When Opportunity Knocks, ‘Op School’ Is Ready to Answer

The message outside the Emily Griffith Opportunity School is clear. The block-long building beckons with “OPPORTUNITY” in capital letters above the door.

For seven decades, Miss Griffith’s dream of a school “for all who wish to learn” has been reality, offering vocational courses of every sort--English for the foreign-born, avocations by the dozen.

Miss Griffith the schoolteacher would haul a pot of soup to the school each evening so that new immigrants could eat before class. She welcomed them from a desk just inside the front door.

Today, the “Op School,” as it’s sometimes known, still runs 14 hours a day, 5 days a week, 11 months a year. But there are no more classes in telegraphy, millinery and horseshoeing, and the immigrants are more likely to be Asian than European.

Yet, after 1.4 million students, the mission is the same.

‘Do What People Want’

“We just do what people want us to do,” administrator Ladell Thomas said during a farewell tour shortly before his recent retirement. “Students can come in here today--any day--and start class tomorrow. If we don’t have what they need, we try to get it.

“We’re a little more bound by bureaucracy than Miss Griffith was, but we’re still trying to do the same thing--give people the opportunity to learn what they need to know.”

What Miss Griffith dreamed of was simple. Having seen the parents of her students struggling to cope in a new world, she decided that education could not be just for the young, and that it could not be governed too closely by the usual schoolroom clock.

She wangled a reprieve for a condemned elementary school building near the heart of Denver, then proceeded to wangle whatever and whomever she needed for those who showed up to take advantage of the school’s name.

The Opportunity School’s emphasis on providing what people need makes for some interesting students.

Retired Judge Signs On

After Denver District Judge James Flanagan retired from the bench Jan. 8, he says that he fulfilled a lifelong dream by enrolling, just a day later, in the Opportunity School’s general auto mechanics class.

When Brother Sebastian Tobin decided to take a shoe-making class, after spending a few years making sandals for his religious order at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in New York, he chose the Opportunity School for his education.

Alonna Widdoss, working toward a doctorate in bioengineering, came to the Opportunity School to learn welding so she could make emergency repairs on medical machines such as iron lungs at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

The school offers the only furrier courses west of the Mississippi.

About 135,000 students a year enroll at Opportunity School, Thomas says. “Many of them come here for one specific thing and, after three weeks or so, they leave us.”

Others enroll in apprentice programs that require daytime work and two nights of classes each week for several years.

Worldwide Attention

The “open entry-open exit” system of allowing students to enroll whenever they’re ready and the individualized instruction given each student has attracted the attention of educators from around the world.

Thomas recently escorted a group of South American educators on a tour of the school while his aide, Ralph Latimer, led an entourage of Australians.

Thomas is fond of saying that the number of instructors who did not graduate from teachers’ colleges make the individualized instruction possible.

“The majority come right out of the trades or profession they’re teaching,” Thomas says. “I guess they don’t know any better, so they learn that they can give individualized instruction.”

A former high school principal who once taught math, chemistry and physics himself, Thomas admits: “Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have said it would work. I was a typical academic teacher.”

There are just under 80 full-time teachers. Another 400 to 500 who teach part-time have full-time jobs in their chosen field.

Tuition is free for Denver residents because the Opportunity School is part of the Denver public school system. Those who live outside Denver pay a maximum of $670 a year.

Helped by Grants

About half the $9-million annual budget comes from the school district, the rest from state and federal grants, Thomas says.

The halls of the Opportunity School shine with the pride of a place that even the janitors care about. Visitors remark on the helpful attitude and smiles of those they see everywhere, of the willingness to stop and answer all the questions anyone has.

It’s a far different place from the high school where Thomas once was principal.

“The people, No. 1, are here because they want to be,” he says. “We’re meeting a need that they feel.”

Even if Denver-area residents never sign up for a class, they can come in and get a 35-cent haircut, have their cars or clocks repaired just for the cost of materials, eat a cut-rate breakfast or lunch in the school restaurant.

(In the kitchens of “Your Best Bite,” students learn culinary skills under the tutelage of chefs who trained in Europe. Those serving the meals and busing the tables are part of a program to train handicapped students in a skill that will give them independent lives.)

Fresh From Afghanistan

Zohra Ansary, 21, and her brother, Haress, 24, arrived at the Opportunity School in March. Fresh from Afghanistan, they enrolled in Mike Sheil’s English class.

On the blackboard, little stick figures are shown jumping from a frying pan into a fire. The lesson that day had been “from” and “into.”

Anyone should be able to do anything, says the school’s credo, and the staff says they mean just that.

“Suppose someone comes in who has a sixth-grade math background and they want to get into electronics,” Thomas says. “We could say, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ We don’t. We say, honestly, ‘Maybe you won’t be able to do it, but you have the opportunity.’ ”