Brittany has a mouth, and a reason for the mouth.

A new eighth-grader at Bruce Randolph School in north Denver, the slight girl decked out in braids and a bright orange warm-up jacket wants to do better this year.

See, her mom was shot in the throat in May, and she's not around any more. So Brittany, who rarely listened to her mom before she died, thinks now is a good time to start heeding what she said.

Lose the attitude, improve her grades, try not to fight.

"I'm going to set some goals and accomplish them," she writes carefully in pencil on her first day of school. "I am going to try harder than ever."

Monday was a day of fresh starts not only for Brittany, but also for her new school.

Teachers at Randolph, many of them veterans of urban schools, are sympathetic but not much surprised by her story.

They think the best thing they can give Brittany and her classmates is a good education, a way out, teacher Taylor Betz explains, a way to cope with the harsh realities that life has dealt many of the kids here.

"I need to keep that in mind, but I can't make it an excuse," said Betz, who came to Randolph this year from nearby Cole Middle School. "Regardless of what we get dealt, we still have to have goals."

Randolph is a school on the brink of state closure.

For two years running, the school has been rated "unsatisfactory" on state school report cards.

One more year of the "U" label and the school, by state law, must be taken over and converted to a charter. Cole, Randolph's neighbor, was the first school in Colorado to close and reopen as a charter.

Denver Public Schools is betting on Principal Kristin Waters to make sure Randolph isn't the second.

Waters has a history of success in DPS. She took the downtown Morey Middle School from a state rating of "low" to "average" and then to "high."

Here's one indication of the difference between the two schools: 11 percent of the seventh-graders at Randolph were reading at grade level this past spring, compared with 76 percent at Morey.

But Waters got tired of people saying Morey's gains were because of a school program for gifted students. So she drafted a plan to prove what works at Morey can work at Ran-dolph.

Then former Superintendent Jerry Wartgow told her to put the plan into action. He told her to pick a staff and then made Randolph a "Superintendent's School," meaning Waters reports directly to the district leader.

"I thought, 'What have I done? Do I really want to do this?' " she said. "Yes, because I believe in the students."

The idea is to transform a low-performing school within the parameters of a typical school year and a typical school budget.

Show it can be done and then replicate it.

"We are about to undertake a huge adventure together," Waters told her hand-picked staff on Friday afternoon. "We are going to rock."

Ted Tessendorf is one of a handful of the Randolph teachers rehired by Waters.

He started at the school when it opened in fall 2002, when DPS officials unwittingly merged neighborhoods of rival gang members.

"We would have police here every day it seemed like," he said.

The first principal lasted two months. Tessendorf said the second, 32-year DPS veteran Don Manzanares, "definitely got the school under control."

But few Randolph teachers worked together across subjects, and there was little consistency in expectations from classroom to classroom, he said.

An art teacher, Tessendorf said he fought to keep his job after hearing Waters' reform plan.

"I was so jazzed," he said. "She's really created a feeling where we all get to contribute, where teachers know they're here working on their craft of teaching."

Other teachers came from across the district. Waters, who began interviewing teachers in March, made her final hire last week. She has asked all teachers to commit to three years at Randolph.

Many students at Randolph come from tough home lives. Most of the 376 seventh- and eighth-graders who attended school Monday will meet federal poverty guidelines, if past years are any guide.

Other schools, other teachers have tried to make their lives easier by lowering expectations.

Randolph teachers are trying a different approach, a schoolwide series of high standards backed by support.

"We're going to give you homework every single day," new teacher Fernando Sanchez told his eighth- graders.

"If you need help, we are going to set up an after-school program, or talk to the teacher," Sanchez said. "If we have to stay after every single day, that's what we're going to do. . . . Whatever it takes we're going to do it at Bruce Randolph."

Many students have heard the threat of high expectations before. They also said they usually evaporate, like the gleaming polish on the floors, within weeks.

Erica, an eighth-grader who wrote in her paper that she was "glad I didne flunke" last year, said she hopes it's different this year.

"They said the same thing last year, but they didn't do any of it," she said.

"I hope they do. I want them to be tougher on us."

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