Overview:
5280 High School is a charter school located just south of downtown Denver that serves recovering student addicts.
For students at 5280 High School, arriving for the day means two things. First, a productive day of learning. Second and more important, a hard day combating the negative emotions and realities of addiction without the fear of being judged.
“I was really angry to the point where I’d be screaming and just high as hell at school, you know?” said student Morgan Hedrick, 17. “But I was never kicked out, because apparently they saw something in me that not a lot of other people saw.”
For Hedrick, addiction manifested in anger, often resulting in bouts of unwanted panic attacks caused by the effects of methamphetamines raging through her body. A Texas native, Hedrick and her family struggled to find differing treatment options for her. A residential stay at a new facility proved unsuccessful as the disease took hold of her life.
“I was jumping from residential to residential in Texas, and eventually we ran out of treatments for me to go to in Texas,” Hedrick said. “I wasn’t allowed home for a long time, and then they found Sandstone, which is in Colorado.”
After coming to Colorado in hopes a new form of treatment would work, Hedrick was ultimately recommended to 5280 High School. Here, she was met with a mentality among peers and staff that offers a welcoming approach to healing.
“Even if they have only been sober for a couple of days, as long as they want to be sober and express this, then we will take them in,” says school director Jeremy Jensen said. “But they have to want to be able to work a program.”
5280 is a charter school located at 1200 West Mississippi Avenue, just south of Downtown Denver. It provides students with the opportunity to participate in a recovery-oriented classroom where they can feel supported and understood by peers and staff members who share a recovery mindset.
With a strong emphasis on communication among those who share similar struggles, this school aims to provide students with not only direct access to recovery coaches, but also individuals who have experienced the various struggles of addiction and can relate to those they teach and coach.
“If a student does mess up and relapse, as it does happen, we’re going to treat them with love, but we’re also going to hold them really accountable and that’s a big part of how we operate here,” Jensen said.
Opening in 2018, the school operates on the fundamentals of allowing students to hone in on skills rather than those things that held them back from their addiction. With a growing student body reaching 100 students, the need for this is greater than ever, especially in the Denver Area.
According to a study reported by the New England Journal of Medicine, Denver is second in the nation when ranked among other states with the highest number of adolescent drug overdose deaths. When combined with a 2023 study conducted by the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, which discovered that adolescents in Colorado are 37.4 times more likely to have used drugs in the last month, the need for the state to provide solutions and safe spaces such as 5280 High School is critical.
While typical treatment options are often encouraged, such as various intensive outpatient programs that meet daily after school, 5280’s key to success is in its unique brand of learning.
“We are a project-based learning school,” Jensen said. “What this means is we want students to be building something or constructing something that has some sort of end product.”
The goal is to provide students with a completed project that will allow them to feel a sense of completion and accomplishment, reinforcing the idea of finding the positive in the mundane, which is often seen in recovery. These projects frequently combine the complexities of multiple academic subjects.
“We have one class right now that’s really working on a lot of gardening,” Jensen said. “They’re combining botany with math and they’re building some gardening boxes while using geometry to do so.”
This type of learning involves redirecting students’ mindsets away from drugs and alcohol, as well as other obsessions like disordered eating, and toward a more prominent problem-solving-oriented model of stress management. This type of learning has proven to be beneficial for students such as Hedrick.
“It gets a lot easier as time goes by and I think what kept me around when I was super newly sober is that they understood,” Hedrick said. “The staff here [are] addicts; the peers here are addicts. We’re all here for the same reason at the end of the day, whether you’re a student or a teacher.”
While students at 5280 have many people to turn to, having active recovery coaches on-site is critical. According to Keith Hayes, the school’s director of recovery, the more resources available, the better.
“I have a team of recovery coaches that do individual case management with our young people who meet with them every week and check in on their outside programs of recovery, set sobriety dates and support them in different ways,” Hayes said. “They support them holistically, emotionally, spiritually, through their recovery journey, and academically as well to make sure that they’re caught up in their classes and they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
According to the aforesaid research conducted by the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 75% of people who experience addiction will end up recovering. But this is usually in assisted help with treatment or options like 5820 High School.
“The cool thing about recovering from addiction is that it’s the only disease that can be put into remission with peer-to-peer support,” Hayes said. Hedrick finds the support makes her want to offer her unwavering support to those who share the same struggle.
“We’re all here for the same reason so there’s this unspoken rule that we’re not going to shoot our wounded,” Hedrick said. “Sometimes there is drama between us but it’s because we’re addicts and do messed up shit to each other but even though we hurt each other, we’re not going to tell everyone and their moms and make things worse.”
The sense of community is what makes 5280 High School students thrive and believe in themselves.
“Getting sober isn’t boring and it isn’t going to make you unhappy,” Hedrick said. “In fact, it’s going to make you happier than you thought you could ever be, so yeah, don’t be afraid of sobriety.”
