$38 million worth of revenue bonds will fund the makeover of Park City School District athletic facilities without cost to the taxpayers, according to school board President Andrew Caplan.

The Park City School Board in mid-November approved parts of a master plan to create a new athletic facility on Kearns Boulevard near Park City High School.

The project, will be financed through a 20-year lease revenue bond. Caplan said the bonds would not raise taxes and would be paid primarily using the district’s construction capital outlay and capital fund balances.

A public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 17, at 6 p.m. at 2700 Kearns Blvd. The same day, the school board plans to officially adopt the bond resolution.

The master plan for the facility is divided into four phases. Phase one refers to the construction of baseball and softball fields, while phase two includes soccer fields, bleachers and tennis courts. Phase three would be an addition to the current fieldhouse and renovations for the existing gym, and phase four encompasses new track and turf, a support building for restrooms and concessions, and more bleachers.

School board members voted to approve phases one, two and four on Nov. 19. Phases one and four will be executed between April and September 2025, according to a timeline Chief Operating Officer Michael Tanner provided the board. Phase two will be executed between March and August of 2026.

In addition to the athletic facilities, the now-approved phases include the demolition of Treasure Mountain Junior High. In its place, the board plans to build two soccer and lacrosse fields as well as new infrastructure to improve parking.

The post School board plans to approve bonds to fund athletic field makeover appeared first on Park Record.

McPolin Elementary School fifth grade teacher Sam Thompson has shown just how far a little funding, creativity and great relationships with students through the radio-controlled car club can go.

Three of the district’s four elementary schools participate in the program, and the remaining fourth school — Parley’s Park — is set to join the high-speed action next year.

“They start it from scratch,” Thompson said, explaining how the club works while he kept an eye on a student learning to operate one of the cars through a series of cone-laden obstacles stretching down the hall. “Two of our five groups are almost done or are done, and then there’s some other groups that are riding the struggle bus right now big time.”

That’s a good thing, he said. They’re learning to work as a team and rely on one another as they try to piece the intricate little vehicles together after being given a disassembled car, instructions and tools.

“They do this, and then when their cars get done, we take them out and we play. We do little races and stuff,” he said. “Our culminating activity is we have a race at trailside.”

In the classroom, Thompson’s primarily hands-off attitude became even more apparent as groups worked through varying stages of construction. Chassis, screws, radio control units and micro parts were scattered over workstations, with fifth graders working meticulously to pull it all together.

“I didn’t screw one part in, so I needed to take it off, but our RC car is basically finished,” Cru Crawford explained as he looked over a set of instructions that made changing a car’s oil look like a 400-piece Lego set.  

The wrong pieces were touching, something wasn’t working, and so he had to go back and check his group’s work. Now, he’d identified the problem and was fitting everything back together.

In another group, Jackson Beal worked on his car’s front and back modules with a fellow group member.

“The chassis is, like, all the power,” he said, before being interrupted by his co-mechanic.

“The chassis is the boing-a-boing,” she corrected him.

That’s right, Beal remembered, the power depends on the radio transmission. 

Club member Abigail Tullis said several of the smaller pieces can be tricky to place and easy to lose. 

“We’ve lost a couple of those,” she said. “Mr. T has an extra car that he takes pieces off of, and if you don’t find one there, then you just don’t have one, which is probably bad.” 

Other groups came over to look at Tullis’ group’s car, which was much further along than several other of its peers.

Their team has some skilled technicians, Tullis explained, and they used the most important component needed for the project — teamwork. 

“We work together pretty well,” she said.

Thompson, who was always available to help students with their questions but never ready to jump in and answer everything for them, said he was sure to buy extra parts.

“This girl,” he said teasingly toward one of his students, “likes to eat the parts. I don’t know. We’ve talked about it.”

He leaned over toward her to emphasize his message, “We don’t eat the parts.”

He also said the club gives kids a chance to use tools, a skill that he’s noticed becoming more and more of a dying trade for youngsters.

The club was born when he was asked to start a program at Treasure Mountain Junior High School. He’d grown up messing with RC cars, and he thought it would be a fun opportunity for students.

“Kids brought their own cars, and it was just a free-for-all,” he said. 

They built snow ramps, had tons of fun and gave kids a safe place to be after school.

When he started teaching at the elementary school, he missed the activity and applied for a grant through the Park City Education Foundation. 

Next year, every fifth grader in the school district will have an opportunity to join in on the fun. 

The post Park City School District fifth-graders become mechanics in after-school RC program appeared first on Park Record.

Park City School District administrators are considering a policy update that would make school employees and students mandated reporters of bullying and harassment, and subject them to possible disciplinary action if they fail to speak up.

The school board voted last week to publicly post the policy at its first meeting since The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights released a report last month highlighting over 180 instances of prejudice-based harassment among students in recent years.

“I was born on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so that’s always a special day for me and my family,” Superintendent Jill Gildea said at the session. “I’ve especially loved having that day off. … But one of his quotes that resonates is, ‘Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.'”

She also emphasized the importance of education in the district’s future efforts against harassment.

“Education is the answer. Education is pivotal in addressing the issues highlighted in the report, specifically around discrimination and harassment,” Gildea said. “We do encourage all families to discuss these issues with their children fostering a culture of kindness and understanding.”

She held up her wrist.

“I have my little bracelet that says kindness is magic, but I don’t believe kindness should have to be magic,” she said.

Since the civil rights report, the district’s leaders have found themselves facing students, parents and community members seeking accountability, solutions and explanations as to what exactly happened.

“When I think about schools, I think about love. I think about light, joy, happiness, friendships and all of the great things that come with school. So in light of our recent OCR report, I do want to affirm and reaffirm that our school district is committed to more than just meeting the requirements of the resolution agreement,” Gildea said. “As superintendent, I apologize for any instance where our district fell short of providing a nurturing and safe environment.”

Later in the meeting, the board voted to publicly post several policies it is considering, including possible board policy updates to ensure the district complies with its agreement with the Office of Civil Rights.

Along with possibly penalizing students and school personnel who see harassment and stay quiet, the amendments would mean principals or vice principals would not only be obligated to inform parents if their child threatened to commit suicide or was involved in harassment, hazing, bullying or retaliation within a day of the incident, but also inform them of the district’s plan to address what happened.

The plans are to be tailored responses to address the specific needs of both the harassed and the students who did the harassing.

The policy updates would specifically name types of harassment and specify employees or students who observe harassment or bullying “and fail to intervene or report the activity to school officials may face disciplinary action for conspiring to engage in such conduct.”

Since the report was released, the district has added a page to its website where viewers can see updates on the administration’s efforts to meet the requirements outlined in the district’s resolution agreement with the Office of Civil Rights. According to the web page, the district is in the process of reviewing harassment incidents from the 2022-23 school year, ensuring equitable resolutions, and reviewing and updating policies.

Four other policies were posted as well, one of which targets discrimination within the school district.

Board members said they hope to hear from community members before they move forward.

“I encourage people to review these and please submit comments,” board member Wendy Crossland said. 

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On March 27 at around 9:30 a.m., a series of earthquakes ranging in magnitude from four to nine took place in Gina Mason’s seventh-grade science class in room 120 at Ecker Hill Middle School. Fortunately, the sporadic set of quakes only affected about a square foot of space where students placed towers they had built to withstand the simulated force of the natural disaster.

Admittedly, some of the towers didn’t inspire the most confidence. Constructed with wood glue, balsa wood and heavy metal plates that served as different floors, one of the towers noticeably leaned. Another tower — built by an aptly named group of students who called themselves the Demolition Corp. — didn’t make it to the vibrating board before falling under its weight as the class watched with only half-surprised faces.

The majority of the structures, however, proved to be much tougher than they looked, several of them refusing to fall even after repeated jolts of magnitude nine quaking.

Mason’s promise of lunch for the winning team gave the experiment a competitive edge, which she determined by watching recordings of the towers to see which withstood the longest without so much as cracking.

Before their jostled reckoning, each team gave a presentation in which they told the class what techniques they decided to use to fortify their towers and why they decided to use them.

“We chose to do a lot of cross bracing because cross bracing is used to keep buildings stable when the wind blows,” Lizza Fellows explained to the class.

Her group’s name was Dan’s Mom, and Dan’s Mom’s tower was the first to take the stand.

The nervous students crowded around the platform prepared for the worst but hoping those preparations were made in vain. It wasn’t until it tried to withstand magnitude nine quakes that a lower floor took flight and the suddenly unsupported weight of the higher floors made quick work of the thin balsa wood.

Dan’s Mom was not the only group to rely on cross braces to strengthen their towers, though many different strategies were implemented throughout the experiment.

Luke Kovak and his group Bob the Builder’s tower managed to stay upright throughout the entire activity. He said he’s come to appreciate both cross braces and what they do to fortify structures, as well as counterbalances. He found both techniques were implemented when he studied the 1,667 foot Taipei tower in Taiwan.

“This counterweight is absolutely massive,” he explained.

Another team, The Quaker Shakers, decided to lean into the flexibility of their building materials.

“We realized that the balsa wood that we were using, since it wasn’t a hard kind of wood, it’s pretty flexible,” said group presenter Sofia Fregulia. 

Not wanting to restrict that flexibility, the team stuck to a simpler structure, complete with basic diagonal braces.

The decision somewhat cost their building its posture, and it leaned forward precariously, but their methodology proved sound and earned them lunch. Not one piece of their flexible balsa wood cracked before it was subjected to magnitude nine shakes.

Mason, who said she’s repeated the experiment with her classes for about 25 years, said the experiment serves to educate her students about the design engineering process.

“They have to do research to solve a problem,” she said. “They had to brainstorm designs. They had to come up with a scale model. They had to test their scale model,” she explained. “Now they’ll go back, look at their videos. They’ll revamp their designs.”

She said she typically has a pretty good idea of who will take the cake even before the first earthquake strikes, and a large part of her prediction comes from seeing the kids work together.

“First off, it’s design. But it’s also how well they build, how precise they cut the wood, how well they measure,” she said. “They all had their scale models off someway, and then they had to go back because it’s not really a skill they practice very often.”

Mason explained she teaches her students with an activity-before-content philosophy, which she said gives them an experience they can use to contextualize and understand their studies. Her class performs weekly labs.

“It’s just a definite more real-world application to science,” she said. “They’re way more engaged. You can keep them focused. They produce a lot better work.”

The Quaker Shakers won the day. The group consisted of Fregulia, Charlotte Gallagher, Bryn Tschabrun, Sawyer Kelly and Benjamin Stearns.

The post Ecker Hill students test their structural engineering chops appeared first on Park Record.

Here is a link to the full interview with Superintendent Jill Gildea. It was added to the online version of this article after Heidi Matthews, the community relations member of Park City School District’s community engagement team, called The Park Record and said the article did not provide proper context in its quotations. The inclusion of the interview is to provide more context for interested members of the public.

Scott van Hartesvelt was surprised when he learned about the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigation into the Park City School District that documented commonplace racism, nazism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism and even possible sexual assault, much of it inadequately handled and recorded by district staff members.

But his 13-year-old daughter was not surprised at all. She told her dad that the harassment the report found had taken place among students during 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years still happens right in front of her every day in the only public school district she’s ever attended, the only school atmosphere she has ever known.

Like what?

“I can’t wait for Trump to win so that he can build a wall and throw you back over,” he recalled her telling him. Two Asian girls were asked, “Is your mom serving you dog for dinner?”

These instances came after the report was released last month, he said.

She said she felt lucky to not be pestered by bullies of her own. “I kind of keep my head down and I don’t upset anybody,” she told him.

“We have lots of conversations about right and wrong and her role in being on the right side of situations and behavior,” he said.

The report showed that the school district has not kept adequate records of harassment reports as required under federal law, so no one can be sure exactly how many cases of reported harassment there have been. But in the 180 documented cases the investigators were able to find from Park City High School, Treasure Mountain Junior High School and Ecker Hill Middle School, they found a number of the district’s responses insufficient to address and stop the offending behavior. The figures are also likely incomplete, as school administrators filed harassment records inconsistently, according to the report, with one principal shredding witness statements at the end of each year.

The report stated that a survey sent to staff members of the three schools found that 60.3% of the employees were aware of race or national-origin-based discrimination, 31.4% were aware of sexual harassment or harassment toward LGBTQ+ students, and 24% were aware of harassment toward students with disabilities. 

Students said speaking out against or reporting harassment only results in retribution from their peers.

The description van Hartesvelt’s daughter gave him about the punishment offenders face didn’t seem like much of a deterrent to him: in-school suspension in which students sit with their phones.

Most high school students asked about incidences at school declined even when offered anonymity.

Sharing with a reporter could cost a student their reputation, several teachers explained, and land them on the wrong side of student-to-student abuse.

Van Hartesvelt said he wants to tell his daughter to stand up against the harassment and report it, but he recognizes how the district’s inaction has made that more difficult for her and others.

If students can’t trust the district to appropriately address targeted harassment, and if his daughter’s reports go nowhere, he’s not sure what he’s supposed to tell her, he said.

“I don’t think this is an overtly racist community,” van Hartesvelt said. “So where’s the disconnect between what I believe Park City to be and then what is being experienced in the schools? And I still don’t feel like I have a clear answer.”

To him, the message from the investigation is about leadership, and the district hasn’t shown appropriate accountability.

Abuse ‘normalized’

Spencer Randall, a senior at Park City High School and the president of its Gay-Straight Alliance organization, has had an up-close view of what happens when students feel comfortable and undeterred in harassing one another.

He also stood out as the lone student contacted for this article who was willing to speak and identify himself.

“We get a lot of direct homophobia to the club,” Randall said. “Just for an example, we have sign-ups every year, and every single year, all three years, we’ve had at least five people sign up as a joke. Some people have put a slur as their pronouns. … You can see them walking away, laughing with their friends.”

He said anyone who visited a school for the day could leave with first-hand accounts of racism and antisemitism, as well as harassment targeted toward Latino students.

“It’s just so normalized, especially at the high school and at Treasure, that I think people don’t even report it,” he said. 

When Randall moved to Park City from the Chicago suburbs, he noticed a strong sense of antisemitism, and soon found another kind of widely propagated harassment targeted toward him.

He said he started presenting more masculine, and his peers had a lot of horrible things to say about it. 

“In ninth grade, I was still kind of experimenting,” he said. “And in October of my ninth grade year, I just completely stopped going to school for the rest of the year because the looks and the comments. … I did not have a single friend. I did not have anyone who was very nice to me or supportive.”

In his sophomore year, he heard slurs daily. Most of his teachers wouldn’t use his preferred pronouns. Through his involvement in the organization, he’s known other students who have been the targets of violence, and he almost became subject to it himself before the situation de-escalated.

A few years ago, when he saw some of the cruel comments wrote on the Gay-Straight Alliance’s sign-up sheet, he said he emailed a principal trying to inform them of his concerns. As far as he knows, nothing came of the report, and the issue was never addressed.

More recently, he’s reached out to the administration with concerns that the high school’s two gender-neutral restrooms are doubling as photography rooms during current renovations.

“I was saying to administration, I was like, the photography room cannot use the gender neutral bathrooms as a dark room or anything for photography,” he said. “It’s not safe, especially given what happened in Oklahoma with the student dying. If trans students are not allowed to use the normal bathrooms, they need to have the gender-neutral bathrooms available.”

The responses were less than helpful, he said.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll get on that next year,'” he said. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a current issue.’ … Something could happen.”

Randall said he’s learned to ignore the harsh comments, and he’s had years to learn how, but that doesn’t make it any easier for other students who find themselves in his footsteps.

One thing he said could help is enacting and making students aware of harsh consequences when they engage in harassing behaviors.

“I feel like if they really push that idea of anti-bullying and anti-harassment, anti-discrimination, I think it would start to make more of a difference and encourage students to report other students,” he said. “I’ve really never seen that.”

Another senior and leading member of the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance provided written answers about their experience, but asked to remain anonymous.

“I have been called slurs in the hallways — never to my face, but always loud enough for me to hear,” they said. “Sometimes I’m targeted for being openly queer, other times for being neurodivergent or physically disabled. I have been told to kill myself because ‘the world would be better with one less faggot.'” 

The student said they feel the district is, overall, handling the investigation well, though the student is “not confident in their ability to actually enforce rules or follow steps to fight bigotry.”

The district has had a “no tolerance” policy toward harassment since they were little, the student said, but they’ve seen little execution.

They said they’d like to see that change, and that the school’s administrators need to show they care about students through their actions, not just talk of a zero-tolerance policy.

“When a Jewish teacher had to raise hell for anyone to do anything after a student drew a swastika on the bottom of one of his desks, that said much more than any of the anti-bullying posters did,” the student said. “When you turn a deaf ear to the slurs and bigoted remarks being thrown around in your hallways, that says much more than the safe space stickers do.”

The student continued: “When your response to your marginalized students’ complaints is diplomacy instead of action, over and over again until it necessitates a federal investigation, that says infinitely more than the emails reiterating that you will not tolerate harassment.”

“Almost every person I know who has reported being bullied admitted that the district did very little, if anything, that actually helped their situations,” the student said. “I’m a little worried this will all disappear without anything happening, and in five years, someone will say, ‘Hey, remember that time the OCR was investigating our school district because of the amount of unacknowledged harassment going on?’ and the response will be ‘Oh, that happened? I didn’t notice.'” 

Silver linings

District Superintendent Jill Gildea emphasized that the report did mention that the district had done some things to address student harrassment.

“In the report, believe it or not, there are also acknowledgements of the things the district has stepped forward and worked on,” she said.

The report acknowledges the district “timely investigated some specific incidents of harassment based on race, national origin, sex, and disability at the three schools and took some measures (most often disciplining harassers) to end and prevent recurrence of the harassment.”

But the district didn’t provide adequate evidence that it had investigated other instances at all or “took effective steps to eliminate hostile environments” in other instances, several of which the report explored in detail.

One Black student was the target of racial harassment 17 times between the two school years. Students called them the n-word, “monkey” and “negrito.” 

Most of the harassment was investigated. Most of the students faced consequences. Still, the report found the response lacking because “the hostile environment based on race persisted.”

Many of the examples followed a similar pattern, though the consequences offending students faced were often redacted from the report. In many cases, the district acted, but not sufficiently according to the Department of Education, and not to federally mandated standards.

Gildea said punishments for targeted harassment often vary depending on the students’ ages, the severity of the offense, and other situation-specific details. Currently, she said, the district is in the process of clarifying its policies to be more accessible and easy to find for the community.

“There can be restorative practice. There can be a module of education on the topic. There can be an in-school suspension with time spent with a counselor or social worker or wellness coordinator,” she said. “There are going to be different things.”

To make sure reports of harassment are taken seriously and escalated to the appropriate level, she talked about standard reporting forms now available on the district and schools’ websites. If students want, they can report incidents anonymously or they can ask for a follow-up.

“I think what we’re learning from our OCR review is that sometimes if something was just one email or a teacher might have mentioned something to an assistant principal, it may have seemed like it was just a for-your-information,” Gildea said.

She said the district is hopeful people will use the new report format.

There are several anti-bullying campaigns within the district’s schools, including a “There’s No Place for Hate” program, which the civil rights report said consisted of posters, the ability for students to sign a banner to pledge against hate, and asking teachers to hold 15- to 30-minute class discussions about creating an inclusive culture.

“Our challenge in a zero tolerance mindset is sometimes, you know, if you simply say, ‘Well, that’s it. You made a mistake. You’re expelled. You’re out of here.’ That just leads to more hatred and more misunderstanding,” she said.

Not enough

After the report was released, Gildea sent a letter to students’ families outlining steps the district would take.

One Jewish parent of a middle schooler at Treasure Hill told The Park Record the letter didn’t feel sufficient.

“This is a serious situation with the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights weighing in,” he said. “That’s not to be taken lightly. … For me, the letter wasn’t explicit enough.”

It didn’t show accountability or ownership, he said.

“You’ve got to identify a problem, own that problem, and then you can set about being serious about fixing the problem,” he said. “If you go short on any of those first steps, then you’re messaging that it’s not really that big a problem.”

In the days following the release of the report, his daughter saw several boys in his class passing around a swastika. 

“A boy uttered, ‘We need to kill all of the Jews,’ or something to that effect,” the man said. 

His daughter immediately left class, and an investigation was immediately opened.

“The next day, my daughter felt uncomfortable at school, getting some looks,” he said. “To the credit of her friends, they wrapped themselves around her, so she was never alone throughout that day.”

The school, he said, isn’t sharing the consequences for the boy who said those hateful statements.

“Is it too much? Is it too little? For things that define the safety in the schools, you’d want to know what the consequences are,” he said. “I don’t need to know the person’s name. I don’t need to know any specific information.”

As for the district as a whole, he said he’d like to see more transparency, overt communication and responsibility. 

“Who’s responsible for wars between countries? Who’s responsible for a lot of the conflicts that happen?” Gildea said. “I wish it were as easy as a who or what to blame … but is that fair?”

Everyone does their best, she said, and they do more as they learn more.

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