JOHNSON: Advocate is committed to making Manual work

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Friday, July 20, 2007

And so, the grand experiment will begin - not with the simple ringing of a school bell or the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, but with mopping, painting, mowing and wall-washing.

Much has been written in recent months about the pending reopening of Manual High School on the city's northeast side. There have been grand statements about how new teaching techniques and attitudes will remake the old, spectacularly failed school into a model for Phoenix-like educational reform.

It all sounds good and proper. Whether it, too, is all just bluster or, more likely, graveyard whistling, I figure we will know after Aug. 4. We will have an idea how truly committed Denver Public Schools and, more importantly, the rest of us are to making Manual and, by extension, any DPS school revamp, a success:

How many people will volunteer on Aug. 4 to help clean up musty, rusting Manual High School?

It is almost impossible not to run into Cheryl King-Simmons these days. For a couple of months now, she has been darting into churches, barbershops, fraternities, sororities and pretty much every place where people gather to tell them of Aug. 4.

To say that she is a spokeswoman for the committee responsible for recruiting cleanup volunteers doesn't do her involvement any justice. Cheryl King-Simmons, 57, lives and breathes Manual.

She, of course, graduated from the school in 1968. That was only proper in a family in which four generations began graduating from Manual in the 1920s. She didn't know it then, but she graduated the same year as her husband, Michael, who had a huge crush on her then but never acted on it until seeing her at the 1982 People's Fair, determined she was the woman he would marry.

Their 13-year-old son, also named Michael, will be among the approximately 175 ninth-graders who will be the first students to sit in a class at the reincarnated Manual when it opens next month.

"He wanted to go to East (High), but I felt this new Manual will provide a better academic environment for him," Cheryl King-Simmons explains, noting, too, that she and her family now live across the street from the school, in the same home her grandfather built with his earnings from working the railroad as a Pullman porter during Prohibition.

"I disagreed so much when they closed Manual," she said. "It never really got 100 percent help from the district. Now, I think it has a lot to prove to the community, and everything I've seen so far tells me it does plans to prove all of it."

Manual, in the years following the end of court-ordered school busing, quickly became the place where kids went to bide time or drop out - just to put a headline on it. They were mostly poor, brown- skinned children, left to fend in a school that descended into your basic, failing, inner-city academic hellhole. It wasn't always that way.

When Cheryl King-Simmons attended, the kids were mostly poor and brown- skinned, too, she said. Still, the school flourished.

"It was a community school. Parents were involved. The teachers and principals really cared. There was such a strong line of communication between the school and the community. Our goals were set so high. We were empowered. We were always told we could do better, at a time when bigger, richer high schools were being built. We had, by comparison, nothing. But we made it work because it was our school."

It would allow her entry into Howard University, later earning a master's degree, before spending 30 years as an admissions officer at the University of Colorado at Denver.

She now is a true believer in the new Manual and its new principal, Rob Stein, brought in from Denver's prestigious Graland Country Day School.

"I really believe he's invested to make this work," Cheryl King-Simmons said. "I'm betting my own son's future on it. I'm involved because I am dedicated to seeing it work."

Her son has been charged with working on the school's courtyard, part of Manual's new approach of giving students major roles in the school's operation.

"If he designs, builds and paints the walls," she said, "he will have ownership of them. I think it will result in higher self-esteem for him and better academic results, both of which I think go hand in hand."

Come Aug. 4, she, her husband, son and daughter - "an East graduate, a traitor" - will pick up brushes and tackle the courtyard. Others will tackle landscaping, graffiti abatement. The pool is rusting and in disrepair. Paint needs to be applied.

"The whole school smells musty," Cheryl King-Simmons said. "It smells like it's been closed for a year."

Volunteers will be given T-shirts, free food and the thanks of a community. Good Morning America is scheduled to broadcast from the subsequent Aug. 9 cleanup effort.

Those interested in helping on one or both days can sign up at the Metro Volunteers Web site at metrovolunteers.org.

"I believe in this school, of everything it can be," Cheryl King-Simmons said. "And I believe in this community, that together both can make a positive difference for our children."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763