It’s a cold and dreary March day, but a group of Manual High School students

are still outside, armed with hoses and buckets. They’re washing cars to raise money for their school, and while they haven’t gotten too many customers, they remain optimistic. As a reporter parks a news van and approaches, the students get excited. “I thought they wanted to come ask us about the car wash,” remem-bers one Manual senior. “But they want-ed to talk about a [shooting] that had happened two days prior.”

“There’s a lot of perception of Manu-al, but it stops at the doors,” says Manual senior Anthony Ruiz. “We’re being por-trayed as failures. In order to see Manual for what it is, you have to come inside.”

As both communities struggle with the proposal at hand, the debate has reached a flash point. Tempers are flar-ing. Both communities have become des-perate. Both schools are at risk of being changed forever.

“Lost, Stolen and Betrayed.”Manual High School opened its

doors in 1896, the oldest high school in Denver. Five years after its doors opened, Manual’s Sephora Joseph became one of the first black female valedictorians in the country, and Manual in turn be-came a symbol of minority excellence throughout the region. It produced some of the most famous African-American and Latino leaders in the Western Unit-ed States. Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, the legendary Chicano activist, poet, and

boxer, graduated Manual in 1945. The first African-American mayor of Den-ver, Wellington Webb, graduated in 1960. The first (and only) African-American mayor of Seattle, the first African-Amer-ican woman to serve on the DPS Board of Education, and renown folk artist and college basketball legend LaVon Williams are all Manual Thunderbolts. The current mayor of Denver, Michael Hancock, was class president of Manual all four years.

“Back in 1969, Bill Cosby made Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed,” says Manual historian Jim McNally. “I’ve been researching this, and I’m starting my own. Manual History: Lost, Stolen and Betrayed.”

How We Got HereIn 1995, a federal judge released

Denver Public Schools from the court-or-dered practice of busing, which mandat-ed where kids went to school in an at-tempt to racially integrate schools. There was no school of choice or neighborhood schools. The most controversial feature were satellites, places outside of a school’s boundary that served as extensions of the area that schools could draw from.

At the time, Manual was partnered with East. At the East/Manual Complex, while students could take classes at either school, they had fierce rivalries in athlet-ic and academic competitions. (“Angel’s can’t fly when there’s Thunder in the sky,” one popular t-shirt read.)

Following the end of busing, the districts for high schools were redrawn.

Manual, whose higher performing and wealthier kids had traditionally come from their Hilltop satellite, now had a boundary of three quarters of a square mile surrounding the school, located in a predominantly minority neighborhood. Minority leaders saw it as an opportunity to strengthen their community.

“Many prominent African American families still regarded Manual as their school,” wrote Alan Gottlieb in a Febru-ary article of ChalkBeat. “Busing had de-prived them of their school since 1973, and they wanted it back.”

What all had failed to realize is how impoverished the area had become. Housing discrimination in the pre-Civil Rights era had created a neighborhood filled with African-Americans of all kinds of income and education levels. But after laws ensuring fair housing were passed, the more affluent African Ameri-can residents of the neighborhood fled to the suburbs, leaving behind a communi-ty that, by the time busing was over, was rife with poverty and troubled students.

The redrawing of the boundary was an extremely controversial issue, creat-ing wounds that still haven’t healed. “The East boundary gets all the kids, and the Manual boundary gets pretty much no one now, because of the fact that you have Bruce Randolph [School], and all these other high schools in the mix,” explains Manual vice principal Vernon Jones. “The only boundary that’s been impacted is the Manual boundary.”

Manual’s student body, of whom

seventy-nine percent qualify for free and reduced lunch, started to struggle im-mensely after the redrawing of the lines. East, now drawing higher performing students away from Manual, saw a lack of benefits in a partnership and severed ties with the school. “The schools [went] dif-ferent directions,” reflects East principal Andy Mendelsberg. “They’re nine blocks away, and you couldn’t find two more different places in the world.”

By 2001, the entire nation had caught wind of the problems Manual, and soon the school was given a million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which created three separate schools within the school. As Katherine Boo wrote in a 2007 profile of the school’s troubles in The New Yorker, while “in these environments, students had a sense for the first time, that their teachers cared for them...the mutual affection came at the expense of academic rigor. Discipline was weak and the academic performance of the students barely changed.”

The principals of the three separate schools bickered constantly, the schools became divided by racial lines, and test scores descended even further. By 2005 the school board ordered that the school be closed for the next school year. “That was a gross injustice,” recalls McNally.

The school reopened in 2007 with new staff. The previous instability proved near-fatal for the school, however. In five years, a student body of over a thousand was cut in half. Parents refused to choose Manual. “Manual is now the fourth most

For Manual High School senior Jeffery Foster, being a Thunderbolt is much more than a label. It’s a way of life. It’s his last day of high school, and Foster could be signing yearbooks, working on a senior prank, or planning for Prom the next day. Instead, he’s fighting to

keep his school intact. “For someone above us to take our legacy away from us, it’s disrespectful. No one’s trying to listen to us, nobody’s trying to hear us out, everyone’s just trying to scoot Manual under the rug.”

Foster is one of many Manual students passionate about preserving Manual as a stand-alone high school, a task that is becoming increasingly difficult as many proposals are submitted in an attempt to help the school. One of the proposed plans, the one DPS is push-ing the most, involves moving East’s ninth grade class over to the Manual Campus in an effort to address Manual’s declining enrollment and subpar test scores, as well as East’s overcrowding. The district is still struggling, however, to find a solution that’s best for students at both schools, and to ensure that all voices are heard.

An East plan was developed in December, according to Principal Andy Mendelsberg, proposing a merging of East and Manual with a Ninth Grade Academy on the Manual campus and tenth through twelfth grades remaining at East. All classes that are usually offered to freshman will still be offered at the Manual campus, including electives.

Students who normally would have attended Manual would have the option of coming to East as sophomores, or, as proposed in recent discussions, staying at Manual to pursue a math, medical, and science-heavy track with Career Technical Education incorporat-ed. An engineering program will also be offered.

The Ninth Grade Academy would help decrease overcrowding and shrink the long waiting list at East. Explains Mendelsberg, “Even if we started out with that 800 students in the Ninth Grade Academy, by the time it plays through, this building at its largest will still be 250 smaller than it currently is.”

Mendelsberg maintains that nothing is set in stone, “It’s a plan. It’s not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination...this proposal has already been pushed back another year because we want to hear what people have to say.”

THE PROPOSALThe Fight for Manual High School

Special Report:

by Harry Forbes

popular school in its own district,” DPS superintendent Tom Boasberg admits.

Of the seventy-eight students pro-jected to go into the ninth grade at Man-ual next year, only fifteen listed Manual as their top choice.

Class sizes have dwindled. This year’s graduating class will only include fourty-two students. “They’re a 1A school in a 5A building,” says Mendelsberg.

“The current and projected future enrollment will not support a traditional, stand-alone high school on the Manual campus,” says community leader Karen Mortimer. “It’s not sustainable.”

Their Good NameThe current proposal would result in

a tiny number of Manual graduates. The only ones that would be Thunderbolts would be those who went through the STEM program, which deputy superin-tendent Greta Marteinez estimates would have less than a hundred kids total.

“We need to ask, what happens with the legacy of Manual?” poses Manual teacher Ben Butler. “We need to look at data and numbers, but we need to also fight for the faces behind those numbers.”

“If we want more opportunities for students who currently go to Manual, then this is a viable option,” says Mario Girardello, a former Manual teacher. “All the things we said we wanted, we can have, if we do a partnership with East.”

“The proposal has everything. You’d have your books, you’d have everything,” agrees Jones. “You just wouldn’t have Manual. Do you understand what Manu-al means? What it means to the black and brown community historically? Do you know what it means to all those people for whom this was the only place they could go because of the segregation in our city? To trample their history, their legacy, change the fabric of our story...to me that’s not worth it. That’s not the price I’m willing to pay.”

“There’s a huge amount of pride. People don’t step on the Thunderbolt logo,” says Giardiello. “I think we need to maintain that legacy to some degree. But the bottom line is, that’s not as important to me as all students getting a quality ed-ucation. I’ll throw away the logo before I throw away a kid’s education.”

It’s not just the Manual legacy at stake. “How does it impact the East lega-cy if it’s just the ten through twelve?” asks Jones. “How important are freshmen to the East legacy and the East tradition? Can they matriculate from a different campus and still act like Angels?”

“I think the disruptions have been downplayed,” agrees East alum Marchell Holle. “When I went to East, It took me two years to get my bearings. This idea that we’re going to send these kids from school A, to school B for a year, to school C for three years, so they’re really only going to understand where they’re at in

the school for one year, is a big deal to me. I think it could completely change the school.”

Others disagree. “I guess it depends on what you think East culture is,” argues Susan McHugh, a Manual graduate who teaches at East. “Do you think it’s a build-ing? It’s the people that make the culture, not the location of the building.”

“I have as much or more pride in this school than anybody I know, and there’s no way in the world I would let that fall into jeopardy,” says Mendels-berg. “I feel like, if you have a chance to help more kids, and increase the great-ness of a school, it’s a worthy risk. If you never take a risk, I don’t know that you’re challenging yourself, or a school or a community to be better. We’re trying to challenge ourselves to give more kids the same access that our kids currently have.”

“At the end of the day, I know how much our legacy means, but it can’t com-pete with what it means to have a qual-ity education for all kids,” concludes Giradello. “People’s emotions and expe-riences are tied to their legacy, but also these past few years have not been a good enough education for all our kids there.”

Where to Go from HereDenver Public Schools are evaluat-

ed using School Performance indicators, which are made up of eight evaluation criteria such as academic growth, enroll-ment rates, and college/career readiness. Schools are graded either blue, green, yellow, orange, or red in each category, with blue representing exceeding expec-tations, green meeting expectations, yel-low not meeting expectations, and so on.

Manual has not scored above yellow on any category since 2011.

“Some people are saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” relays 1972 Manual graduate Elena Watkins. “Well, it is bro-ken, and we keep breaking it.”

Everyone has a different idea of how to solve the issues that plague the school, however. Some believe that the change needs to take place at the lower levels.

“Of the seventy-six incoming fresh-man, only six of them are proficient,” be-moans one Manual junior. “Why are we here and not at the middle schools trying to change something?”

“Teach our kids at the lower level,” asserts Rita Lewis, president of the Den-ver NAACP. “Keep Manual intact.”

Others see it not as the fault of the middle schools, but the inexperienced teachers that occupy many of Manual’s positions. Teach For America, an organi-zation that sends recent college graduates to teach at underprivileged schools, has sent dozens of teachers to Manual since the organization came to Colorado in 2007. “The educators, the people in the classroom...there’s no grey hair there,” complains Dwight Handling, a Manual alumnus. “There’s no experience.”

The majority, however, blame Manual’s poor perfor-mance on a lack of stability. “We’re not asking for much,” says an exasperated Foster. “We’re asking for a regular school, where we don’t have all these people innovating all the time. That’s what we’ve been go-ing through for four years. Con-stant change. Innovation after innovation. Failure after failure.”

“There hasn’t been stabil-ity at this school in a decade,” laments Jones. “East has been on stable footing. I would ex-pect parents to choose stability. You can’t say no one’s choosing Manual because it’s totally un-stable. I’m saying to stabilize it. Give it the same resources, and by resources I mean students.”

“I know East student’s class-room experiences are suffering because of class sizes,” advises Jones. “You don’t have to take away Manual to gain resourc-es. Share the population. Share the students. Just change one boundary.”

When asked the size of an East student body that he felt comfortable with, Mendelsberg figured 1,900. East’s current population sits at over 2,400.

“I’m saying if you have 2,400 kids, and you feel 2,000 is the max, let’s create a place for those four hundred kids that is comparable to East,” says Jones.

Thunder in the Sky

“I didn’t get into education to only help in one spot,” says Mendelsberg. “I got into edu-cation because I wanted to help every kid I possibly could, and when I watch [Manual]...it’s set-ting up three to four hundred kids a day for failure. If you fail at East, it wasn’t because you didn’t have opportunities, it was because you didn’t take advan-tage. [Manual students] aren’t even getting the opportunity.”

“Kids are supposed to come to our school black, brown, green, or yellow, whatever, and be offered a quality education,” laments a 1960 Manual graduate. “When our kids come through those doors, they should be ex-citied, and getting instruction from qualified teachers, not teachers that are just going to leave in two years. Let’s stop just sitting around and talking about it. I want to see something done. I don’t mean any disrespect, bu I am tired of discussions. I want to see some action.”

Scenes from Manual. Photos by Harry Forbes