LESS SCHOOLS TAKING IN VULNERABLE STUDENTS
Erin Schneiderman used to get calls in the middle of the day two or three times a week to pick her son up from his Denver elementary school.
The third-grader had run away or was standing in the hallway screaming. Meltdowns could last for hours. School was just too loud and crowded, with too much unpredictability, for a child with autism who craved routine.
Denver Public Schools decided Schneiderman’s son should go to a privately run school that specializes in serving children with intense behavioral, mental health or special education needs. But when it came time to start fourth grade, he still didn’t have a spot. The boy spent two months at home, most of that time getting no education at all.
Today, nearly five years later, the few options for Colorado students like Schneiderman’s son have dwindled further. In 2004, Colorado had 80 of these specialized programs known as facility schools. Now there are just 30 that serve an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 children a year. A single school serves all of western Colorado. On the Front Range, another school is set to close soon.
Meager state funding, dire staffing shortages and changes to federal law have pushed the system to the brink. Lawmakers hope a cash infusion and regulatory changes will spur the opening of new schools — even as school districts are seeking their own solutions.
When there’s no open facility school seat, children may languish at home. They may remain in a mental health facility longer than they need to, taking up a bed that could be used by another child stuck in a hospital emergency room. Or they may stay in classrooms, struggling to learn, coming undone, lashing out almost daily and disrupting the learning of their classmates.
Parents pay the price in lost jobs, and children pay the price in squandered potential.
Public schools have an obligation to educate every child. Facility schools — which operate at the crosscurrents of education, mental health, disability and trauma — serve as placements of last resort when public schools can’t or won’t meet a child’s needs.
“K-12 was set up to educate the masses,” said Cori Woessner, a career public school educator
who isn’t sure her own son with disabilities would have finished high school without the more supportive environment provided in facility schools.
“We’re not talking about the masses. We’re talking about the kids with the most severe needs that need the most support to be a productive member of society. To even have a chance at it.”
Facility schools balance academics and therapy
Facility schools offer academic programs within larger therapeutic settings. Some facilities serve children in foster care who need mental health care, or children in the juvenile criminal system who need treatment before returning home. The more common scenario is that students live at home and school districts send them to day treatment programs.
“Once we make that decision, it’s not because we don’t like kids and we’re sending them somewhere else,” said Callan Ware, the executive director of student services in Englewood Schools, a small district south of Denver. “We are saying we like them so much, we care about them so much — and we’re admitting to you we don’t have what it takes to support them and we’re going to find it and we’re going to pay for it.”
Some critics say facility schools too often end up warehousing kids who,
with more support, could have stayed in their home schools. Oversight is spread across multiple state and local agencies. When a school district recommends a facility school, parents have no easy way to know if the school is good or safe, though they rarely get a choice about placement.
“Students don’t need to be segregated in order to have their needs met and be successful in school,” said Lewis Bossing, senior staff attorney with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “We think that there are a number of different kinds of supports that can be put in place so that, for the most part, students can be served in general education settings.”
The Tennyson Center for Children is a facility school located in a bright, modern building in a residential Denver neighborhood. The staff seems to have endless patience for behaviors that would likely get a student kicked out of public school.
On a recent Friday, an elementary student ran up and down the hallway letting out a series of screams between his spelling words and math problems.
The boy was working with a staff member in one of the “nooks” — a small recessed room without a door where students can retreat if they’re feeling overwhelmed.
“I don’t want to do any more work!” the boy said, coming out of the nook and kicking the wall.
“To earn our positive breaks with staff, we have to complete work,” the staff member said, reminding the boy that he was working toward earning computer time in the library.
“It’s hard for me,” the boy said. He asked why his classmates, who had just completed a worksheet on Presidents Day, were earning points for good behavior and he wasn’t.
“Because they stay in class,” the staff member calmly told him as he pouted and fumed. “Part of the expectation of being in school is staying in class.”
The boy went back into the nook and screamed again.
When funding dries up, kids are funneled down
Children with these challenges were once institutionalized in psychiatric facilities that created their own schools. But since the 1990s, the philosophy has shifted toward communitybased care. The Medicaid dollars that supported the previous system dried up.
Twenty residential treatment facilities closed in Colorado between 2007 and 2017, according to newspaper reports. On the heels of those closures, Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which sought to keep more children with relatives or foster families and placed limits on government-funded residential care.
More residential programs closed. Options in rural Colorado — where the nearest school might be hours from home — became even more scarce.
“Great if we move away from facilities that aren’t cutting the mustard or doing what we need, but now we’ve gone too far,” said Becky Miller Updike, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Association
of Family and Children’s Agencies, which represents residential facilities.
More children in crisis are now funneled into day treatment programs. But the funding hasn’t increased.
Low funding means it’s hard to hire staff, which limits how many students they can serve. The job is hard, and new hires don’t always stay.
The aides at Spectra School, which started as a therapy clinic for children with autism, take 40 hours of behavior technician training and often wear bite guards and spit shields. Despite those precautions, founder Amy Gearhard said in January that three Spectra staff members had suffered concussions on the job, and two were out on workers’ compensation claims.
“You can’t pay them $15 an hour,” she said.
But the staff who stay at facility schools say they’re drawn to working with this population of kids.
“These alternative schools give kids chances to do it again and be successful,” said Renée Johnson, the executive director of Third Way Center, a residential facility that serves students in foster care or youth corrections. “That feeling of success is so important to build on.”
Fewer schools mean longer waitlists
A statewide snapshot taken on Dec. 1 each year found 1,266 students in facility schools in late 2017 but just 769 students in these schools in 2022. That’s a 40% decrease.
It’s not because the demand
has decreased. Students who would wait two or three weeks for placement 15 years ago are now waiting “anywhere between two three, or sometimes even six months for a placement,” said Courtney Leyba, Denver Public Schools senior manager of extended school support.
In the wait, students can unravel even more.
Until he got into a facility school two months into his fourth-grade year, Schneiderman’s son would have meltdowns over literally anything, she said.
Schneiderman ended up having to take a leave from her job. An in-home tutor the district promised didn’t start working with him until he’d already been home more than a month.
“It felt like we were completely lost in a system that we had no idea how to navigate,” Schneiderman said. “That had to have been one of the worst periods of our lives for sure.”
Moving ahead toward an uncertain future
A state law signed by Gov. Jared Polis this spring more than doubles facility school funding and seeks to make it easier to open new schools. Parents, advocates and special education experts all say that meeting the needs of some of Colorado’s most vulnerable children will require more than just saving the schools. Families need more options all along the spectrum of inclusion and separation, and children need more care as they make precarious transitions from one setting to another.
Schneiderman’s son did so well at Tennyson Center
in Denver that everyone agreed he should go to public middle school, she said. But even with a dedicated teacher in a small program for students with disabilities, his meltdowns returned. Schneiderman began getting calls again to pick him up midday.
The controlled environment at Tennyson had made it hard to predict how or if her son might struggle once he returned to public school, she said.
Partway through seventh grade, an advocate suggested Schneiderman’s son try something different. Evoke Behavioral Health is not a facility school, but a private day treatment program specializing in a type of intervention called applied behavioral analysis, or ABA. Evoke calls itself a “school alternative.”
Evoke, she said, has been life-changing. Now that she’s not picking her son up midday, she’s able to work full-time again. And her goofy 13-year-old eighthgrader, who loves video games, science fiction audiobooks and skiing with his parents, is thriving.
But that progress means his time at Evoke is coming to an end.
Because he’s doing so well, Schneiderman said the school district wants him back in public school.
“As a parent, that is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying,” Schneiderman said. “There’s no in-between options that we can find. We can’t figure out what our next step is.”