The real work at Manual High School will begin in 10 days. That is a story for a different day.

I found Cheryl Simmons exactly where she had said she would be, seated on a bench inside the school's courtyard, a score of volunteers laboring nearby.

When we had spoken several weeks earlier, when she was desperately drumming up publicity for the event, she wasn't certain even a few dozen people would show.

Yet on this day, hundreds of people, young and elderly, had descended upon Manual, shovels, rakes and paintbrushes in hand, to beautify the once-failed school ahead of its Aug. 20 reopening.

She put the number of volunteers scouring the school at about 650. Metro Volunteers, which coordinated the effort, had a day earlier cut off sign-ups at that number. There just weren't enough gloves and shovels and brooms for any more.

"I'm just so moved by all of this, I can hardly take it," said Cheryl Simmons, a 1968 Manual graduate.

"Look at them," she said. "I think they want to do something good for this community. I think it's for the kids. They're here for them, giving them a message that there is support behind them."

It is easy to read too much into events such as these, but from interviews with some of those who turned out to labor hard in the unrelenting heat Thursday, there was an undeniable sense that they were at least trying to correct - perhaps even apologize for - the inattention and sheer neglect that led to Manual's closing more than a year ago.

If nothing else, most showed up to, if only in a little way, help along the education experiment that will be the new Manual High.

"We always had a fabulous high school, so why not help make everyone's high school one?" said 18-year-old Nicole Sokol, a graduate of Mountain Vista High in Highlands Ranch, who arrived, ready to work, at 7 a.m. with her friends Tara Schmolzer, 18, and Theresa Gray, 22.

It was, all three said, really the last thing they wanted to do on a hot summer day just before they head off to college. Yet something pulled them in.

"I guess we wanted to help the community, to make a little difference," Theresa Gray said. "We feel good about it, even if today we only pruned and saved a tree."

Pat Kelley, 29, of Lafayette, knew of Manual because Denver Public Schools shut it down. He wanted now to do his bit to help make it successful. All morning, he had pulled overgrown and diseased juniper bushes from beds in the main parking lot.

"I had to be here," he said. "It was my day off, a day I usually spend sitting and watching TV. But I figured I had to look in the mirror, ask myself what I had done today to make this world a little better. I guess I'm trying to learn to be a better person with my days off. Tonight, I can honestly tell myself I made a difference today."

Rob Stein, the new Manual principal imported by DPS from prestigious Graland Country Day School, warmly greeted every volunteer he passed as he showed his daughter around the school.

"I honestly did not expect this," he said, noting that a software firm had just dropped off an $80,000 donation for the restoration project and that every bucket of paint, every tree, every pile of mulch and bench had been donated.

Manual will begin the school year with only a 180-member freshman class. There are now six teenagers on the school's waiting list, Rob Stein said. Making Manual work this time, he said, will of course be a challenge.

"Everything in this line of business is a challenge," he said.

"But the most challenging thing in my profession is secondary education. It is particularly so in secondary education in an urban setting where it has already failed once before. I look forward to it. It is the cold fusion of education - can it be done and how?"

In the administration offices, older folks from a few blocks over and their children were laying laminate hardwood flooring. A few doors down, a church group from Kansas was putting the finishing touches on a paint job. This has to succeed, they all said.

Wandering among them, handing out bottles of water and oranges, was Emilia Lujan, a 14-year-old from Denver, who will be one of Manual's 180 new students.

I will give her the last say because she put Thursday and the entire Manual experiment better than I ever could.

"I volunteered," she explained softly. "This is a special day. I'm here because I want to make this school better."

Her older brother had just graduated, and her sister was going to be a senior, when Manual closed.

"I saw her struggle a lot when they closed the school," Emilia Lujan said of her sister. "She really wanted to graduate from here. She finally did, from South (High School), but it wasn't the same. Maybe that's why I'm here.

"I know a lot of people are saying this won't be a good school. We're going to come here and prove them wrong. We're going to study. We're not going to fight.

"And I am going to make my mom and my dad so proud because I am going to get good grades here and graduate from this school."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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