There was never any question that after they married they would settle there, and they expected the same from their five children and their children’s children. When some of their children decided to leave, during…

A week after the University of Northern Colorado Laboratory School let out, Kristen Anderson’s mind was on the summer activities that would keep her two young kids occupied for the next three months. Other parents were planning road trips, backyard barbecues and swimming lessons. No one was thinking about the…

In the weeks following the January 27 decision by the Boulder Valley Board of Education to consolidate five elementary schools, it was hard to find a parent in South Boulder who wasn’t calling for boardmembers’ heads to roll. But as the school year wound down, a petition to recall three…