Jefferson Jr./Sr. High School has spent a decade on Colorado’s list of lowest-performing schools. Now, for the first time in 10 years, it’s close to leaving that list: a milestone that would have to happen if the school wants to save its future.
Jefferson Jr./Sr. High, a 7-12-grade school of about 600 students, has faced major challenges in recent years, including declining enrollment, pressure to improve academically, and questions from the district about its future. In 2025, Jefferson County Public Schools proposed redesigning the school.
After the community pushed back on the redesign proposal, the district and school board honored that request and committed to keeping Jefferson open as a comprehensive Jr./Sr. High School.
Ricardo LeBlanc-Esparza stepped in as Jefferson’s principal three years ago with a track record of turning struggling schools around. Under Colorado’s academic accountability system, Jefferson had been classified as ‘Turnaround’ status, which is reserved for the state’s lowest performing schools. LeBlanc-Esparza is straightforward about where things stood when he arrived: “Our school has been in Turnaround a lot the last 10 years,” he says. “Academically, we have not been successful.”
Jefferson Jr./Sr. High is in its third year of Colorado’s Turnaround process. Schools have five years to improve before the state looks at intervening, and entering year four without significant progress would potentially lead to a formal state review. Colorado’s accountability scale runs from Turnaround to Priority Improvement to Improvement to Performance, a progression that LeBlanc-Esparza compares to moving from red to orange to yellow to green on an emergency scale.
Enrollment is another significant concern for the school, with Jefferson Jr./Sr. High currently spending more per student than comparable schools within the Jefferson County School District. This has been a limiting factor for Jefferson High when it comes to the courses and extracurriculars it can afford to offer.
But under LeBlanc-Esparza’s leadership, Jefferson has climbed from Turnaround to Improvement: one step below Performance, which is a rating the school hasn’t reached in 30 years. Jefferson is currently in the yellow, he says, just eight points away from green. When LeBlanc-Esparza arrived, the school also recorded more than 120 fights per year. According to him, that number is now down to just two.
LeBlanc-Esparza has credited this success to systems that build strong relationships between Jefferson’s faculty and students. Every student is assigned a mentor teacher for up to six years, and each school day ends with a mentorship period (one teacher paired with no more than 20 students) focusing on grades, attendance, and career goals.
Students attend their own family conferences twice a year, which is a shift from the traditional parent-teacher model. “Our students actually take ownership of their future, their education,” LeBlanc-Esparza says. “When people say ‘parent-teacher conferences’ that jumps out to me. It’s all just about the parents and the teachers. How about the students? Why are they not involved in this thing?”
Jefferson also partners with a career coordinator for job shadow experiences and uses a program called ‘Brain Buffs’ to help students practice SAT and PSAT questions. Students practiced roughly 22,000 questions and have improved an average of 93 points since the program was implemented.
The career focus is personal for LeBlanc-Esparza, who grew up watching his grandparents work hard but still struggle in retirement. “I saw my grandparents live, work hard, and they were good people, but it was all in poverty,” he says. “When they were too old to work, they had Social Security, but that was minimal. If you get stuck in this low income road in life, that can be a lifetime sentence. You do not want to be in that.”
LeBlanc-Esparza’s approach comes down to a simple philosophy: “Treat them like your own kids,” he says. “You’re checking on their grades, their attendance, their career goals, trying to guide them to understand the importance of why they’re doing what they’re doing. People need to find what speaks to their minds and to their hearts. Otherwise, you’re just doing stuff with no goal. At the end of the day, you’re supposed to be able to launch yourself into the career that you choose and be able to have a good life.”
LeBlanc-Esparza will soon be retiring and handing the reins to Kristin Landes, Jefferson Jr./Sr. High’s current assistant principal. “She reminds me of me when I was her age,” he says. “She knows the systems we have put in place. They just need to keep being further ingrained, more refined. Let’s hit Performance. Let’s hit the green. I have full faith they’ll get it.”
At the same time, LeBlanc-Esparza is realistic about the amount of change that can be achieved by individuals. “I’ve come to the realization that all I can do is really just affect the small area, whatever I’m involved in. But if everybody would adopt this mentorship and truly take care of their kids like their own, and monitor and track the results… it really does work.”
At Jefferson Jr./Sr. High, the wrestling team just won the regional championship and is headed to the state tournament, students are getting ready for student-led conferences, and a school working hard to get back on track is slowly showing signs that the hard work is paying off.
