District still weighing up whether to repair damage or build a new school

In an emergency meeting held Monday night, the Tooele County School Board approved a plan to relocate 750 Grantsville Elementary School students following a fire last week that damaged the school.

The plan adopted by the board last night will send Grantsville Elementary’s third and fourth grades to Willow Elementary, while fifth and sixth grades will go to Grantsville Junior High.

The July 13 fire, which started in the faculty break room, damaged the building worse than initially believed. It will be at least a year before the building can be used again, according to Terry Linares, Tooele County School District superintendent.

“There was a lot of damage done to the building,” Linares said. “The board will have to determine at a future date if we will rebuild only the damaged parts of the school or build a new school.”

Rebuilding will take a year while building a new school would take two years. The district is still waiting for cost estimates and information from its insurance company before making a decision on how to proceed, Linares said.

In the meantime, the district administration, in consultation with teachers, administrators, and board members, examined several options.

“We will go into this planning on a two-year period [of closure for Grantsville Elementary] and if it is less then we can pull out of the plan in one year,” Linares said. “The last time there was a fire in a Grantsville School was 1983 and there were only 500 students in Grantsville. Today we have over 2,000 students and the choices on what to do are harder.”

A second option presented to the school board for consideration involved moving the seventh and eighth grades out of the junior high and into the high school, then moving all Grantsville Elementary School students into the junior high school.

Though this was originally the preferred choice of the administration, according to Linares, it fell out of favor as details were discussed.

“It would involve the seventh- and eighth-grade students moving six times a day between portables and within the high school, the school schedules were incompatible, and it involved moving a lot of teachers into new classrooms,” Linares said. “We did not believe that was a good environment for the junior high students.”

A third option would have had all the junior high students from Grantsville bused to Clarke Johnsen Junior High School in Tooele. However, the plan was rejected by the administration after consulting with board members from Grantsville, who cited the length of time students would spend on the road and a desire to keep Grantsville students in Grantsville, according to Linares.

The plan adopted by the school board will require four double portables to be installed at Willow Elementary and three portables at Grantsville Junior High. The district already owns enough portables, but must relocate them, Linares said.

The fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms will occupy a separate part of the junior high building and maintain their normal schedule. They will also have a separate lunch from the seventh and eighth grades.

“We approve of the district’s action,” said Bob Gowans, president of the Tooele Education Association. “The district staff has worked hard to examine alternatives and have listened to the teachers’ concerns. We will work together to make the plan work.”

The community is also beginning to realize the losses created by the fire are greater than any monetary value placed on the building.

Parts of the school date as far back as 1929. The gymnasium, on the east end of the building, was built in 1929 and sustained little fire damage. The building underwent several remodeling and additions in 1956, 1974 and 2004, according to Steve West, construction coordinator for the Tooele County School District.

Donna Fillion, the district’s 2009 teacher of the year, had her third-grade classroom in Grantsville Elementary for 20 years.

“My classroom was one that had smoke billowing out of it,” Fillion said.

While the walls of her room remain intact, her personal collection of teaching materials built up over 20 years is lost.

“With smoke, soot, and water damage, there will probably be nothing left in my room that I can use,” Fillion said.

It is uncertain when or if teachers will be able to return to the school to collect classroom materials because of exposed asbestos, according to Linares.

“It is sad to see the damage to the school — it is a big hunk of history,” said Fillion, who also attended Grantsville Elementary as student. “But the building was old and did need some attention.”

The district will hold a public meeting for parents of all Grantsville Elementary School students to discuss damages to the school and explain the new student schedule Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at Grantsville High School in the auditorium.

Tim Gillie: tgillie@tooeletranscript.com