This story by Rae Ellen Bichell and Helen Santoro appeared on Chalkbeat Colorado on May 12, 2023. We are sharing it in two parts.
At first glance, nothing seems particularly unusual about the four-room school in the western Colorado city of Grand Junction.
Inside, six students are learning about radioactivity. The walls of their classroom are plastered with motivational messages like “Determination” and “Courage” scribbled onto paper cutouts of stars and moons.
A closer look reveals that Hilltop Day Treatment is no ordinary school. There are no backpacks or lockers. Students are escorted to the restroom. Hugs aren’t allowed, a precaution against inappropriate touching by students who do not yet understand physical boundaries. And before lunch, the students break from their regular lessons for group therapy.
Hilltop is a facility school, Colorado’s term for specialized institutions that serve students with severe behavioral, mental health, or special education needs when their public schools can’t. And this school, with 12 students, is the last of its kind on the Western Slope, the vast territory west of the Continental Divide home to 10% of the state’s population. The other 29 facility schools are in the more heavily populated Front Range corridor.
“It breaks our heart to have a waitlist,” said Hollie VanRoosendaal, director of community programs at Hilltop Community Resources, the organization that runs the Hilltop Day Treatment school. “We really want to get those kids in and seen and getting their education towards their graduation as well as some really great therapeutic services.”
Disability rights and mental health advocates say facility schools are overused and can become dumping grounds for students with disabilities. But in rural Colorado, when the local school district can’t meet a student’s needs, the lack of spots in facility schools can mean students end up at home learning online, languishing in mental health facilities, or attending a residential school far from home.
Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law this spring that provides funds to prop up facility schools and strengthen services for students with severe needs in rural districts. But the sparse population and vast distances of the Western Slope and Eastern Plains mean serving these vulnerable students will likely remain a challenge.
“There are no services there. And so you get one student with autism that comes into this little tiny district, what’s going to happen? That child is not going to get what he or she needs, and they’re too far away from the Front Range,” said Barb Taylor, an educator turned consultant who serves as special education director for several Colorado facility schools.
According to a report submitted to lawmakers, among the main reasons students could not be placed at a facility school were lack of openings and, in rural areas, “prohibitive geographic location.”
A few rural patches of the state have figured out alternatives to serve students closer to home. For example, the Santa Fe Trail Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, started the Southeast Alternative Learning Academy in La Junta for students in the eastern plains with emotional and behavioral problems.
But few other BOCES, regional associations of school districts that pool resources to provide services they would not be able to alone, have managed to start such programs.
Instead, across much of rural Colorado, “we have people that are trying to work with these kids that are not qualified or that are not trained, that don’t have the skills that they need to be able to do that in the district,” said Sandy Malouff, executive director and special education director of the Santa Fe Trail BOCES.
In the western half of the state, Sonjia Hunt, director of Hilltop Day Treatment school, said she has watched facility schools scale down or close: first in Rifle, then in Whitewater, Delta, Durango, and, last year, one inside a Glenwood Springs hospital.
After operating in the red for years, Hilltop had to scale back as well, shutting down its 16-bed residential facility in October 2020. Now, students on the Western Slope who require residential treatment must travel across the Rockies, if not out of state, Hunt said.
The new state law will allow Hilltop to hire another teacher, case manager, and therapist, and take on 12 more students, Hunt said. But Hilltop doesn’t plan to reopen its residential side.
When the residential facility closed, surrounding communities struggled to make up the loss, said Tammy Johnson, executive director of the Uncompahgre BOCES, which serves five rural western districts.
“There’s a big difference between being an educational entity and a therapeutic entity. We just don’t have the training that we need to meet these kids’ needs,” said Johnson.
Riley George, a 12-year-old with autism and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, has had to cross a mountain range to get an education. After enrolling in and leaving multiple schools, Riley now lives in a residential facility in Colorado Springs, more than three hours from his home in Del Norte.
The slight preteen, whose tufty hair sticks up in the wind like a thistle, is an avid reader who tears through 400-page science fiction books.
He loves his dog and Baby Yoda, a character from the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian. He goes for walks with one of his little sisters and plays action figures with his little brother. On a good day, said his mother, Kelly George, he’s “a good, respectful kid” who has no trouble getting himself ready for school.
But Riley’s brain works faster than his hands, which can make tasks like writing or tying shoelaces feel frustratingly insurmountable. He is only now learning how to play make-believe with others cooperatively, something other children tend to learn at a much younger age. And seemingly small things, like an itchy tag on his clothes, or loud noises, like his sister’s happy shrieks, can send him to a bad place.
“When he was younger, he would cover his ears and just immediately hit the floor and start screaming like he was in pain,” said George.
Now that he’s older, overload leads to aggression: hitting, cursing, kicking. “We had to design a code word for the other kids,” said George, to signal to her three younger children to barricade themselves in a room while the parents try to calm the eldest.
From preschool through second grade, Riley attended Bill Metz Elementary School in Monte Vista, one town over from where his family lives. Riley remembered how his teachers there gave him space when he was upset, as on the day his dog ran away. His special education teacher, Kellyn Ross, remembered him complimenting the cafeteria staff for a “divine” lunch.
Riley was in the Pokémon Club and could earn points for good behavior that he could redeem for prizes. Riley and Ross developed a system to help him identify his feelings and others’, and to take a break when needed.
Monte Vista School District Superintendent Scott Wiedeman said the school takes a proactive approach to encouraging positive behavior in all students.
But when Ross got a promotion, the school couldn’t find someone with enough experience to fill her spot, and they were at capacity with special education students. In the decade since Ross had started as a special education teacher, her caseload had doubled. So, they had to send out-of-district students, including Riley, back to their neighborhood schools.
“The kicker is just having the resources,” Wiedeman said. “We need more people to deal with the mental health of students. That’s a big factor.”
After that, Riley started lashing out at others. The calls home ratcheted up, as did the use of force at school to restrain him.