Joel Azoulay, homeless for 2½ years while attending Thomas Jefferson High School, found out in August that he wouldn’t have enough credits to graduate.

His options included taking credit recovery courses and picking up a part-time job to help pay the bills for the Aurora apartment that he and his mom moved into after bouncing from shelters to motels to friends’ homes.

“I was ready to do basically whatever,” said Azoulay, now 18.

He ended up earning a General Educational Development certificate and enrolling in SeedPaths, a new Denver-based technology boot camp that teaches low-income youth basic software programming and professional development skills, preparing them for jobs with average starting wages of more than $60,000 annually.

Such programs, also called hacker boot camps, have sprouted in Colorado and across the country over the last two years, aiming to feed the job market’s seemingly insatiable demand for tech talent.

The schools, though, are now attracting regulatory scrutiny as questions arise over whether they need to be licensed in the states in which they operate.

Local programs include Galvanize’s gSchool in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood, RefactorU in Boulder and DaVinci Coders in Louisville.

SeedPaths is slightly different.

The inaugural eight-week program kicked off last month with 13 students, whose $6,000 tuition was fully covered with funds from the federal Workforce Investment Act. Four students have since dropped out.

Job development centers manage the Workforce Investment Act funding at the local level, with the Arapahoe/Douglas Works! Workforce Center determining youth eligibility for scholarships to the SeedPaths program.

To qualify, students between the ages of 16 and 21 have to come from a low-income household and face at least one of a dozen barriers, such as homelessness and learning disabilities.

“What we’re trying to do is build more soft skills and training programs to filter youth through,” said Nikesha Holliday, a supervisor with the workforce center, adding that the focus is on preparing them for jobs in high-growth sectors such as information technology.

SeedPaths is the brainchild of Jeff Macco, who co-founded AppIt Ventures, the Denver mobile app startup that won the city’s inaugural JumpStart business plan competition in 2012.

A year ago, Macco experienced firsthand the difficulties of hiring software developers amid what’s widely viewed as the second technology boom. At the time, the national unemployment rate for software developers was 2.2 percent, well below the overall jobless rate of 7.7 percent.

“We needed to hire a junior developer, and it took six weeks before we finally found someone at $43 an hour,” Macco said. “It was really tough as a founder because it took a lot of my time away from sales and away from project management.”

A month later, AppIt’s chief technology officer and lead developer were lured away by another company, he said.

Macco left AppIt in March and looked into the tech-hiring problem and how to solve it.

Galvanize’s gSchool courses run 24 weeks and cost $20,000, making it a better option for those with financial stability. RefactorU’s 10-week classes cost $13,500.

Macco is focusing initially on low-income youth.

“It’s been a soft spot in my heart for a really long time,” said Macco, whose mother was a school teacher for 27 years. “We found a unique funding source in the federal government that was targeted toward this demographic of students.”

SeedPaths is a for-profit business that features two divisions. The first is the two-month course that teaches “soft skills” such as workload management and critical thinking as well as in-demand software languages such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

The other division is an IT recruiting arm that connects companies with students after they complete the boot camp.

Students can earn up to $1,000 by reaching milestones during the program, which is held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m to 5 p.m. in the community space at the headquarters of Denver startup Convercent. Tuition includes lunch, snacks and an RTD bus pass.

The first class features students from a wide array of backgrounds. Diego Conde is an 18-year-old who has lived in five foster homes since his mother died of cancer in 2008.

“What’s so great about the program is that they have not only taught me about the tech industry, but also the professionalism part of it, involving high energy and intellectual curiosity,” said Conde, who was born in Colombia and moved to Colorado when he was 3. “It’s just a variety of things that I had never learned or nobody ever taught me while being in the child welfare system.”

Macco said there’s a good chance Conde will land a job with SeedPaths after finishing the course.

Another student, Tesa Wilson, was referred to SeedPaths through the Cherry Creek School District’s Transition Program for youth with special needs.

“The way they teach is not the typical sit-in-the-chair and be lectured kind of class,” she said. “They get you to do stuff.”

Dustin Kraft, who built his first website when he was 12, teaches the software development curriculum.

“What’s impressive to me is that on the Monday of a week, they’ll be introduced to a new concept, and you can see their brains short out,” said Kraft, who has worked as a senior developer for several companies.

By Friday, Kraft said, the students will have a good handle on the new language.

During class last week, they were jumping through once-foreign terms such as “console.log” and “function call.”

SeedPaths plans to run five courses a year that are open to both low-income youth and students who don’t qualify for federal funding, though regulatory issues may need to be cleared up soon.

In January, California notified seven tech boot camps that they may be violating state education laws.

“We’re going after them because they need to be licensed if they’re offering an educational program,” said Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs. “We’ve also told them, as long as you make a good faith effort to come in compliance with the law, you don’t fall very high on our list of enforcement priorities.”

Macco said he was uncertain whether Colorado schools face similar compliance issues.

A review by The Denver Post of Colorado statutes shows that programs such as SeedPaths and gSchool may need licenses from the Colorado Department of Higher Education’s Division of Private Occupational Schools, or DPOS.

The agency has authority over for-profit schools that deliver education or training for a variety of occupational areas such as cosmetology and real estate.

DPOS works to foster the growth of the schools and protect students from substandard education and deceptive practices.

Lorna Candler, DPOS director, said SeedPaths, gSchool, RefactorU and DaVinci Coders are not currently licensed and will have to respond to a “regulatory questionnaire” to determine whether they need to be. The questionnaires were mailed Thursday.

A key aspect of the licensing procedure is that schools are required to carry an insurance policy that covers a portion of tuition paid in case they shutter mid-course.

The agency doesn’t have authority to send cease-and-desist letters to non-complying schools but can request that the Colorado attorney general take legal action if there is a need.

“Generally speaking, we get involved when there’s been either alleged or demonstrated public harm,” Candler said.

Thus far, none have surfaced about Colorado’s hacker boot camps.

In fact, Holliday from the Arapahoe/Douglas Works! Workforce Center said the goal is to cover tuition for up to 30 students for SeedPaths’ next class, which starts in April.

As for the current class, Azoulay is a month from completing the program and perhaps landing a job as an entry-level Web designer or software programmer.

The starting salary for a software developer in Denver ranges from $82,500 to $130,800, while a Web designer makes from $61,900 to $101,800, according to Robert Half Technology.

“I know enough software coding that it’s practical,” Azoulay said. “It’s not like I can just design a new Facebook or anything like that, but I know enough to contribute.”

Andy Vuong : 303-954-1209, avuong@denverpost.com or twitter.com/andyvuong