Since the pandemic, mental health resources have been amped up to serve Colorado’s youths

San Juan Basin Public Health has been running a public awareness campaign to help reduce the stigma around mental health. The Attorney General’s report identified that stigma around mental health issues persists. Jerry McBride/Durango Herald file

In 2021, the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration passed House Bill 21-1258 to provide rapid mental health care to Colorado youths. Since then, the program I Matter has flourished.

Paul Barnett, director of Child Youth and Family Behavioral Health with BHA, has overseen the program, which has served almost 9,000 youths and completed 35,000 therapy sessions statewide through July.

I Matter provides free and temporary mental health services for anyone 18 years and younger and 21 years and younger if they receive special education services. They do not have to be enrolled in school.

The program was a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve seen through the pandemic mental health and substance abuse problems across the board,” Barnett said. “For a while, substance abuse decreased for kids and increased for adults, but it’s now leveling out.”

Barnett said people can go through the website and quickly be screened to sign up. It is not a full mental health assessment, which can create barriers, such as financial or social stigmas. No one who signs up will be denied, and it gets kids connected to something with a positive experience.

“Because it’s quick access with low barriers, it provides a level of service that is accessible,” Barnett said. “If more serious issues occur, they can be referred to a more intense service.”

Roughly 206 therapists are contracted through BHA. Some of them have their own private practice, and some work through mental health agencies.

Barnett emphasizes that if it seems there is no parental involvement in the client’s life, the clinician is mandated to make sure everything is OK at the client’s home. They are obligated to report abuse and neglect.

I Matter offers six free therapy sessions in person or remote, depending on what the client prefers. If the client favors in person it would be in the therapist’s office, depending on the location since there might not be an available in person therapist in certain areas.

Once on the website, a couple of buttons lead to the rapid screening. If the client is 11 or younger, a parent must complete the survey. Youths 12 and older can fill the survey by themselves. After completing the screening, a webpage will allow them to search for therapists and view their profiles, including expertise, philosophies and other values, allowing potential clients to pick who they would like to see.

I Matter is funded through 2024. The legislature says up to three sessions will be provided, but Barnett said the program has enough money to allow six.

“We’ve provided more than six on occasion if the clinician says their client needs a few more before transition,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone has had more than eight.”

I Matter tracks how many kids finish therapy and how many are referred for other services, including higher level of care, crisis services and basic needs services. Barnett said very few kids – one to two per month – are referred for higher levels of care or crisis services.

The program has been advertised in every county across Colorado, although in some counties nobody has used the service.

Since the program’s beginning and up through July 2023, I Matter has served 24 Montezuma County youths.

“It seems somewhat ahead than other (similar) counties,” Barnett said. “Some of the regions are underserved. Because of this health access (in Montezuma County) we’re doing good.”

In comparison, four to six Denver communities have served close to 1,000 clients, as well as Adams County. Boulder County and similar counties have served a few hundred clients. More than 20 counties have numbers in the single digits, and San Juan County hasn’t served anyone.

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By John Herrick, Boulder Reporting Lab (Via AP Storyshare)

In 2021, Colorado lawmakers passed a law that restricts holding people with a diagnosed mental illness in solitary confinement, part of a push in legislatures across the country to curb a practice that can have severe mental health consequences.

The law, which took effect July 1, prohibits jails with more than 400 beds from putting people with a diagnosed mental illness into “restrictive housing” — another term for solitary confinement — except under limited circumstances. Restrictive housing is when a person is locked alone in a cell for more than 22 hours per day, according to the law.

For those placed in restrictive housing, the law requires jail staff and medical professionals to frequently check on them. A court order is required to keep someone isolated for more than 15 days — an amount of time the United Nations has deemed torture.

The law does not aim to prevent people with a mental illness from ending up in jail — it only seeks to make life behind bars less harmful for them.

Despite having two years to prepare, Boulder County Jail officials are struggling to implement the new law, citing design limitations with the crowded jail as well as staffing shortages. As a result, some mentally ill people are still spending all day long in their cells.

“The general principle behind [the law], we fully embrace,” Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson told Boulder Reporting Lab. “The challenge for us is some of the implementation.”

More than half of the people in the Boulder County Jail have a clinically diagnosed mental health disorder — schizophrenia, bipolar, depression — according to jail officials. More are likely undiagnosed. Long-term isolation, research shows, worsens a mental illness, causes psychological damage and can increase the risk of self-harm or suicide.

According to jail officials, people are typically held in restrictive housing as a form of punishment, for personal protection, or when there is no other place to put them. In the Boulder County Jail, more than a dozen people may be in restrictive housing on any given day, according to jail records. The 543-bed jail currently holds 470 people, according to state data.

When people are placed in restrictive housing, jail officials typically allow them out one at a time for safety reasons. The jail is vulnerable to civil lawsuits if someone is hurt while in their custody.

But allowing people out of their cells one person at a time creates a logistical challenge, according to jail officials. The jail, which was built in 1987, is divided into separate communal areas. On some days, in certain sections of the jail, there may not be enough hours in a day to allow everyone out for two hours per day.

Jeff Goetz, the jail’s division chief, said people are being offered time out of their cells on a rotating basis. Even so, for some people, their only out-of-cell time comes in the late evening or early hours of the morning. Typically, people use that time to call family, exercise or shower.

“Who are you going to call at 2 in the morning? Who are you going to talk to?” Goetz said. “Some don’t want to come out.”

Separately, since the law took effect this month, at least five people with a diagnosed mental illness have had their out-of-cell time cut short “due to their behavioral issues,” Goetz said.

All were on a waitlist to receive a competency evaluation or restoration, a form of mental health treatment to make people aware of their legal rights so they can have their cases adjudicated. All were still presumed innocent.

‘Our health community is failing’

The challenges described by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office reveal just how ill-equipped jails are to care for those who are among the most in need of mental health treatment, advocates say.

Vincent Atchity, president and CEO at Mental Health Colorado, an advocacy organization that lobbied in support of the 2021 restrictive housing bill, said the pushback from jail officials is an indication they simply cannot live up to the “humane standards” set by the law.

“They can’t do it. They don’t have the tools to do it,” Atchity said. “All they have are the carceral tools, not the human tools of a civil health care setting.”

He said sheriffs have been put in an “impossible situation” of having to care for people with a mental illness. Colorado has one of the highest rates of adult mental illness and the least access to care in the nation.

“Someone who is that ill and has not been convicted of any crime needs to be held safely, securely and humanely in a setting that is entirely focused on their health,” Atchity said. “And our health community is failing to meet that need.”

The 2021 law isn’t the only one that has sought to change solitary confinement practices. In 2014, Colorado banned isolating prisoners with certain mental health conditions in solitary confinement. That law was a response to the 2013 murder of Colorado’s former director of the Department of Corrections, Tom Clements, who was shot and killed at his doorstep by a man who spent much of his eight years of incarceration in solitary confinement.

In 2021, Rep. Judy Amabile, of Boulder, helped pass the law on restrictive housing. In 2022, at the request of the County Sheriffs of Colorado, she amended the law to give county sheriffs an extra year to come into compliance.
“I’m really disappointed,” Amabile told Boulder Reporting Lab in response to the concerns raised by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.

Officials representing county sheriff’s offices in Denver County, Douglas County, Mesa County and Weld County, said they are in compliance with the law. Preparing for the law required a “significant amount of collaboration and planning” between jail and mental health officials, according to a spokesperson for the Denver County Jail.

‘We can’t do it’ 

According to Boulder County Jail officials, one way to allow more people out of their cells for two hours each day is to subdivide the communal areas. And the jail theoretically has the money to do that.

Boulder County voters in 2018 approved a sales tax generating about $10 million per year for “jail modernization” renovations and to build a new alternative sentencing facility, primarily to hold people who are on work release or in community corrections. Last week, county officials broke ground on the $35.6 million project. Construction is projected to take 18 months, according to the county.

The sheriff’s office has used some of the sales tax revenue to divide up day-use areas in the jail, officials said. Much of the rest of the money has gone to building administrative offices and replacing old pipes and kitchen infrastructure. The sheriff’s office plans to build a new intake facility, too.

Separately, county commissions in 2022 approved nearly $1 million to allow the sheriff’s office to subdivide other communal spaces in the jail, in part to comply with the 2021 law on restrictive housing. Construction is yet to begin, in part due to crowding in the jail, officials said.

“I can’t send the inmates somewhere while that construction is going on. They’ve got to come in and jackhammer the floor, they’ve got to use epoxies and other paints and solvents. Inmates can’t live there while that’s going on,” Goetz said. “We can’t do it.”

‘We’re struggling to figure out the balance’

Under the law, jail staff are also required to check in on people held in restrictive housing twice per hour — or every 15 minutes if the person shows “unusual or bizarre behavior” or suicidality. Mental health professionals are required to evaluate people every day on their psychological health and every two days for “need for ongoing placement in restrictive housing.”

To help implement this requirement, county commissioners last year allocated $428,000 for the sheriff to hire four mental health counselors. They have hired one. The jail also has 14 open positions for jail staff, Johnson said.
Given the staffing constraints, Johnson said the mandated documentation and frequent check-ins for people in restrictive housing could take time away from the jail’s behavioral health and reentry programs.

“The challenge is a 15-minute checkup to check on all these people, or investing real time to try to make real assessments and change with people. We don’t have enough staff to do both,” Johnson said. “We’re struggling to figure out the balance that will allow us to meet the law but not at the sacrifice of the programming, care and treatment that we’ve been providing here prior to this bill.”

Separately, in an effort to get more people with a mental health condition out of jail and into treatment, in certain situations, the law requires officers to offer to bring people to a hospital. Goetz said local hospitals might turn them away at the door or discharge them hours later. And others, according to Goetz, may end up hitting someone at the hospital and ending up with another criminal charge and coming back to jail.

Over the next several months, it’s unclear what jail officials will do to fully implement the law.

If the jail staff fail to comply, they may be vulnerable to civil lawsuits.

Jail officials said a process is already in place to obtain court orders to hold people in restrictive housing for more than 15 days. The sheriff’s office expects to apply for at least four such orders as soon as this week.

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More than half of Colorado lawmakers received perfect scores for their work addressing mental health issues during the 2023 legislative session. 

The advocacy organization Mental Health Colorado released its annual legislative scorecard on Thursday. In addition to grading each lawmaker, the report applauded the session, as a whole, for taking steps to “remove systemic barriers to care and improve the quality of health services.”  

“For too long, Colorado has lagged far behind when it comes to ensuring everyone in our state can access timely, high quality, affordable mental health and substance use services,” said Mental Health Colorado CEO Vincent Atchity. “Thankfully, Colorado lawmakers have been working hard to address this crisis, as evidenced by the 58 lawmakers who received perfect scores.”

This year’s scorecard graded lawmakers based on their votes on six bills that were passed and signed into law during the 2023 legislative session: 

• Senate Bill 174 (support): Requires Medicaid to cover behavioral health care for members under the age of 21 without a formal diagnosis. 
• House Bill 1013 (support): Restricts the use of clinical four-point restraints in prisons beginning in 2027. 
• House Bill 1268 (support): Streamlines access to substance use treatment for people serving a criminal sentence in Colorado for a conviction in another state. 
• Senate Bill 176 (support): Prohibits insurance providers from denying coverage of eating disorder treatment due to weight standards, and restricts the sale of diet pills to minors.
• House Bill 1003 (support): Creates a mental health assessment program for Colorado middle and high school students. 
• House Bill 1167 (support): Extends Good Samaritan immunity to people reporting or seeking aid for substance overdoses. 

The scorecard also considered lawmakers’ positions on two bills that failed to pass the legislature: 

• Senate Bill 109 (oppose): Would have made distributing drugs a Level 1 felony if it results in a user’s death and weighs more than a certain amount. 
• House Bill 1202 (support): Would have let local governments allow sites where people can use illegal drugs under supervision of medical professionals. 

Mental Health Colorado gave 58 lawmakers scores of 100%, meaning they voted with the organization’s stance on all eight of the bills. The 58 lawmakers who received perfect scores were all Democrats, 42 of whom were in the House. 

The organization honored four lawmakers specifically, recognizing them as “legislators of the year.”

Democrat Rep. Meghan Lukens of Steamboat Springs, Republican Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Republican Sen. Byron Pelton of Sterling were all named “Legislators of the Year” for sponsoring HB 1268 — Lukens was also recognized for sponsoring SB 174. Denver Democrat Sen. Julie Gonzales was awarded for defeating and defending substance use-related bills as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Of the four awardees, only Gonzales got a perfect score from Mental Health Colorado this session. Lukens received an 86% and both Evans and Pelton received a 29%.  

Three lawmakers got scores of 0%, meaning they voted against the organization’s stance on all eight bills. All three were House Republicans: Reps. Scott Bottoms of Colorado Springs, Ron Weinberg of Loveland and Don Wilson of Monument. 

The full list of scores for all lawmakers, as well as how they voted on each of the eight bills, is available at mentalhealthcolorado.org.

Mental Health Colorado, founded in 1953, advocates for Coloradans with mental health and substance use conditions. The organization’s board includes Doug Muir, behavioral health initiatives director of Centura Health; Shannon Van Deman, former vice president of Children’s Hospital Colorado’s Pediatric Mental Health Institute; and, Patrick Fox, Medicaid market president of Elevance Health.

The organization has released legislative scorecards each year since 2016.

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Owners Tracy Ulmer, left, and Natalie Sperr, photographed at My Salon Suite in Louisville on Wednesday, reopened in March after closing for nearly four months due to significant water damage in the building. (Cliff Grassmick — Staff Photographer)

Who do we trust with our self image, how we present ourselves to the world and our secrets? Our hairstylist, of course.

My Salon Suite in Louisville, 1075 East South Boulder Road, has reopened after having to close due to a pipe burst during the winter bomb cyclone in December. My Salon Suite is home to 22 suites where individual entrepreneurs can rent out a private suite, manage their own business and work independently while still in the company of like-minded beauty professionals. My Salon offers hair and makeup services.

Natalie Sperr and Tracy Ulmer, co-owners of the My Salon Suite, had known each other for less than a year when they decided to become business partners. They opened the salon suite in September 2019.

“You’re working for yourself, but you’re never working by yourself,” Sperr said.

Sperr and Ulmer take the time to uplift the entrepreneurial spirit. They want to help beauty professionals take control of their life and work, which includes helping them navigate how to run their business.

On Dec. 23, Ulmer said, a pipe burst on the third floor of the building, causing significant damage, although Ulmer and Sperr did not know the full extent of the damage at the time. Ulmer received a phone call telling her the salon had received some water damage, but she laughed it off before she showed up with her family to the salon thinking she could clean up quickly.

“It was really scary and we saw that it was really bad. Oh, and how cute of us to think we could clean it up with a Shop-Vac and a broom,” Ulmer said.

When she realized the extent of the damage, she sent the stylists home because of the unsafe work conditions. And yet, this was not the beginning of their problems.

In Colorado, an asbestos test is required if walls need to be torn down or opened to dry out from a flood. However, by the time Ulmer and Sperr submitted their asbestos test, thousands of people who also experienced some damage from the bomb cyclone in the winter were waiting in line for their test results as well.

“The suites were trashed, just completely trashed. Like a bear had come in, because every time the ceiling fell it knocked down whatever was under it,” Sperr said.

Sperr said the ceiling started to cave under the weight of the water and came down on the suites. Yet Sperr and Ulmer had hope the place could reopen quickly. However, they realized because they could not properly dry out the inside of the walls, Sperr and Ulmer made the hard decision to completely shut down and rebuild.

However, the co-owners were not going to let the stylists face the unexpected tragedy alone. Sperr and Ulmer made sure to call other local salon suites to get stylists a temporary space to work in, helped pack up suites and offered a shoulder to cry on. Sperr noted that despite the tragedy of losing the workplace and income, people came together as a community.

“It was heartbreaking, there were tears and hugs. But it also was like the day that this felt more like a community because people really came together in support of each other,” Sperr said.

My Salon Suite temporarily closed on Dec. 30 and didn’t reopen until late March. Floors were torn up, walls were torn down, and the salon was completely rebuilt.

Denai Ortiz, of Denai’s Hair Design, was one of the first to relocate back to the salon. When Ortiz started at My Salon Suites, it was the first time she was working for herself. She thanks Sperr and Ulmer for helping her with the process of navigating a business and making sure she felt safe and comfortable in her suite.

“It was nice to be back. The clients feel comfortable and safe, like they’re back home,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz said it was hard to have to relocate temporarily, as some clients had to miss their regular hair visit and hair is often tied to self expression and identity. Clients and stylists build a connection, and it is difficult to get knocked out of the regular routine. Clients also grow comfortable in Ortiz’s Harry Potter-themed private salon. It is hard for clients to see the stylist struggle and hard for stylists to see clients not fully happy with their appearance.

Not to mention, the salon is Ortiz’s job and income and dealing with insurance to help pay for damages is time-consuming, confusing and exhausting.

Rebecca Robb, of The Colour and the Shape salon, said having to close and temporarily relocate was hard and completely unexpected. She joked that “Dante forgot about moving when he wrote about the inferno.” Robb noted despite the bad situation, every stylist at the salon came together and found temporary work at different salons or suites.

“My clients wouldn’t follow me to the ends of the earth, but definitely the ends of the Denver metro area,” Robb said.

Clients and stylists build a strong relationship and become friends, and Robb’s clients were glad to be able to move back into My Salon Suites. Robb explained because she is in a private suite, clients feel more comfortable and relaxed.

More information about My Salon Suite stylists and services or how to lease a suite is available on its website at mysalonsuite.com.

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Facility schools are intended to act as temporary programs of last resort to stabilize students so they can successfully return to their home schools. Yet, the state does not keep track of how many students return to regular school or how many eventually graduate.

The state requires facility school students to take its standardized tests, but does not provide individual school results, citing student privacy because the classes are so small.

The schools exist at the intersection of the educational, mental health and juvenile justice systems. Multiple state agencies are responsible for monitoring the schools, but those visits in some cases happen only every two years and reports from the state education and human services departments aren’t readily available to the public. The Colorado Sun and Chalkbeat Colorado filed multiple requests under public records laws to receive reports, some of which were redacted, that offer a glimpse into the facility school environment. 

Maintaining separate schools for children who act out aggressively, frequently run from school, or have severe medical or intellectual needs is controversial, with some parents and disability rights advocates questioning whether they are holding centers for kids with behavior problems. It’s clear Colorado needs more facility schools to accommodate the growing number of children with behavioral health struggles, but advocates also want enough information to ensure kids are safe and learning. 

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaStudent artwork decorates a classroom at Skyline Academy on April 21, 2023, in Denver. Skyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education. Skyline’s campus has a capacity of 24 total students.

‘We don’t really have a choice but to make them better’

The prime sponsor of the new law that will pour an additional $18 million into facility schools next year, increasing their funding by 2.6 times what’s in current law, agrees that Colorado needs more data about whether facility schools are working. Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat and chair of the Joint Budget Committee, hopes her legislation will force the various state agencies that oversee the schools to cooperate and report better data on outcomes within a few years. It also requires that schools earn accreditation in order to receive state funding through the new law.

“There are some facilities where we do question whether they are simply warehousing kids and whether they offer good programming,” said Pamela Bisceglia, executive director of Advocacy Denver, which speaks up for Denver Public Schools children with special needs. She has visited several facility schools over the years with parents who are deciding where to place their children. Some are clean, calm and excelling at teaching children, she said. And some are not. 

Bisceglia recalled visiting one Denver school where children ages 5-17 were all in the same room, some lying on the floor, no one interacting with each other, while several staff members in the room were scrolling on their phones. 

“They were simply trying to keep them from hurting themselves or others,” she said. “There wasn’t any learning going on. There wasn’t any individualized therapy.” 

The Arc Pikes Peak Region believes all children should attend their neighborhood schools rather than facility schools where they end up cut off from their peers, said Connie McKenzie, an advocate for children with disabilities. If children do end up in a facility school, their time there should be temporary, with the goal that they will gain skills so they can return to their neighborhood school. 

“In actuality, I don’t think that happens as often as anyone would like,” McKenzie said. “In my experience, a lot of times when kids are sent to facility schools, they never return to their neighborhood schools. Sometimes it’s a moving target for them to try to meet to get back into that neighborhood school. Sometimes they just never learn the skills that the school feels that they need.”

Maureen Welch, a member of a task force that studied facility schools for the past year and whose son attended one, said Colorado needs “a lot of light and sunshine” to illuminate the process of approving facility schools in the next few years. She wants to make sure the state is bringing in quality programs ranging from small, neighborhood startups that serve a handful of students with related issues, to large, national operations. 

“We need to actually have them learn and move forward,” Welch said. “Yes it’s expensive, but we don’t really have a choice but to make them better. What are we going to do? Put these kids in the correctional system? There is no place to put them because there are not institutions anymore. We will always have a population of kids that can’t be served in a public school district situation.”

Under the new law, schools must receive accreditation based on recommendations from the state facility school board, a panel created in 2008. Board chairperson Steven Ramirez did not return multiple requests for comment from The Colorado Sun and its partners. 

The Office of Facility Schools, within the Colorado Department of Education, pushed back on the characterization that facility schools are just a place to keep kids that school districts don’t want to deal with anymore. 

“Are there facilities somewhere out there that exist that maybe aren’t being as effective as they need to be or warehousing kids? I don’t think we can eliminate that as a possibility,” said Paul Foster, the executive director of exceptional student services for the education department. “I think we can pretty safely say if they’re in our facility school system, that that’s not the case.”

If it were the case, he said, monitoring visits by the department would have turned up “serious or even egregious” violations instead of the more pedestrian problems that they more commonly find.

Facility schools are not rated based on their test scores in the same way that traditional public schools are, Foster said. While students at facility schools are required to take state standardized tests, state officials take into account that students have “unique and pretty significant needs — and that’s why they’re in a facility school setting,” Foster said.

Callan Ware, the executive director of student services for Englewood Schools, a small district south of Denver, said that when she sends a student to a facility school, it’s because their behavior is so dysregulated — they’re skipping class, getting kicked out, or harming themselves — that they struggle to concentrate and learn. 

“While we do absolutely have academic expectations of facility schools, the No. 1 goal is, let’s learn the skills you need to be successful in a public setting,” Ware said.

She recalled one student who struggled with boundaries and impulsiveness and who routinely got sent home from public school for touching other students in class. After less than a year of daily therapy in a facility school, the student “totally turned it around,” she said. His engagement in academic tasks skyrocketed and when he returned to public school, “we could see the kind of student he could be because he wasn’t getting kicked out of class all the time.”

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaAn art and multipurpose room at Skyline Academy is seen on April 21, 2023, in Denver. Skyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education.

Human services reports reveal safety issues involving cleaning chemicals, restraints

The job of ensuring students are safe and getting a quality education in facility schools falls to multiple state agencies. 

The Colorado Department of Education is charged with making sure the schools are following curriculum guidelines and the components of students’ individualized special education plans. The state Department of Human Services, which includes the child protection division, monitors schools to make sure students are safe. Human Services licenses schools in day-treatment or residential centers, while the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment licenses those in hospitals. 

When Colorado lawmakers implemented the Office of Facility Schools at the state education department in 2008, they ordered the office to create curriculum standards, graduation guidelines and an accountability system for the schools. While those standards were written, some of the performance data isn’t tracked or is not easily accessible to the public. 

In response to a records request, the Colorado Department of Education provided average standardized test scores across all facility schools — they are lower than the state average, which state officials attributed to their intense behavioral health needs. Colorado’s strict student privacy law requires redacting data about small student groups, and the state wouldn’t provide any test data for individual schools. 

The Colorado Sun and its partners gleaned what data we could by seeking documents under state open records laws. The state doesn’t track graduation rates or keep a count of how many students return to their home districts after attending a facility school. The Department of Human Services charged $90 for redacted reports on child safety. One police department said it would cost $4,700 for copies of reports that could shed light on why police were called so frequently to a facility school and the residential center where it’s housed in Colorado Springs. 

The state human services department conducts regular inspections of schools in day-treatment and residential centers, focusing on whether children’s rights are protected. When the division receives a complaint about the way a child was restrained or injured, a state monitor investigates to determine if the school violated state regulations regarding child abuse or neglect. The Colorado Sun reviewed a year’s worth of school monitoring documents after receiving redacted reports through state open records laws. 

The reports shed light on the often chaotic, and at times unsafe, environment at schools for students with a history of behavior problems deemed too much for regular schools to manage. 

Mount Saint Vincent, a Denver day treatment center with a school, was cited last summer after a child was able to get ahold of cleaning chemicals and spray them at staff, sending a worker to the emergency room with possible eye and inhalation injuries. 

The school was cited again in September after a father of one of the students complained about a red mark on his child that he said was from being held down by staff members on a “hot sidewalk.” A state report says the child threw a water bottle and began hitting two workers after being told to complete math before playing. The staff members restrained the child in a supine hold, face up on a paved courtyard, as the child screamed “Let my arm go” and “The concrete hurts.” 

Tennyson Center, another Denver day treatment center, was cited in January for failing to supervise a child who had a known history of cutting herself. The girl hurt herself in a bathroom after staff failed to check on her, according to one Colorado Department of Human Services report.

Devereux Cleo Wallace, which has a day treatment school in Westminster that is closing at the end of this school year, was investigated after a worker chased after and collided with a child running toward a maintenance shed containing tools. 

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaAn elementary classroom at Skyline Academy on April 21, 2023, in Denver. Skyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education. Skyline’s campus has a capacity of 24 total students.

12 schools cited by education department in past five years

In the past five years, the Colorado Department of Education has ordered 12 facility schools to take corrective action for violations ranging from not uploading individualized special education plan documents, using curriculum not aligned to state standards, and cutting into academic time by pulling students out of class for therapy, according to monitoring and corrective action reports reviewed by Chalkbeat Colorado

Five of those 12 schools are closed now. That means seven of the 30 facility schools currently operating — or about 23% — have had violations in the past five years. Most were addressed by the next time state monitors visited.

Poplar Way Academy, inside a behavioral health hospital in Littleton, was cited for cluttered and dirty learning areas, “minimal structure,” and lots of downtime for the 17 students who were there when the monitors visited last June.

“Students had control over the radio and music was playing loudly as they worked,” said the report, which was by far the most egregious of 88 monitoring reports reviewed for this story. “There were no redirections for inappropriate language or behaviors, and students were often left unsupervised or allowed to walk out of the classroom with no redirection. Inappropriate boundaries were noted among students,” who were male and female.

The school is different from most in that it’s for teenagers who have been admitted to a hospital on mental health holds, meaning they were deemed a danger to themselves or others. The average length of stay is just four to five days, the report says. 

The school’s director of special education, Deon Roberts, said that since state officials’ last visit, the school has hired more teachers, increased staff training and expanded the curriculum. The school is “committed to continuous improvement while providing much-needed educational services to a challenging population of students,” she said in an email. 

The majority of the violations, however, are for “quick fixes” that schools can address with more training or resources, said Judy Stirman, director of facility schools at the state education department. 

State education officials try to help schools with a background in mental health treatment understand their educational obligations, said Foster, with the state education department. “If I’m a therapist or someone at a facility school, I’m looking at the whole package, and so I may not understand that the school side of it has committed to a certain plan for this child in addition to the treatment plan you’re doing.

“Special education is pretty technical, so you can have technical violations,” he said. “Don’t hear me say that technical violations don’t need to be treated seriously. But a technical violation that is quickly remedied is not usually harmful to the student.”

Facility schools with violations get a visit each year from a pair of state monitors. Schools without violations get a visit every other year from monitors who use a 98-item checklist. In addition to whether schools are complying with the mounds of federal requirements related to special education, the monitors determine whether teachers are properly licensed and staff are using positive behavior interventions with students and not punitive ones, for example.

The reports provide a window into what the schools look and feel like. Many describe bright classrooms with student artwork on display. They note that most schools use a reward system where students with good behavior earn tickets that they can redeem for prizes. Some schools hold events like talent shows and carnivals. One has a basketball team. Another has a student choir. A few have therapy dogs, gardens, or culinary arts programs.

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaA “chill space” room at Skyline Academy provides a separate space from classrooms where students can seek a darker, quieter environment to emotionally decompress and self-soothe.

Juvenile records laws shield information about safety

Several of Colorado’s facility schools include a mix of students who live at home with their parents and students who are in foster care and live in the residential treatment center that contains the school. 

This clouds transparency about the safety of the schools, since police regularly visit residential centers for young people who might have lived in multiple foster homes and juvenile justice centers. 

Public records requests from The Sun to police departments in Colorado Springs and Denver revealed a constant drumbeat of emergency calls to facility schools or programs housed in the same complexes. 

Between April 2021 and the end of March, for example, Colorado Springs police responded hundreds of times to the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, 10 Farragut Ave., and the residential program across the street, 17 Farragut Ave., police records show.  

More than 100 emergencies were reported at the school, including 18 assaults as well as sexual assaults, threats, harassment, 911 hangups and suicide attempts. The residential facility, where some of the students live, accounted for more than 470 police calls during that period, with dozens more reports of assaults, threats, indecent exposure, missing children and sexual offenses, the records show. 

No details were provided beyond the time, date and nature of each call. Police said a request for more records of those calls would require an estimated $4,700 payment for research and redaction fees.

Managing outbursts and aggressive behavior is nothing new at the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, said Lauren Campbell, the chief operating officer of the Griffith Centers, which runs the school and residential program. 

“Some of that behavior is why these kids — a good portion of them — are here,” Campbell said. “It’s not an ideal piece of learning, clearly, but unfortunately it’s the safest place for most of these students to be in general.” 

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaSkyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education.

When police are called, the children involved in the emergency are separated from other students, so officers aren’t entering classrooms, Campbell said. That minimizes disruptions and allows staff to restore order and return to teaching, she said. 

A threat that might get a child suspended or even kicked out of another school often results in a safety plan involving special accommodations, such as a temporary transfer to a different classroom.   

Campbell said calls to police had increased in the past two years, citing a staffing shortage that made it harder for workers to defuse conflicts on their own.

The campus used to operate five residential centers, housing up to 40 children. But they closed all but one after the passage of the federal Family First Prevention Services Act, which pushed states to send fewer children to residential care.

The closures reduced the campus staff by roughly 50%, and the only remaining residential center was reserved for the kids with the severest needs, leading to more frequent calls for help, Campbell said.

Still, the emphasis remains on keeping children safe, and on campus. 

“They end up in less troublesome situations than in a school setting,” she said. “We’re less likely to press charges than a school would. If they’re here, we’re not suspending them, either.” 

In Denver, police similarly logged thousands of calls per year to facility schools or the complexes housing them, also for reports of assaults, missing children and various disturbances, records show. But Denver police declined to provide incident or arrest reports that would disclose more detail, citing a state law meant to protect juveniles’ privacy.

McKenzie, with The Arc Pikes Peak Region, worries Colorado isn’t doing enough to make sure kids at facility schools are safe.

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaAn elementary classroom at Skyline Academy on April 21, 2023, in Denver. Skyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education. Skyline’s campus has a capacity of 24 total students.

“There isn’t that oversight,” said McKenzie, who advocates for a handful of families each year whose kids end up attending facility schools, noting some students are terrified of returning to one. 

“They were afraid,” she said. “They were legitimately afraid of what was going to happen to them if they went back to a place where they felt they had been abused.”

Becky Miller Updike, director of the Colorado Association of Family and Children’s Agencies, which represents some of the largest youth treatment facilities in Colorado, is hopeful that this year’s legislation will set facility schools on a trajectory of better funding and more accountability. 

“With this new investment from the legislature, facility schools will now track data and access technical assistance more robustly than ever before,” she said. “We will have new ways to measure what’s working and what’s not.” 

Zenzinger’s legislation requires multiple state agencies to work together to help current schools function better and new ones open. 

“Facility schools don’t neatly live under one department. That’s why they are such a challenge,” she said. “We are definitely mandating a new level of cooperation between these different departments so that they are each doing their part.” 

As part of the new accreditation requirements, schools will have to report additional data showing student outcomes, and the new law provides funding for data collection because “we absolutely would like to track things a little bit better,” Zenzinger said. A task force that has studied facility schools for the last year and made recommendations ahead of Zenzinger’s legislation will continue to meet and help determine what data the schools are required to report. 

“We want them to be accredited and deliver good quality public education,” she said. “Obviously they aren’t traditional schools. You are not going to have passing periods and a full schedule every day. But we want to make sure that children in facility schools are able to graduate and go on to college and have productive lives.”

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaSkyline Academy, a day treatment facility for students in 1st through 8th grade, serves youth who may benefit from social-emotional learning and other therapeutic approaches to education.

One child out of 11 returned to a regular school

On a recent day at Skyline Academy in Denver, elementary school children read quietly at their desks as a flat-screen television at the front of their classroom played soothing music and showed a trickling waterfall. 

The desks at Skyline, which is run by Denver’s community mental health center WellPower, have bungee rubber bands that stretch from one chair leg to the other so kids can put their feet on them and bounce as they study fractions or read aloud. Each child gets a plastic rainbow wiggle slug they silently twist and curl in their palm, helping them relieve anxiety. Children can use standing desks or “wobbly” stools inside of regular chairs. There is a “chill room” and a “peace room” containing bean bags and swings where students can hang out if the classroom gets too stressful. 

The classrooms, decorated with cheerful colors and maps, are on one side of the building of the Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-Being. On the other side are the mental health center’s counseling offices where children get individual and family therapy. 

The school has a capacity for 24, yet only 14 desks are full — even as school districts across Colorado are scrambling to find spaces for children whose needs are beyond what they can handle.

Program manager Erica Edewaard said that’s because many of the children who’ve been referred to Skyline in recent months have behavioral issues more intense than even Skyline can accommodate. Some of the kids referred by school districts, she said, need residential treatment. 

Skyline, not far from busy Martin Luther King and Colorado boulevards, won’t accept children who repeatedly run away because they could get hit by cars. Under state law, schools like Skyline are not allowed to lock their doors and staff are prohibited from physically restraining students unless there is imminent risk of danger to themselves or others. Skyline also won’t typically take kids with a history of destroying property or assaulting teachers or other students, especially if they are nearly the same size as Edewaard’s staff. 

“I also have to take into consideration the size of the student relative to the size of my staff,” Edewaard said. “If I’m always relying on just my two tallest staff members, that’s going to burn them out really quickly.”

The goal at Skyline is that students learn to cope with their anxiety, depression or attention disorder so they are able to function and learn in a regular classroom. For most, however, a direct transition to regular school is not that easy.

Eleven students have left Skyline in the past year, according to data provided by the school. Three students left for hospitalization or a residential treatment program, one “aged out” and a handful of others went to other step-down or specialized school programs. 

Only one returned to a regular classroom.

Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for AmericaArtwork decorates Skyline Academy on April 21, 2023, in Denver.

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