Spirits high at '2-in-1 school'

Some teachers don't have a classroom.

Others were moved from a room with a view to a giant box in the parking lot.

Secretaries gave up their summer vacations to prepare for the school year.

Parents are asked to drop students off as much as a block away from school to alleviate traffic.

Students literally will rub elbows with "rivals" as they walk down newly crowded halls.

So, why are all these people smiling at Churchill Junior High?

"I'm excited," Churchill ninth-grader and cheerleader McCall Clark said of sharing her school with Wasatch Junior High students. "I think it's going to be really good for us. We're all going to be in the same high school next year; we might as well make friends and get to know each other now.

"It should be a really fun year."

School starts Monday for the newlywed Churchill and Wasatch junior high schools, which will share Churchill's campus following a devastating July blaze at Wasatch.

School officials have worked since late July to ready for the new school year, including rearranging classroom assignments, bringing in new portables and changing class times to meet Churchill's block schedule. That's on top of making sure teachers who lost decades of materials have something to teach with.

It's a logistical challenge, to say the least.

The Churchill campus, which last year was part empty, will more than double its enrollment to 1,500-plus students. All students will share bell schedules, start and end times and lunch breaks.

School leaders acknowledge that makes for some high traffic.

But Churchill principal Bryce Holbrook wouldn't have it any other way.

"We would have distinctly drawn a line" if the schools kept different schedules. "You'd be two strangers passing during the day, and would remain strangers."

Still, the schools will operate separately, as schools within a school, with their own teachers, their own separate offices, even their own custodial staffs.

Preparations to do it have been intense.

The school's 10 new portable classrooms required an additional power line from the neighborhood and a new transformer, Holbrook said.