Tonight, Life Skills Center will graduate its last-ever class. Back in November, the Denver Public Schools Board of Education voted to shutter the last-chance high school, a decision that the State Board of Education upheld on appeal in March. That left about 180 kids without a school for next year…
The rug monster is coming back to life. In 1964, the monster — which, BTW, looks like a combination penis-and-vagina — was the star of the (terrible) monster movie The Creeping Terror. Now, thanks to more than $70,000 raised through Kickstarter, a brand-new version of the rug monster will grace…
North High School has had many struggles. Among them: poor test scores, low enrollment, myriad redesigns and lax oversight of the school’s credit recovery program. But a community group called Choose North Now thinks the historic high school is beginning to turn around — and that co-locating a charter school…
Update below: Will federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement have a presence at this weekend’s 115th annual Strawberry Days Festival in Glenwood Springs? That’s what youth-led immigrant rights group AJUA wants to know. AJUA sent a letter to ICE, explaining that the agency’s presence at last year’s fair “traumatized our community.”…
RTD wants you to call them, maybe. Starting today, RTD will hold a series of fifteen “telephone town hall” meetings in which residents will be called randomly and invited to participate in telephone forums with members of the RTD board of directors. Residents will be encouraged to ask questions and…
Earlier this week, we told you the story of a little boy in Montezuma County who suffered horrible abuse in his parents’ care and was placed with a foster family. That family eventually intervened in the court case to terminate the parents’ rights, offering information and cross-examining witnesses. On Thursday,…
When and how should foster parents intervene in court cases involving the children in their care? That’s the question at the center of a case that the Colorado Supreme Court will hear tomorrow. It could be said the case started five years ago when the Montezuma County Department of Human…
Ten acres of habitat just wasn’t enough for Rinny the tapir. This morning, the 800-pound black-and-white mammal briefly escaped from her new home at the Denver Zoo’s brand new exhibit, Toyota Elephant Passage, and went on an adventure to a fenced-in landscape area. Rinny’s entire excursion lasted five minutes and…
Lakewood Gulch, a trickling tributary in west Denver that feeds into the South Platte River, was once a pretty good place to disappear. The area was overgrown and full of as much concrete as it was weeds; many people used it for what street artist Peter Miles Bergman calls “unsanctioned…
Peter Miles Bergman is drawn to the unsanctioned. In 2004, the founder of art-prank society The Institute of Sociometry made his backyard into a faux parking lot to showcase how ridiculous it was that homeowners near the Broncos stadium couldn’t sell parking or even to give it away. This year,…
Lay Catholics and several big organizations, including the Denver-based Gill Foundation, have saved the budget of an immigrant advocacy group in Durango whose funding was yanked by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The Catholics stripped the immigrant group, called Companeros, of $30,000 because it belongs to a coalition that…
This is it, zoo fans. This is what you’ve been waiting for and dreaming of since you approved that $62.5 million zoo-improvement bond in 1999. Big, hulking male elephants — up to eight of ’em — living in City Park. Big, hulking male elephants and their big, hulking…trunks. Today is…
Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma is currently in Thailand, her first international trip in 24 years. Suu Kyi spent much of the past two decades under a house arrest enforced by the ruling military junta, which has since been replaced. Now freed, Suu Kyi has been elected…
Gay kids in Colorado are among the most protected in the nation. Last year, legislators expanded the state’s bullying-prevention law to prohibit the bullying of students based on several specific characteristics, including sexual orientation. The revisions make Colorado one of fourteen states to explicitly protect gay students; the revised law…
Denver’s new crime lab smells like fresh paint and virgin plastic. Some of the office furniture is still wrapped in it, or stacked in boxes. But all of the major stuff — the lab benches, the fingerprint examination tables, the walk-in freezer and the test-firing range — is in place,…
John stings, or undercover operations where a cop — usually a female cop — poses as a prostitute to catch men willing to pay for sex, are more rare than stings in which the roles are reversed. This week, the Denver police announced the arrests of 29 people as the…
The woman in the photo is Pabrita Niroula’s mother-in-law. She and Pabrita came to Colorado from Nepal, where they lived in a refugee camp and slept on hard bamboo beds. In January, Pabrita was one of eight Bhutanese women given a digital camera and asked to document her life as…
Can’t you just picture this restaurant as a stop in some epic road-trip movie? Or maybe as the site of an awkwardly tense lunch scene in a Coen brothers film? A new website called Shoot Colorado is cataloging the state’s quirky attractions, sweeping vistas and abandoned ghost towns so that…
Let’s say you’re a big-time Hollywood filmmaker. You’ve heard about Colorado’s new film incentives and you’d love to take advantage of the cash rebates natural splendor the state has to offer. But where to start? A new website called Shoot Colorado makes it easy, providing a digital directory of locations…
Initiative 52 would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, as long as they provide an individual tax identification number, last year’s tax return and a form of government-issued ID from their country of origin. Today, backers of the initiative held a press conference at the Capitol to call for…
Visit Denver has a new mobile app designed to lure vacationers to Mile High City hotspots through a series of “dares:” Complete a “Denver Dare” and you’ll earn a Facebook badge. So what are these terrifying tasks, these death-defying deeds? Here’s a hint: One of them involves the Celestial Seasonings…
Today was a good day for Aurora tourism — and not for the same reason as on November 28, 1979, when a mysterious Hollywood stunt man showed up with a plan to build a massive amusement park called Science Fiction Land. Today’s good news came courtesy the Colorado Economic Development…
