Many expected last week’s Wasatch County School District hearing on school boundaries for the 2026-27 academic year to be the final say after a six-month saga of surveying, feedback and hours of work sessions.
But after listening to public comments about the splitting of students at the J.R. Smith and Daniels Canyon elementary schools, which lie directly on the boundary line in the proposed scenario, the school board decided to wait and see if it could address those concerns.
“We have each heavily weighed out the scenarios that benefit our individual communities and the community as a whole,” said school board President Kim Dickerson during the hearing. “Please know that we have lost sleep over this.”
Board members scheduled a work meeting for the crack of dawn on Oct. 30, and during that meeting, the majority of the board leaned towards Scenario H.
Scenario H is nearly identical to the boundaries that were proposed during the earlier hearing.
Both scenarios use U.S. 40 as a boundary, with students on the east attending Timpanogos Middle School and Wasatch High School and students on the west attending Rocky Mountain Middle School and Deer Creek High School.
The difference between the two proposals is that Scenario H bumps the northwestern border of the Timpanogos/Wasatch boundary up to Coyote Road, incorporating the Cove Estates neighborhood. This also evens out enrollment numbers between the middle and high schools. The J.R. Smith and Daniels Canyon elementary schools would still be split in Scenario H.
The school board has multiple priorities for the boundaries, including demographic mix and safety, so how much to keep students together throughout their public education is a difficult question to answer.
Superintendent Garrick Peterson noted he’d spoken with a neighboring district over the past six months and found that it had also been forced to split some of its elementary schools.
Board members Breanne Dedrickson and Brad Ehlert advocated for Scenario B, which divides students based on their elementary schools instead of their home address.
Dedrickson said her fifth-grade daughter’s friend group would be fractured by Scenario H.
“I don’t have an issue with my kid going to either school,” she said. “What I’ve heard from my neighborhood (is), ‘Send them all to one or the other.'”
Ehlert suggested further tweaks to Scenario B’s boundaries, but the idea was shot down because of the limited time remaining to make a decision.
The school board must decide boundaries by mid-December, when they will be registering Deer Creek High School with the High School Activities Association. If the boundaries chosen are significantly different from what was proposed during the Oct. 28 public hearing, the school board will be required to hold another hearing within 30 days.
The school board will be holding a special session to vote on boundaries at 6 p.m. on Wednesday. The meeting is open to the public.
Update: The Wasatch County School District provided a map of the proposed school boundaries that will be discussed. That map can be viewed below.
