By withholding hard-earned high school diplomas and interpreting a state law literally that guarantees an education to students up to 21 years old, principal Scott Mendelsberg is sending 100 Denver seniors to college this fall – and he’s charging the state.
Roughly half of the graduating senior class from his Abraham Lincoln High School in southwest Denver will go to Community College of Denver, or go through a vocational program, on the state’s dollar.
By counting them as students at Lincoln, even though they’ve technically earned a high school degree, Lincoln will get the roughly $6,500 a year in state funding that most Denver Public School kids get, and with that, he’ll pay their college tuition.
Mendelsberg says the program, which will start this fall, has given his students hope at a school “where a lot of the students had no hope before,” he said.
But a handful of education leaders, as well as the state treasurer, say that Mendelsberg is too loosely – and maybe even incorrectly – interpreting a law that was meant only to give some troubled and special- needs students a little extra time in high school.
“There’s no question that his solution violates the intent of current law,” said state Treasurer Mike Coffman. “If he’s artificially holding back a diploma … so he could get the state funding, then it’s really a financial shell game.”
Vody Herrmann, the Colorado Department of Education’s director of public school finance, said the state in the past has closed down similar programs.
“We’ll probably withhold funding from those kids,” she said. “This is absolutely not OK.”
DPS leaders defended the policy Thursday. “We believe it’s consistent with the law,” said Wayne Eckerling, assistant superintendent. The school board gave its endorsement in a 7-0 vote on the program Thursday.
The idea came to Mendelsberg after he saw programs aimed at helping students through high school “dangling a carrot” of a promising future but not really helping them get to college.
He saw lapses in communication between colleges and high schools. “No one was talking to each other,” he said. “I keep reading day after day about the need to get students of color into college, and I thought, ‘I’ve got the students.”‘
A little more than 86 percent of the roughly 1,300 Lincoln students are Latino, and about 67 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, a guideline for poverty.
Mendelsberg created elective courses at Lincoln for juniors and seniors that would count toward remedial college education. He got English professors to sit down with high school English teachers to figure out a streamlined curriculum.
And he says it has worked.
Last school year, there were 23 fights on school grounds; this year, there have been eight. Last school year, more than 200 students were suspended; this year, that number was at about 145, Mendelsberg said.
Of 238 graduates last school year, only 40 went to college. This year, when about 200 students walk in gowns on Saturday, 125 are slated to head to college this fall – 100 of them enrolled in his program.
“People believe the silver bullet in education (reform) is small schools or better teachers or different administrators or different principals,” he said. “But fundamentally, the kids who have hope, they’ll do fine. The ones who don’t, won’t.”
George Arreaga has been living with his father in Denver since he got out of foster care when he was 9.
His mother dropped out of middle school, he said, and his father never went to college.
“I’ll be the first to go to college,” said Arreaga, 18. “I never thought I would have done that.”
Arreaga, who was the lead in a school play this year, hopes to study theater at community college. He hopes to eventually transfer to the University of Colorado and become an actor.
“It’s very exciting to me,” he said. “I just need to prove that I can do these first two years.”
Arreaga’s isn’t the first Colorado senior high school class to try this. In the 1990s, the state allowed some districts to participate in “fifth-year” programs, which gave students one paid year of college after high school.
But in 2001, state auditors found that continuing the programs would eventually cost the state too much money.
A first-year student at Community College of Denver pays about $2,800 in tuition and fees.
Auditors also found that the high school portion of the fifth- year program was too rigorous. After the release of the report, state education leaders shut the programs down.
School board member Lucia Guzman, who co-chaired the Denver Commission on Secondary School Reform, said Lincoln’s program goes along with her group’s recommendations made earlier this year.
In that report, commission members said it would be better if high schools were more flexible, giving students options for three- or five-year programs.
“I’m very supportive of this,” Guzman said after the school board approved Lincoln’s policy.
Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com.
