When Janay Eiland saw fliers advertising a new charter school for homeless, at-risk and runaway youth, she tracked down an administrator at the shelter where she lives.
“I asked her about the school, and I said I want to go,” said Eiland, who, at 18, has gone from living in foster care to spending the past four months at Urban Peak’s youth shelter in Denver.
“There are all these opportunities (at the school) I never had,” Eiland said.
Today, she is among 40 students attending the Academy of Urban Learning, the district’s first charter school targeting homeless students.
The curriculum includes courses for students at Emily Griffith Opportunity School or the Community College of Denver, principal Mark Koester said. The school will provide support services such as housing, bus passes and job and mental health counseling.
Eiland is among thousands of students spilling into classrooms in the Denver and Aurora school districts.
Some Douglas County students started school Friday. Doors open in Jefferson County next Monday, followed by the Boulder Valley and Colorado Springs 11 school districts.
Along with the new lockers and boxes of crayons, football and band practices, and sometimes confusing class schedules, other changes are in store for Colorado’s estimated 750,000 public school students for the 2005-06 school year.
Fifth- and 10th-graders will be gearing up for a new science portion on the Colorado Student Assessment Program test. Until now, CSAP, which measures how well students are meeting state standards, tested only eighth-graders in science.
For the state’s 92,000 students who are learning English as a second language, there will be a new test next spring to measure their English proficiency – the Colorado English Language Assessment.
And Aurora’s first kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, Murphy Creek K-8 School, will open to more than 650 students, helping to relieve congestion in the district’s southeast area.
Early education also has gotten a boost. The state has restored hundreds of the pre- school slots that had been slashed in previous years. This year, more than 13,000 at-risk children will have the opportunity to attend preschool.
In the Mapleton Public Schools district, four new high schools will be opening this fall, bringing to six the total number of “small” schools, said spokesman Damon Brown.
The district is converting one large comprehensive high school to six smaller facilities under the umbrella of Skyview High School. Each will have a unique design, like the Early College High Schools, Brown said.
Among school boards, a priority will be looking at whether the state should change the way schools are funded, said Jane Urschel, associate executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards.
The state has been accused in a lawsuit of improperly funding schools. “The question is how much money is enough and where do we get it,” said Urschel, who sits on a committee analyzing the funding system.
Legislation passed this year will give eighth-graders a better idea of how to get into college.
Under the law, the Colorado Commission on Higher Education will be notifying the parents next spring about the high school classes students need to take to get into college, said Jason Hopfer, commission spokesman.
“If you want to go to college directly, you’ll need to have this covered,” he said.
In Denver, KIPP Cole College Prep starts this year as the first Colorado charter granted by the state because a traditional school performed so poorly. The former Cole Middle School, which has opened already with seventh- and eighth-graders, will eventually grow to grades 5-8.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-820-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
