Three separate programs serving students with special needs will be housed this coming school year at Gilpin Montessori, a northeast Denver elementary school closed for poor performance, while Denver Public Schools considers a long-term use for the building.
Two of the programs are run by DPS. The third, called The Laradon School, is run by a Denver nonprofit. It serves students with disabilities from DPS and more than a dozen other school districts whose needs are greater than the districts’ abilities to meet them.
The school’s 70 students, who are ages 5 to 21, will start attending classes at the Gilpin building July 10 while Laradon’s campus in the Globeville neighborhood is being renovated.
The nonprofit will pay a fee that represents the cost of building operations and maintenance for the portion of the building it’s using, said DPS spokeswoman Jessie Smiley. That fee is being negotiated, she said. Laradon students are expected to stay at Gilpin until June 2018.
The two DPS programs are also expected to stay for the 2017-18 school year.
The DPS Transitions Program helps special education students ages 18 to 21 who have completed the necessary credits to graduate high school with post-secondary education, employment and independent living. The program is currently housed in multiple locations and the temporary move to Gilpin is an effort to consolidate, Smiley said.
The DPS Middle School Affective Needs Intensive Center Program is a small program for students with mental health, behavioral and cognitive needs. It currently shares space with another program that is seeing increasing enrollment, Smiley said.
DPS will continue to evaluate other locations for both programs over the next year, she said.
The Denver school board voted in December to close Gilpin Montessori and two other low-performing elementary schools under a new policy that takes several years of student test scores into account. The other two schools, Amesse and Greenlee, will be replaced by programs the board has deemed more likely to succeed.
The board decided not to replace Gilpin with another elementary program because of low enrollment. Gilpin Montessori shuttered for good when school let out earlier this month.
DPS is “committed to collaborating with stakeholders to solidify a long-term use plan” for the Gilpin building, Smiley said. A plan for community participation and decision-making is still being finalized, she said, but the goal is to begin engaging the community in mid-July to help create a request for proposals for a long-term use starting in fall 2018.