Granite District needs to provide for long-term growth

Mothers who go school shopping with children, don't buy clothes that fit just right. They look to see if there is a little growing room so the jeans bought in August will still fit in January.

Granite School District is looking to make a perfect fit right now with school buildings and children without giving enough thought to the growing room that will soon be needed in the schools on the East side of the valley.

The news in my area is that the kids are coming back. Many neighborhoods on the east side of the valley are experiencing a great regeneration of school age children. It will never match the boom days when all the houses were new and there were 50 kids per street. But many schools have already been closed since those days, too. We can't afford to close any more. What fits now won't fit in five years. We need just a little growing room in our neighborhood schools.

It doesn't make economic sense to close schools in exactly the neighborhoods where children are coming, only to have to come back again within a few years and try to figure where to house or bus these kids.

In fact, Granite School District would do well to adopt a policy with more long range vision than the "build and close" school pattern that has been seen in our valley for many years. Keeping neighborhood schools open through the enrollment fluctuations helps everybody. Families want to move into an area with schools close by, and when families move into established neighborhoods, the kids go to schools that have long since been built and paid for. Families, school districts, neighborhoods, everybody wins.

Several neighborhoods in West Valley are soon facing the same trends my neighborhood went through over the last 20 years. The population has already peaked, and the number of neighborhood children is actually starting to decline. Right now, the Granite District Web site shows that there are almost as many west side schools with empty seats as east side schools. Boundary adjustments can be a powerful tool to help keep neighborhood schools open.

On the far western side of the valley there are urgent needs for a new elementary school. Granite School District needs to get to work and build. There are several ways the district could pay for the needed schools, not the least of which would be selling its own unused property instead of viable schools. School bonds are prudently used nationwide as a long-range financial tool to help school districts meet needs. Granite District needs to investigate all options. Closing schools is the least financially efficient way to create needed funds, and it is the most disruptive to children.