School Board Member Nancy Garrison Did Great job of Addressing Upcoming School Challenges and Highlighting Questions Citizens Must Start Thinking About

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.