This morning Park City School Board member Nancy Garrison was on KPCW. She did a great job of answering questions about the challenges of accommodating all our students and noted questions the community needs to start deciding upon.

• KPCW’s Leslie Thatcher noted that there wasn’t a lot of land to build a new school on, Ms Garrison replied that there were a few pieces of land they owned but that, “If growth continues, we’ll have to look at existing parcels and structures we have.”
• Ms Garrison noted that Jeremy Ranch Elementary school used to have 750+ students. She asked whether we as a community want to go back to that and accept the different “feel” of a very large elementary school.
• Ms Thatcher asked asked what’s time line for decisions on building or renovating? Ms Garrison answered “two week ago”. “You don’t respond to growth any sooner than you must because you don’t want excess capacity because it opens you up to …we are a very high performing school district and there’s a lot of interest in intra district participation and so its a very chicken and egg timeline.”
• Ms Garrison said the Master Planning committee is meeting every other week and should be able to present choices to the board in the next few weeks.
• Ms. Garrison was asked about early release and singleton classes and its impacts on the school district. She stated that there is concern that they do impact budget, faculty, and class sizes. She stated that “there are going to be tough decisions. Some of those singletons may not continue. It may mean changes in how we handle parent release”. She then followed up “it’s going to be appropriate but it might be unpalatable”. Ms Thatcher asked whether this meant something like a calculus class would be cancelled because there was only “15 students in it”. Ms. Garrison said that she felt that core classes like that would be looked at very closely before cutting them.

With the uproar over SAGE testing results, we were surprised to learn of Utah SB 101, which was signed into law earlier this year by Governor Herbert. SB101 says that you, as a parent, have the right to stop your kid from having to take part in standardized tests like SAGE and it cannot impact the teacher or school according to law.

From message boards describing this practice, it appears the “trick” is to make sure the school doesn’t then label your kid as “non-proficient” due to skipping the test. There are reports of school districts like Alpine that are happy to not apply this label to children who opt-out. However, we aren’t sure about the Park City School District. If this is something that appeals to you, you should definitely discuss this option with the Administration at your school (or the school district) to make sure you understand all the implications. More general information can also be found on the web.

This movement seems to align itself with those who oppose the Common Core in education, so there are definitely passionate people on both sides of this issue.

We, however, see the SAGE test a little like buying the first model years of a new car. Why buy it when the kinks are still being worked out? In this case, we are confident that Park City Schools are going to do what’s necessary to get SAGE results up in the coming years. A case could be made for waiting for them to figure this out before you let your kid behind the wheel.