Some students feel their identities were disregarded at high schools far from their own communities. “It was this realization that I don’t look like the students that I go to school with,” one said.
“Students who actually have schools in their community do not face all these different challenges,” says an East High grad from Glendale.
Now, Nava is one of many community members who have been calling for the Salt Lake City School District to consider building a new high school on the west side of the city — where students continue to deal with the distance between neighborhoods like hers, in Glendale, and east side high schools. “We do not have $600 million in the bank account to rebuild West and Highland. We do not have $900 million to rebuild West and Highland and a third high school,” he said. “The only way to do that … would be to ask the community for support to borrow the money to do that.”
“They didn’t feel like they really had a place at East High,” Gagon said. “A lot of them said they didn’t feel like this school was representative of the community they live in.” She also felt her and her classmates’ identities were disregarded, sometimes being disciplined for speaking their native languages and not English.
Langi said she felt uncomfortable herself when attending PTA meetings, due to the stigma she felt for being from the west side. Having later transportation, Nava said, would make it difficult for her to make sure her younger siblings were situated back home after school. Geographic disparities create challenges not only to access to extracurriculars and family engagement with the school, Nava said, but also to “a sense of belonging.”
The district also currently partners with the UTA to provide free bus and rail passes for students, Chatwin said.School board members earlier this year asked for an analysis of splitting West, East and Highland students with a fourth high school. At the March board meeting, Paul Schulte, executive director of auxiliary services, said the ideal number of students for a high school is a minimum between 1,500 and 1,600 students.
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