Alta is small for a traditional ski area, with a comparable one-room public school.
why we are here
We're exploring how America defines itself, one place at a time. In Utah, one-room schoolhouses help maintain the family atmosphere of a cult-favorite ski area.
For as long as ski resorts have existed, Alta, Utah has been a place where young people come to work for a season before starting life in the real world, and end up staying for two, 10, 20, or even a lifetime. was. .
They come for the powder snow. This powder snow consistently ranks high on lists of the deepest and lightest snow in the country. They discover the simplicity and warmth of life in a town of about 300 year-round residents at the end of a box canyon.
But a little more than 20 years ago, Alta, while it prided itself on being a place where generations of families returned for vacation each year, was losing family members among the employees who run the town. City officials noticed this. Young people with children left their homes because there were no schools and the nearest school district would not send buses to the narrow canyon roads.
Known as an old-school ski town, Alta turned to an old-school solution and opened a one-room public school in a former lodge warehouse at the base of the mountain. Today, Alta School not only educates the children of ticket sellers, avalanche forecasters, hotel reservations clerks, and chai latte makers, but is also a source of pride for the town.
The annual play written and performed by students at Our Lady of Snows, the town's worship and gathering center, attracts a standing-room-only crowd, and it's more than just parents' pride. Students publish monthly newspapers and visit lodges and ski shops to sell advertisements they design.
“This may be an exaggeration, but it brings the community together,” Alta Mayor Roger Burke said.
Less than a century ago, there were approximately 139,000 one-room public schools in the United States. At the final official count, there were 166 schools in 2022, most of them in rural areas where the nearest school district was too far away for students to commute every day. In Alta, the closest school is just 21 miles away in the Salt Lake City suburbs. But the winding road up Little Cottonwood Canyon is frequently closed due to avalanche danger, more than 30 times last year when Alta received 903 inches of snow.
The school not only eliminates dangerous commutes, but also contributes to the ongoing fight to “keep Alta Alta,” as Burke said. While other ski resorts have been acquired by conglomerates and developed with condominiums, Alta, founded in 1938, is still owned by the same family that has owned it for generations and is home to a silver mine. Little has developed since its early days as a town. There is no nightlife, no traffic lights, and snowboarders are not allowed. As the T-shirt says, Alta is for skiers.
Just four square miles, the town is centered around a resort and occupies mostly National Forest Service land. It has fought attempts to develop private land there. The canyon sign and ski stickers express opposition to the gondola that the state Department of Transportation is proposing to build to bring more crowds to the canyon.
“With the hustle and bustle of today, it's a different pace of life,” ski patroller Brian Babbitt said as he picked up his daughters, Miles and Collins, after school. “Children can focus on different quality of life activities, such as recreating nature and spending time in nature, without being glued to a screen or computer.”
The girls are now 6 and 8 years old. “They've been skiing on their own since they were 3 and 5, and his wife says it's been 4 and 6,” Babbitt said. “I know 100 people on this mountain by first name, so they're always being watched.” (“Really?” asked Miles.)
Most skiers visiting Alta won't know of this school's existence, but they may wonder as pint-sized skiers deftly bounce along the mountain's famous long traverses – it's a physical education class. is.
Cars full of skiers have not yet begun to fill the parking lot as the 14 students begin their day. With the sun just shining on Mount Baldy far overhead, they began an observation walk along a rope that stretches from one end of the resort to the other, with teacher Jeanne Chiferi slipping in a little lesson on climate science.
Then, enter through the side door of Gold Miner's Daughter Lodge to sharpen your pencils in preparation for the daily timed math quiz. This gives Mr. Chihuly time to take attendance.
The school looks like a normal classroom, except the windows are mostly covered in snow. But Ms. Chiferi has to teach students at her 9th grade level, which keeps her on a more constant motion than most teachers.
During her math class, she moves between eighth-graders working on quadratic equations and kindergartners learning reconstruction while doing addition. During her science period, she stood over the desks of two of her sixth graders and demonstrated her heat transfer using a heating pad and an aluminum can. At the desk behind her, fourth graders use a thesaurus, crochet, and ruler to make a tape she dispenser and rub her Goldberg machine lesson.
Students come together for art, watch a short video about artists using quilts to tell stories, and then split up to make their own paper quilts. Many people have stories of adventures and mishaps in the mountains. Collins, a sophomore, cut out soft pink and black shapes to represent the braces she wore after tearing her foot and anterior cruciate ligament (a bit of classroom one-manship unique to the field). Connect. “My mom tore her anterior cruciate ligament,” a student calls. Another student replies, “My mom tore her anterior cruciate ligament twice. and her meniscus. ”)
Ciferley, whose father and grandmother both taught in a one-room schoolhouse, taught at Alta for nine years before retiring for nine years to teach at schools overseas. She returned three years ago because the teacher who had worked in her place left to raise her children. She missed having the same students each year and her ability to tutor them individually.
“I always thought of this school as a place where you really learn how kids learn and how they progress,” she said. “We say you have to read a book at age 5, do this when you're 6, and do that when you're 7. But my understanding of children is that it doesn't make any sense. I don't think so. Development is a continuum.”
Because the school was small and didn't have a grading system, Chiferi said. They caught up when they caught up. ”
Jen Riif, who came to Alta as a housekeeper and eventually became co-owner of Gold Miner's Daughter Lodge, created a space in a school storage area and later had two children and moved there. I sent him to. “There are always naysayers who say it's too small, but how do they adjust?” she said. “But they all did well. Teachers were busy teaching different grades, so they worked independently and learned to be self-sufficient.”
Just like the city, the school has a family atmosphere. Parents help physical education classes up the mountain, resorts offer discounted lift tickets, and students spend most of their weekends skiing together.
With ski season over (Alta's official last day is April 21), the number of students will drop by a few by the end of the school year, and some parents will head off to seasonal jobs as far away as Thailand. Marley Korpera, who manages reservations at Alta Lodge, said her son, Tade, sometimes wishes there were more fourth graders than just one. But when you think of going to school in the valley, Alta makes you think of what most people do: skiing.
“He said, 'Then you have to pay for the full ticket!'