Utah Mountain School governing board votes to dissolve charter, cites ‘hurdles’ in charter system
A mock-up from Utah Mountain School's charter application shows a geodesic dome classroom.
A mock-up from Utah Mountain School's charter application shows a potential layout for the new school at one of its previous proposed locations on Jackson Avenue.
A group of educators and community members have been working since 2018 to bring a charter junior high school focused on using outdoor learning to combat poverty-induced setbacks to Ogden. Three years later, the school announced it will never open.
In a press release published earlier this week, Utah Mountain School said its governing board voted unanimously on May 5 to dissolve its charter. The decision comes after a number of setbacks and an appeal granted by the Utah State Charter School Board to delay its opening by one year.
“Innovation is inherently risky, and the UMS experience highlights insurmountable hurdles ingrained in the public charter school system,” read the press release. It continued, “Our board fears that new innovative schools do not have the support, resources, or statewide investment in education needed to succeed within the existing state charter framework.”
The board’s chair, Charles Kavanagh, declined to comment on the obstacles the board sees as existing within the state charter school system.
“As you might imagine, this is a heartbreaking time for us,” he said in an email to the Standard-Examiner. “UMS still has a great deal of work to do to ensure that we dissolve the charter with expedience and transparency. At this time, that is our priority.”
Utah Mountain School was originally set to open in 2020, according to its application to the USCSB. Following difficulty finding a location, it appealed to the USCSB in April 2020 to postpone its opening until 2021.
Sheri Hardy, the school’s director, told the Standard-Examiner in October the decision to push back the start date was also influenced by complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic and other problems she was “not at liberty to disclose.”
In its initial application, Utah Mountain School said it would be located in Ogden or the immediate surrounding area. Its goal, the school wrote, would be to offset the socioeconomic achievement gap among students living in the area.
Standardized tests were canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic, but according to data from 2019, the proportion of economically disadvantaged students in the Ogden School District who were proficient in tested subjects was 5.4%-6.3% lower than the district’s average. The gap was even larger at charter schools Ogden Preparatory Academy and DaVinci Academy.
After multiple proposed locations for the school within Ogden fell through, it began looking to build in northern Weber County. In October, the school was working on negotiations regarding a piece of land in a municipality Hardy declined to disclose.
It’s unclear how those negotiations ended or what exactly led Utah Mountain School to terminate its mission.
Things appeared to be on track as of January, when the school submitted an articulation agreement with GreenWood Charter School, an elementary school, for USCSB’s approval. Under the agreement, which would have began at the end of this school year, students attending GreenWood Charter School would have been given enrollment preference at Utah Mountain School.
Both schools have similar missions. GreenWood Charter School, like Utah Mountain School, is focused on serving students from a lower socioeconomic background. The U.S. Department of Education has classified it as Title I, meaning it has a high concentration of students living in poverty. It also works to use outdoor learning and principles of healthy living to educate its students.
Utah Mountain School planned to teach students in eight outdoor classrooms in the form of geodesic domes. It also would have implemented four 15-minute aerobic exercise breaks throughout the day, while centering curriculum around project-based learning as students engage in volunteerism.
Citing research on the topic, the school theorized in its charter application that exiting the traditional classroom for increased exercise and connection to nature would foster better academic outcomes for underprivileged students.
“The outdoor classroom is a natural choice to combat poverty-related selective attention deficits because access to exercise and green spaces are two of the most thoroughly proven strategies,” the charter application read.
The team that worked to establish Utah Mountain School now is looking to keep all of its work from going to waste. In the release, the board encouraged other educators to look at and apply the research it has done in trying to get the school off the ground.
“While UMS will not open its doors, we encourage schools around the state to implement the research-driven interventions outlined in our charter,” the press release read. “We stand ready to share our research, curriculum, and ideas with any student, parent, teacher, school, district, or other stakeholder who is passionate about making public education work for all students.”