‘Excited and worried’: Hundreds of Salt Lake City kids begin school at new campuses after elementary closures

For hundreds of Salt Lake City elementary students, the first day of school Tuesday brought more than just new classes and teachers — it signified a fresh start at new campuses after their previous schools closed in the spring.

More than a dozen elementary schools welcomed these displaced students, as well as teachers and staff from the shuttered schools who were reassigned. The campuses that closed last school year included Hawthorne and M. Lynn Bennion elementary schools on the east side and Mary W. Jackson and Riley on the west.

Carissa Batista’s son, who used to attend Bennion, was reassigned to Liberty Elementary following the district’s boundary adjustments. She watched from outside Liberty early Tuesday as her son entered his new school, saying she was “frustrated” by Bennion’s closure.

“I still am,” Batista said. “This is a little overwhelming compared to Bennion’s size. A ton more kids than Bennion had, so, I don’t know how to feel about that. I liked the smaller school, but my son, he doesn’t seem to care.”

Liberty is one of 14 elementary schools in Salt Lake City that took on new students from closed campuses Tuesday. Two others, Nibley Park School and Indian Hills Elementary, did not receive new students from boundary changes, but two programs previously located at closed campuses were relocated there, through which they welcomed some new students.

Liberty’s principal, Julia Barrientos, said there isn’t yet an exact count on how many newcomers it’s receiving as students are still are enrolling. But they include some former Bennion students, like Batista’s son, as well as some students from Mary W. Jackson and Hawthorne, who requested to be transferred there.

The additions at Liberty also include 14 new staff members, half of whom previously taught at Bennion or other closed schools.

“I miss Bennion,” said Richard Aslett, a former Bennion teacher. He greeted students lined up outside Liberty, waiting for the school day to start — many of whom he’d previously taught. “Glad to be here, but miss it.”

The decision to close the four elementary schools came in early January, nearly a year after the district in February 2023 first began studying all 27 of its elementary schools’ boundaries and populations for potential closure. The study came after a 2022 state audit found the Salt Lake City School District was wasting millions in taxpayer dollars to keep emptying elementary schools open despite their declining enrollment.

After those evaluations, the district in July 2023 selected seven schools to further study for potential closure. In November, the district narrowed that list to four, which Salt Lake City school board leaders ultimately approved for closure.

Principal Barrientos the school has been preparing for the transition since early spring, which involved hosting several events between Bennion and Liberty staff and students.

“We played games and talked,” she said. “We took them on a tour of the whole building.”

Former fifth and sixth grade students also wrote letters to the newcomers about “why they would love” Liberty.

The change will bring new challenges, Barrientos said. For instance, some students who have experienced trauma outside of school may find adjusting to a new campus community especially difficult. To ensure those students’ needs are met, staff and faculty from Wasatch, Ensign and Liberty elementary schools attended a training last week on trauma-informed practices.

“They all came together and spent some time learning about how trauma affects children and ways that we can care for them,” Barrientos said.

Overall, the transition has been a welcomed one, she said.

“The Liberty community has really embraced the new community — not just our faculty and staff, but our parents as well,” she said.

A gifted and talented program comes to the west side

A few miles west of Liberty, Edison Elementary in Poplar Grove also welcomed new faces Tuesday. Ten students there had been reassigned from the now-shuttered Riley Elementary.

They aren’t the only new Edison Eagles. Two new programs are starting up at the campus this year: an all-day preschool, and the west side’s first gifted and talented program.

So far, 16 kids have joined the new preschool. The gifted and talented program currently hosts about 85 children, most of whom live on the west side.

Alejandra Rodriguez’s third grade son was attending Washington Elementary in Marmalade, which also serves Gualdalupe, Capital Hill and downtown, until the family learned about Edison’s new program, which has a gifted and talented classroom available at each grade level.

“I’m excited and worried. I’m excited mostly because he’s excited,” Rodriguez said. “He wanted a challenging academic environment. So, he was the one that actually told me that ‘I want to go,’ and that’s why we’re here.”

Rodriguez liked Washington’s positive environment and would’ve been happy to keep him there, she said. Edison is a new environment for her family, and she doesn’t know anybody at the school yet. But her son has friends coming with him to Edison, and Rodriguez was able to meet her son’s new teacher, Katherine Kelly, who she said seems nice and encouraging.

Kelly herself is new to the school. She spent the last six years teaching at the now-closed Hawthorne Elementary — including within the former gifted and talented program there.

In 2020, she bought a house in Poplar Grove.

“When Hawthorne closed, it was obviously very bittersweet. However, this opportunity over here presented itself. It felt like my worlds colliding,” Kelly said. “I made the choice to come over to Edison because it’s my neighborhood school, and I felt like it was the perfect place for me.”

Kelly has 16 third graders under her wing this year. Only four attended Edison before this school year. She wants each student, diverse both in identity and what schools they attended previously, to feel like they and their families belong. She said she’ll ensure that by helping kids feel comfortable talking about their lives with her and other students — get-to-know-you activities she planned for the first day were just the start.

Edison’s principal, Richard Squire, said he is proud to host the west side’s first gifted and talented program.

“Typically, when you think of a gifted and talented program, you think of more students who come from privileged backgrounds, right? Our students don’t fit into that,” he said. “Frankly, most of our students who have qualified for gifted and talented have done so through a different process.”

He said program admission is typically based off of cognitive testing. “Some of our students did get in solely on that, but we also wanted to look at other things,” he said, because he felt cognitive testing alone didn’t best serve his students.

Students placed in the program study the same basics as their grade-level peers, but are challenged with projects that go beyond the standard curriculum. Squire wants the new program to be integrated with the rest of the school, so that when a student in standard classes needs a challenge in a specific subject, they’ll be able to move into a gifted classroom for further instruction. The gifted classrooms are situated next door to standard classrooms at each grade level, he added, making it easy for students to go back and forth.

Edison sees a lot of student turnover year to year, so teachers are used to being warm and welcoming to newcomers, he said. There’s still work to be done, though, in this year of particularly big changes.

“We are working to create a new Edison community that includes [the new students],” Squire said. “We are also working hard to get families involved, and at least feeling like they belong.”

The fate of the four closed elementary school campuses remains undecided, district spokesperson Yándary Chatwin said. In the meantime, several district departments are using the buildings as office space while the district’s new main office building remains under construction.

“We are mindful of the need to prevent the properties from becoming blight to the community,” Chatwin said. “That way, community members see a continual presence on the properties.”