When Denver Public Schools closed Manual High School last spring, many in the community – and at DPS – were worried that some students would feel abandoned and disappear from the education system.
They were valid worries; after all, hundreds of teenagers already had walked away from Manual, some enrolling in other public schools, others becoming a statistic.
DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet and a strong team of volunteers weren’t about to let that happen.
For the past several Saturdays, they have been going door-to-door in northeast Denver, trying to track down Manual’s former students.
This past Saturday was to be their final walk.
Out of last year’s 558 Manual students, 511 have been accounted for in DPS schools or in neighboring districts. Two dozen were from families that moved out of Denver, three graduated early and four were incarcerated. Only 16 former Manual students are not attending classes this year. Eleven of those 16 students actually registered at a school but have failed to show up. Five haven’t registered at all.
DPS also says that 54 percent of Manual’s former students have higher attendance rates at their new schools. That’s a positive step forward.
Bennet and his volunteers, including DPS staff, did yeoman’s work tracking down the students. (He even rode a yellow school bus on the first day of school with Manual transfers, calling their friends from his cellphone to rouse them from their beds.)
That kind of commitment can’t be faked. DPS’ exhaustive efforts proved to students that the district cares about them as individuals and worries over their academic futures. That was the administration’s argument for closing the school, which has struggled with dismal test scores since the end of busing in the mid-1990s.
Bennet wrote in an e-mail to volunteers last week that he’s heard “many positive stories about students meeting new friends, having exciting new academic opportunities, and integrating into their new school life.”
Manual will reopen next year as a “premier” high school, and DPS’s work in the neighborhoods is laying a positive foundation.
The only way to build successful, thriving schools is on the foundation of an engaged and committed community.
