New home for Wasatch

Wasatch Junior High is moving to Churchill.

The Granite Board of Education, facing a room packed with more than 300 often applauding teachers, parents and students, unanimously voted Tuesday to move students and workers from fire-devastated Wasatch to Churchill Junior High School a mile and a half away.

Some 875 students and 35 teachers will be put up in unused classrooms at the half-empty school and in 10 portable classrooms, to be set up on the school's tennis courts by the time school starts Aug. 29. All school secretaries and custodians — plus programs from the academically strong and community-centered Wasatch Junior High — will move with the students.

The schools will remain their own schools — Wasatch will be Wasatch, and Churchill Churchill, with their own student leaders. The two simply will share space in a "school within a school" setting.

"We indeed want to help," Churchill principal Bryce Holbrook said in a statement read at the board meeting. "What's ours is now yours."

Wasatch, located near east-bench Skyline High, was gutted July 11 by a six-alarm fire attributed to an electrical problem with the main computer server. Damages are not yet determined, but 60 percent of the school was damaged by the fire and the rest by smoke and water, assistant superintendent Kevin Hague said.

Superintendent Steve Ronnenkamp and other district leaders last week met with principals of east-bench schools about what to do next. School brass recommended moving Wasatch to Churchill as a school within a school. Double sessions — with one group going from 6 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and another from 1 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. — posed too many scheduling and safety issues, Hague reported.

Churchill's enrollment is declining. Last November, the school was 52 percent full with 650 students, according to a district building utilization study presented to the school board last spring.

Wasatch students will fill empty classrooms plus newly placed portables. They will transition from a seven-period day to an eight-period block schedule, for which teachers will receive ongoing training. And there could be some issues with scheduling extracurricular activities and coexisting student bodies.

But the move received resounding community and school board approval as the best thing to do — for now. A joint school logo including the phrase "one heart, one team" is expected to grace school banners and T-shirts.

"We want Wasatch to be Wasatch. We want to go on," Wasatch principal Doug Bingham said. "I felt like that statement was heard . . . (and) I believe personally this is the very best option."

Wasatch eighth-grader Ben Lehnardt said he'll miss the old school but greets the coming school year with optimism.