Twenty years ago, the Gilcrest and Johnstown communities celebrated fresh construction projects at their high schools.
Construction crews breathed new life into decades-old high school buildings using millions of dollars approved by voters in the Johnstown/Milliken Re-5J and Valley Re-1 school districts.
In the past year, the two school districts have relived those projects in great detail on the cusp of their 20th anniversaries. They’re not celebrating anymore.
During random inspections this past year, civil rights monitors discovered those schools didn’t meet many requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now the districts stand to spend more than a quarter-million dollars to correct problems that never should have existed.
In some cases, systems designed to ensure the new schools complied with federal law failed in every conceivable way.
At Roosevelt High School in Johnstown and Valley High School in Gilcrest, more than half of the problems found during the random monitoring visits were from those large construction projects in 1995-96 that should have complied with 1991 ADA guidelines, documents obtained through a series of Colorado Open Record Act requests show.
Those two schools are the worst examples, but inspectors found an average of 15 or more violations at each of six high schools those inspectors visited in the past five years.
Some superintendents were shocked. They said they’ve never received a complaint.
Disability advocates don’t share the superintendents’ surprise.
“We think that the state has not taken ADA compliance as seriously as they need to be,” said Julie Reiskin, executive director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. “And this is the consequence when people don’t take this seriously.”
The biggest problems haunting those schools originated with projects finished four to five years after 1991 ADA guidelines took effect.
Projects at each school passed through at least 10 layers of oversight. That oversight started and ended with state inspectors, something Reiskin saw as proof of the state’s lack of interest in ADA compliance.
Experts from the Colorado Community College System inspect buildings for ADA compliance because the system has oversight responsibilities for the state’s career and technical education programs.
