Granite ponders closures

The Granite Board of Education is warm to examining three options, which include closing between five and seven schools, to make the district more efficient — and Tuesday, added a fourth that would rebuild Granite High, and possibly, Granger High, as a small school to better serve its community.

That's under a Tuesday board vote, which followed a nearly a three-hour presentation, discussion, some public input and a brief verbal volley between the board and supporters of Wasatch Junior High, who said they were left out of the meeting's public comment period and the board's discussion.

The 69,000-student district, the state's second-largest, has 8,700 empty seats, costing taxpayers $3 million a year to sustain, the district has reported. Last spring, a building utilization study found schools west of 5600 West are crowded, while those east of State Street are part empty.

An options committee of parents and school workers has been examining ways to ensure educational equity by creating schools with the right amount of students to support solid programs. The public last spring chimed in on how the district should proceed. And the school board in June voted to explore options aside from leaving all alone.

A month later, the east-bench Wasatch Junior High was engulfed by fire attributed to an electrical problem in a computer server area. Wasatch now is operating at Churchill Junior High as a school within a school.

The district says the fire will not sway the study's outcomes.

The options committee last month forwarded three options to school communities, where they sought input from about 350 parents.

Tuesday, the board heard the options for the first time. It voted to keep them on the table, and ask the committee to draw up the fourth option for their examination Sept. 27, when they'll vote on which options ought to go out to October open houses for public input.

The first three options would close schools, between five and seven of them, depending on the option. They all would reconfigure boundaries, mainly with the idea of keeping students together as they move through the school system rather than splitting them into several high schools.

The options are complex. And they spurred a lot of comments from the board and hushed talk among the some 300 people packing the board room and adjacent halls, some of whom sported badges supporting Wasatch Junior High and Canyon Rim Elementary that feeds into it. Two of three options would close Wasatch, and all three would close Canyon Rim and Morningside elementaries.

Some board members wondered whether Eastwood Elementary ought to be examined for closure instead of Canyon Rim, which one parent noted is nestled safely in a residential area.