Dee Elementary School

OGDEN -- Students, teachers and staff at Dee Elementary School start all events with the school's song, and Tuesday's open house was no different. But this year they all have much more to be singing about.

Things are looking up at the school, and the evidence is all around.

The walls on the main floor have fresh stripes of blue paint, and the classrooms upstairs are now divided by partitions making them, officially, rooms. In the past, the round school had open classrooms, where students were hearing instruction from as many as four teachers at once. Now, the rooms have a quieter ambience.

OGDEN -- Kalle Kennedy has loved tutoring students at Dee Elementary School each week so far this year, but appreciation reached new heights recently when she and her fellow students got to read to students from books they had donated to the students.

The students participated in a special Christmas project with Dee that has been going on for 35 years thanks to the efforts of Wahlquist Junior High School Spanish teacher Gary Turner. Turner used to work with a nurse who worked with a Hispanic family of migrant workers. His students had helped provide Christmas for families of migrant workers, and when he found out most of the students of the families went to Dee school, he expanded the Christmas project to the whole school.