Three new specialized Colorado schools began working with school districts this fall to serve students with some of the highest needs in the state. A fourth new school works with teenagers and young adults who are in the juvenile justice system.
Known as facility schools, the number of these specialized schools had been dwindling for years due to low state funding, staffing shortages, and operating hurdles. But the four new schools are an indication that a state law passed last year is having the intended effect of increasing options for what one state report called some of Colorado’s “most vulnerable” students.
Together, the new schools will provide more than 100 new facility school seats for students in Colorado, according to the state, shortening the long waitlists that have become common.
“It’s a sign that things are moving in the right direction,” said outgoing state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat who sponsored the 2023 bill. “But it’s going to take a little bit more time to fully know the impact.”
Two of the new schools, TACT and Joshua Early Childhood Center, were existing programs that are now designated by the state as facility schools, opening up the flow of both public school funding and students. Another school, Austin Centers for Exceptional Students, is brand new to Colorado. Austin Centers runs six similar schools in Arizona.
Rocky Mountain Leadership School in Idaho Springs serves a small number of adjudicated boys and young men ages 16 to 20 who are in the custody of the state Division of Youth Services.
Many students who attend facility schools struggle with intense mental or behavioral health needs. Some have diagnoses of autism or emotional or intellectual disabilities. Others have experienced trauma, chronic illness, or substance abuse.
Facility schools are often schools of last resort. School districts and other state agencies send students to facility schools when they can’t meet the students’ needs. The districts pay tuition, and the facility schools also get funding directly from the state.
There were 80 facility schools in Colorado in 2004, but the number had plummeted to 30 by the time the new law was passed in spring 2023. Two more facility schools, Devereux Cleo Wallace in Westminster and Jefferson Hills in Lakewood, closed shortly thereafter.
But the 2023 law seems to be slowing the pace of the closures, advocates said. Among other changes, the law increased state funding for facility schools, allowing them to raise teacher pay and better compete for talent. It also created a new category called specialized day schools that provides a different way for schools and programs to get licensed as facility schools.
And the law created a grant-funded program that allows facility schools to band together to pay for services such as food, accounting, and IT. An early pilot showed participating facility schools saved between 15% and 30% on those services.
“It was the biggest sigh of relief for me of, ‘Yes, this is what we intended for this bill,’” said Becky Miller Updike, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Family and Children’s Agencies, which represents several facility schools.
But challenges remain. Most Colorado facility schools, including the new ones, are located along the Front Range. That leaves students in rural parts of the state with few to no options.
“The giant black hole continues to be the non-metro area,” Miller Updike said. “We all hope we can get a lot more geographic representation across the state for these kinds of schools.”
Austin Centers was called to Colorado by long waitlists
Brad Trout, principal of the new Austin Centers school in Westminster, said the organization had been looking to expand outside Arizona for several years. Austin Centers looked at six states including Colorado, said Trout, who previously worked for the organization in Tempe.
“When they looked at Colorado, they found that there were a lot of students that were homebound, and a lot of students that were on waitlists to get into facility schools,” Trout said. “That’s really the impetus behind the decision to come up here.”
Austin Centers was approved by the Colorado Facility Schools Board in early August. But word had gotten out before then. Trout said he began hearing from school districts in June.
“School districts started reaching out to me, sending me copies of [special education plans] saying, ‘Hey, can you review this kid? Let me know if this is a student you could work with,’” he said. “School districts were taking a big risk on us getting approved.”
Austin Centers now has 44 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, some of whom travel as long as an hour and 45 minutes to get there. It’s located inside the former Witt Elementary, which was shuttered by Jeffco Public Schools in 2023 due to declining enrollment.
Class sizes are no bigger than eight students; there are sensory materials in every classroom; and the school has a team of physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and psychologists to help students regulate their behavior and access learning.
Courtney Leyba, the Denver Public Schools administrator in charge of placing Denver students at facility schools, called Austin Centers “a godsend for us.”
“We now no longer have students waiting to find a placement,” she said at a recent school board committee meeting, noting that the district had already placed 17 students there.
TACT teaches the trades to teens
TACT, which stands for Teaching the Autism Community Trades, is for older students with autism or other neurodiversity. Located in a warehouse in Englewood, TACT teaches skilled trades such as carpentry, welding, auto mechanics, and culinary arts.
“This isn’t building birdhouses,” said founder Danny Combs, who was inspired to start TACT in 2016 because he has a son with autism. “It looks like what a trade school should look like.”
TACT offers workshops for younger children, but its main programs focus on training teenagers and young adults for good-paying jobs in the trades, helping them find positions, and then supporting them at work. The organization was historically funded through a combination of philanthropy and state programs for people with disabilities.
But since TACT is not a traditional school, Combs said the organization would sometimes run into problems when trying to work with school districts. Even if it was written into a student’s special education plan that they should attend TACT for vocational training, Combs said school principals would sometimes refuse to send them.
So in 2019, TACT began looking into becoming a facility school. But the organization didn’t quite fit the mold. It wasn’t a day treatment center or a residential program, as many facility schools are. It didn’t have a child care license, as some others did, and it didn’t offer the traditional therapy programs of many facility schools, though Combs says it is therapeutic.
“Our students are getting therapy; they just don’t know it,” he said. “It’s more real.”
The new specialized day schools category finally allowed TACT to become a facility school for students aged 18 to 21 who are still enrolled in public schools. Students with disabilities can delay graduation to attend vocational or life skills training until they turn 21.
TACT currently serves 80 teens and young adults, but Combs said only 35 are between the ages of 18 and 21. Of those, only eight qualify as facility school students because they haven’t yet graduated high school. The goal is to grow that number in the coming years, Combs said.
“Now this allows students who want to come here the opportunity,” he said.
Joshua School fills a need for early childhood seats
Joshua Early Childhood Center also serves students with autism, but on the other end of the age spectrum, where there was a lack of facility school seats.
The school’s current students range in age from 4 to 8, though it’s licensed to serve children from ages 3½ to 10, said Executive Director Cindy Lystad.
Lystad oversees three schools in total: Joshua Early Education Center in Centennial and two locations of the Joshua School that serve school-age students in Englewood and Boulder. Each student has a one-on-one instructional aide who personalizes their education.
While the two Joshua School locations had been facility schools for many years, Joshua Early Education Center operated under a different model, Lystad said. Twelve of the 24 early education seats were filled by students with autism whose health insurance paid their tuition. The other 12 seats were filled by neurotypical preschoolers whose families paid tuition.
The neurotypical students served as behavior models for the students with autism, a so-called inclusion program that Lystad said worked beautifully but wasn’t “fiscally salvageable.” Last school year, the school transitioned its 12 insurance seats to facility school seats. Lystad said the seats were filled before the state had even approved the facility school license.
“Districts were saying, ‘I want a seat, I want a seat, I want a seat,’” Lystad said.
So this school year, Joshua Early Education Center transitioned fully to a facility school. All 24 seats were filled within 24 hours with students who’d been on a waitlist, Lystad said.
“We field multiple calls a day at all of our campuses of, ‘How do I get my child into your school?’” she said. “It almost breaks my heart because every single one of those phone calls is a kid, is a family, is a situation. They are desperate for a place for their kiddo.”
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org .
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.