This article was originally published in the Academia print issue of The Daily Utah Chronicle, originally in stands in October of 2024. It has not been updated and some information may be out of date.
The Daily Utah Chronicle sat down with University of Utah alumnus Jorge Jimenez, who now works with the Utah Community Advocate Network. Jimenez discussed his organization’s efforts to build a high school on the West side of the Salt Lake Valley.
Jimenez onboarded the project in November 2022 through University Neighborhood Partners and Utah Coaching Advancement Network. In March 2023, there was a Design Circle meeting to address issues that students, teachers and parents were having in their schools.
“Two high schoolers, who are now alumni of East High, said, ‘We want a high school on the west side,’” Jimenez said.
When asked why they wanted a new high school instead of changes to East, the students “didn’t feel like they were wanted there. It’s students of color on one side going to regular classes, and then the more elite, exclusive group going to AP and honors classes,” he said.
Historical Background
“We started building high schools in Salt Lake City School District in the 1930s,” Jimenez said. “Before that, education was done by the LDS church.”
Jimenez explained how the four high schools — West, East, Highland and South — were all established by the 1950s with “West serving the more Rose Park area, East serving more of the East Bench, Avenues, Federal Heights area, Highland serving the southeastern portion of Salt Lake City, and then South getting kind of everybody else.”
“Issues started in 1984, when there were concerns about how efficient the school board was with their buildings, and that’s where the first idea of closing South High began,” Jimenez said.
He explained there was initial pushback about closing South High, so the school board “started doing closed enrollment and shifted the boundaries” enough that there were still an equal amount of students in each boundary.
“In the fall of ‘86, they did a feasibility study that was motivated by the fact that there were whispers that the legislature was going to cut funding for any school district that had buildings under 70% capacity,” Jimenez said. “The problem was that none of the four high schools were up to 70% capacity.”
He hypothesized that this closure was a result of “Reaganomics and the fact that there were severe Education Fund cuts in the mid-80s.”
“When people found out that the school board wanted to close South High, there was a big outrage,” Jimenez said. He explained how this proposal actually violated the shared governance agreement that the PTA, Community Council and Teachers Association had.
“The Teachers Association actually threatened to sue because the school board was cutting their jobs” by not providing adequate time to find a job for the following year, he said.
“It got pretty ugly,” noted Jimenez. “People were calling for the superintendent’s resignation, and they were saying that they were going to sue the school board.”
Jimenez discussed how the decision about closing South High was postponed in March of 1987 when an independent subcommittee was created to review all plans about which — if any — schools they would close. He explained that while the school board would have the final say, this subcommittee allowed for community input to mitigate the negativity around the closure.
The subcommittee was “led by a retired superintendent from Minnesota,” Jimenez said. “His mentality was that he wanted to do it as objectively as possible, which, looking back on it, I don’t think was the right way to do it.”
Ultimately, South High was closed in 1988.
Jimenez said this decision was a result of “board testaments which said that they had a lot of students outside of their traditional boundaries.” However, Jimenez noted “they changed the boundaries in ‘84 to make sure that everybody had an equal amount of students, so that seems a little unfair.”
He went on to say that the school board claimed “South High had the most unstable student population, so they had the highest amounts of turnover, dropouts and transfers to other schools.”
Jimenez then described how test scores, high level programming (AP, concurrent enrollment and IB programs) and the minority population were the main factors the school board considered when re-evaluating the boundaries of the three remaining schools.
“It got really nasty,” Jimenez said. “They didn’t want too many minorities in any group or too few, and I think that’s a really unfortunate way to look at it.”
Jimenez explained how the students in the Avenues and Federal Heights migrated to Rose Park, a few of the students in Glendale went to Highland, but most of them went to East High — “much to the detriment of the community.”
“This was how it was left in 1989, and the way that that’s shifted is the fact that the majority of students in high school actually live on the west side of the freeway,” Jimenez said.
Current Challenges
Jimenez contextualized the logistical need for a west side high school.
“The majority of the student body does not live in the community where their high school exists, and they have to go up and down every single day for four years of their high school career,” Jimenez said.
Due to Salt Lake City’s redlining, the majority of the Hispanic, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander communities reside on the west side, as depicted in the Salt Lake County Census Data.
He explained how transportation has especially become an issue this school year.
“The buses are never on time,” Jimenez said. “There’s not enough buses with the Trax or school board districts, so there’s literally students that are being left on the curb, and these are students that already are using the buses because that’s their only option.”
Jimenez explained that this lack of transportation has resulted in a spike of absences and tardiness and prevents students from being involved in extracurriculars.
He went on to talk about how the students that are missing school or showing up late “are the students who usually need to access the resources, like talking to teachers before class or free breakfast, and are unable to do any of that because the school board and the high school are unable to meet the basic needs of the west side community.”
What’s Been Done
In April 2020, the Utah Community Advocate Network attended a conference in Layton with Innovate Public Schools which trains parents on how to use their power to advocate for their children in the school system.
“We went to the training and then from there, we started developing our own testimonies and our own experiences so that we could share with the school board,” Jimenez said.
Jimenez described the school board’s evasiveness when discussing constructing a high school on the west side, “but we stayed on them, and we actually got them to add this high school in Glendale as something on their agenda.”
The school board conducted a feasibility study for the high school concluding that there wasn’t enough land that the City School Board owned on the west side, nor were there enough students.
“Those two points are very misleading,” Jimenez said. “First off, they don’t own the majority of the land of East High. They actually lease it from the cemetery there.”
Jimenez explained how the project has identified Glendale Golf Course to be the ideal place for the high school. Of the 120 acres, Jimenez claimed they’d only need “30 acres of that to build a comprehensive high school.”
“It’d be very easy to lease it from the city because they’re constantly making deals back and forth with the school board for leasing land,” Jimenez said. “You do have the land, you’re just not willing to think outside the box.”
Regarding the second concern, Jimenez explained that the lack of capacity comes from the goal of rebuilding Highland, East and West to have a 3000-student capacity each.
“If we have the ideal student size of 1500 to 2000, then we can support the four high schools, especially when you take into account that only 52% of the high school age students that live within the Salt Lake City school district actually attend a public school,” Jimenez said.
Looking to the Future
“I think the most important thing is for people to understand that we’re not trying to push against anybody,” Jimenez said. “I think the school board and us have the same goal, which is to provide the best education possible for students in the district.”
Jimenez estimates that the project would take about 10 years to get this high school up and running, mirroring the six to seven year trajectory they have for rebuilding West and Highland.
“The way that we would make it so that there’s improvement in the issues that exist now is creating meaningful, authentic relationships with the people in positions of power [and] with community members that are impacted by their decisions,” Jimenez said. “Making it so that they care about those people because they care about them as people, not just because of constituents or because they have students in school.”
