“Last Resort “is a Colorado News Collaborative-led four-part investigation by Chalkbeat Colorado, The Colorado Sun and KFF Health News into the collapsing system of schools that serve some of Colorado’s most vulnerable students.

The state is now scrambling to shore up what are known as facility schools, which enroll thousands of students a year with intense mental and behavioral health needs. Where there were once 80 schools offering a combination of therapy and academics, only 30 remain, All but one are located in the Front Range, leaving rural Coloradans desperate for options.

A cross-newsroom team of reporters filed open records requests, sifted through state documents, visited facility and non-facility schools, and interviewed dozens of people, including family members, students, special education specialists, disability rights advocates, educators, and lawmakers to tell the story of system hobbled by a chronic lack of staff, anemic funding and the unintended consequences of a federal law seeking to prevent the warehousing of children. It is also a system in which oversight is fragmented and opaque, leaving parents and the public with no easy way to determine whether children are learning and safe. Even as the state seeks to beef up the existing system, school districts and others are finding their own ways to help these students succeed.