Colorado School of Trades Student Defense Lawyer

Students call me about the Colorado School of Trades at three points: after a shop or safety incident that gets them pulled from a bench, after an externship or host site says it will not keep them, and after a letter that ends the enrollment on attendance or academic progress grounds. All three move fast, none of them looks like a courtroom, and each is decided on a written record built in the first few days.

How do student discipline and dismissal cases work at the Colorado School of Trades?

The Colorado School of Trades, in Lakewood, is a private for-profit institution. It is not a state actor, so there is no Fourteenth Amendment due process claim here, and the cases the courts decide about public campuses do not decide yours. The theory is contract: the enrollment agreement, the catalog and the student handbook are the promise, and the question is whether the school did what its own published procedure said it would do. Federal statutes sit on top of the contract because the school participates in federal student aid — Title IX, Title VI, and Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act — along with the requirements of its accreditor.

Colorado law tells you which theory is worth pursuing. In University of Denver v. Doe, 2024 CO 27, the Colorado Supreme Court held that a private university’s promise of a thorough, impartial and fair process, read with the specific requirements in its own procedures, can be definite enough to be an enforceable contract, and it reinstated the student’s contract and good-faith-and-fair-dealing claims. In the same decision it rejected the tort claim, holding that a university “does not owe its students an extra-contractual duty to exercise reasonable care in adopting and implementing fair procedures.” Against a private Colorado institution the claim is contract, not negligence. See breach of contract.

Beyond that, Colorado adds very little. There is no general campus due process statute: no right to counsel, no hearing right, no evidentiary standard, no appeal right for ordinary conduct or academic separation. The single exception is sexual misconduct, C.R.S. § 23-5-146, which reaches state institutions and participating private institutions, requires a fair, impartial and prompt process, sets preponderance of the evidence when a student is the respondent, and allows an advisor while barring that advisor from speaking for the student. Whether a particular private school participates is worth confirming rather than assuming.

Where do Colorado School of Trades cases come from?

The school enrolls roughly 85 students and trains gunsmiths. That is a small, hands-on, sequenced program, and it produces a caseload that looks nothing like a university’s. The incidents that end enrollments here start on a shop floor or at an outside placement, not in a lecture hall.

The honest pattern at a career school is worth stating plainly. Separation usually arrives through satisfactory academic progress rules, attendance rules, or a safety or clearance decision rather than through a conduct hearing. An instructor can pull a student from a bench for a safety violation the same afternoon. A host site can decline to keep an externship student for reasons the school never has to prove. Neither of those is a proceeding, and neither produces findings of fact you can attack later. What they produce is a determination, a status change and a letter.

The consequences are immediate and financial. In a small, sequenced program, being out for a term is not a delay of one term; it is a missed cohort and usually a year. Federal aid eligibility turns on satisfactory academic progress and is decided separately from academic standing, on its own form and its own deadline. Credits earned in a specialized trade program frequently do not transfer anywhere, so a student who is dismissed halfway through generally cannot take the work with them. That is why the sanction is often more negotiable, and more important, than the finding. See SAP appeals and academic dismissal and suspension.

Which process are you in, and why does that matter?

The label on the letter picks the decision-maker, the deadline and whatever protections exist. A conduct charge, an academic honesty allegation, a Title IX complaint, a safety or clearance removal, and an academic progress determination are separate tracks even at a school this small, and they are usually handled by different people. A progress or attendance decision carries no finding that you did anything wrong, which sounds reassuring and is not: it also means it carries no hearing.

Answering in the wrong track spends the one response you get. Match the letter first: conduct code charges or academic misconduct. If a disability is part of the picture — and in a shop environment it often is — the accommodation question is its own track, covered under 504 and ADA accommodations, and raising it after a dismissal is much harder than raising it before.

What should you do first?

Ask for the policy in writing, today. This is the single most useful thing a Colorado School of Trades student can do, because the documents are not available to you online. Email the dean of students or the school director and request the student handbook, the conduct code, the academic standing and satisfactory academic progress policies, and any shop, safety or externship policy, each in the version in force on your incident date. Ask in the same message for your response deadline, your appeal deadline, and a copy of the material the decision-maker will see. Send it from an address you control rather than a school account, and keep the reply.

Then build your own file before anyone else does. Collect your enrollment agreement, your attendance record, any written warning, any bench or safety write-up, and every text or email with an instructor or a site supervisor. Write down what happened on the day in question while you still remember the sequence, and note who was present. Preserve photographs and messages before they roll off a phone. Do not sit for a meeting until you know what is alleged and under which policy, and do not sign a withdrawal form offered as an alternative to a hearing before you understand what it does to your transcript and your aid.

What does the Colorado School of Trades’ own policy actually say?

Honestly: I cannot tell you, and neither can any page that claims to. No public, fetchable URL for the conduct code or for the academic standing policy could be verified, because the school’s site returns a challenge to automated requests. So this list is not a summary of what the school publishes. It is the list of fields to demand in writing, and it is worth sending as a numbered request.

• Conduct office: not published at a public URL. Ask who receives conduct reports and who decides them, by title.
• Governing policy: not published at a public URL. Ask for the name, number and effective date of the code, and for the version in force on your incident date. No system-wide code applies; this is a private school, so the Colorado Community College System procedures that govern the state two-year colleges are the wrong document here.
• Academic integrity: ask whether dishonesty is handled inside the conduct code or by the instructor, and what the published penalties are.
• Appeal window: no campus-specific day-count located. Ask for the deadline in calendar or business days, the person it goes to, the required form, and the grounds on which an appeal may be taken.
• Standard of proof: ask what standard the decision-maker applies. In a sexual misconduct case C.R.S. § 23-5-146(3)(d)(II) fixes preponderance of the evidence for the institutions the statute reaches.
• Advisor: ask whether you may bring an advisor, whether the advisor may be a lawyer, and whether the advisor may speak. Colorado gives no general answer. In a sexual misconduct case, C.R.S. § 23-5-146(3)(d)(IV) allows an advisor but bars that advisor from speaking on the student’s behalf.
• Academic standing: not published at a public URL. Ask for the grade point average and completion-rate thresholds, the probation and dismissal triggers, and the reinstatement route, and ask separately for the satisfactory academic progress policy that governs federal aid, which is a different document with a different appeal.

Because the policies sit behind a site that will not serve them, an inaccessible link is not adequate published notice, and a school that cannot produce the version in force on your incident date has a real problem explaining what you were on notice of. Ask also whether a transcript or a records hold will follow a balance: Colorado addresses the withholding of transcripts and diplomas in C.R.S. § 23-5-113.5, and whether that provision reaches a particular private institution is a question to raise before you plan around it. The practical issues are covered under transcript holds.

What can a student defense lawyer do here?

A federal claim arising at the Colorado School of Trades — Title IX, Title VI, or Section 504 and the ADA — is filed in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, where I am admitted to the bar, so no pro hac vice motion and no sponsoring local attorney is needed. Because the school is private there is no Fourteenth Amendment claim, and the contract claim is a state-law claim. Very few of these matters end in court. What decides them is the record the school builds:

• Reading the governing policy against the charge or decision letter
• Preparing your account, your documents and your questions
• Testing whether the school followed its own published procedure
• Scrutinising software-based evidence, including AI-detection and similarity reports
• Helping with the written response and the appeal, where policy allows
• Serving as your advisor where the process permits one
• Negotiating sanction terms, notations and disclosure language

What a lawyer can do in the room turns on a policy this school does not publish, which is another reason to get it in hand before the meeting rather than after. Where a decision is already final, the questions shift to the record and the grounds, covered under appeals and court review.

Other Colorado colleges

Every school writes its own dismissal, appeal and conduct rules, and the filing deadlines are rarely the same from one campus to the next. These pages set out the procedure at other Colorado colleges:

• CSU Pueblo
• Denver Seminary
• Fort Lewis College
• IBMC College
• Iliff School of Theology
• IntelliTec College Colorado Springs

Common questions about Colorado School of Trades student cases

Where can I read the Colorado School of Trades student conduct code?

Not at a public web address. No public, fetchable URL for either the conduct code or the academic standing policy could be verified, because the school’s site returns a challenge to automated requests. That is not a reason to give up on the document; it is a reason to demand it. Email the dean of students or the school director, ask for the version of the code and the academic policy in force on your incident date, and keep the reply. A policy a student cannot reach is not adequate published notice, and the request itself becomes part of your record.

Does the Fourteenth Amendment protect me at the Colorado School of Trades?

No. The school is private and for-profit, so it is not a state actor and there is no constitutional due process claim against it. What you have instead is contract. In University of Denver v. Doe, 2024 CO 27, the Colorado Supreme Court held that a private institution’s own procedural promises can be definite enough to be enforceable, and revived a student’s contract claim on that basis. The same decision rejected the tort theory outright. In Colorado, against a private school, the claim is contract, not negligence.

Can I be removed from an externship or a shop without a hearing?

Usually, yes. At career and trade schools the separation that ends an enrollment is rarely a conduct hearing. It is a safety removal from a shop, a host site declining to keep you, an attendance rule, or a satisfactory academic progress determination. Those decisions are made by an instructor or a coordinator, often the same day, and the appeal is a written petition rather than a proceeding. The financial consequences land immediately, and credits from a specialized program often do not transfer, so the sanction is usually more negotiable and more important than the finding.

This is general information about the matters I handle and the law that applies to them. It is not legal advice about your situation, and the law in this area can change. For advice on your matter, start with the Full Read + Game Plan — your entire file read, straight answers, and exactly what to do next, in what order. Other campuses are covered on the Colorado student defense page.

This page is informational and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the institution named on it.

Attorney advertising. Zachary Gaynor is licensed to practice law in Florida and is admitted to the bars of the United States District Courts for the Southern, Middle, and Northern Districts of Florida, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, the United States District Courts for the Northern and Southern Districts of Illinois, the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska, the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico, and the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. Federal court admission is not a license to practice the law of the state in which the court sits; he is not licensed in Colorado and does not advise on Colorado state law.