As a retro ski destination, Alta thinks small, with a one-room public school to match.
WHY WE ARE HERE
We explore how America defines itself one place at a time. In Utah, a one-room schoolhouse has helped preserve the family atmosphere of a cult ski town.
Since it has a ski resort, Alta, Utah has been a place where young people come to work for a season before starting their lives in the real world, then end up staying for two, ten or twenty years, or even their entire life. .
They come for the powder snow, which regularly tops lists of the deepest and lightest in the country. They discover the simplicity and warmth of life in a town located at the bottom of a canyon with a population of around 300 people year-round.
But a little more than 20 years ago, city officials realized that even though Alta prided itself on being a place where generations of families return each year to vacation, it was losing families among the employees who kept it running . Young people who had children left because there was no school and the nearest school district wouldn’t send buses up the narrow canyon road.
Known as a retro ski town, Alta turned to a retro solution by opening a one-room public school in a former lodge warehouse at the base of the mountain. Today, the Alta School not only educates the children of ticket sellers, avalanche forecasters, hotel reservationists and chai latte makers, it is also a source of pride for the city.
The annual play written and performed by students at Notre-Dame des Neiges, the city’s center of worship and gathering, draws a standing-room-only crowd, more than can be explained by parental pride. Students publish a monthly newspaper and visit lodges and ski shops to sell the advertisements they design.
“It may be an exaggeration,” said Alta Mayor Roger Bourke, “but it ties the community together.”
Less than a century ago, there were approximately 139,000 one-room public schools in the United States; has last official count, in 2022, there were 166, mostly in rural areas where the nearest neighborhood is too far for students to commute daily. In Alta, the closest school is just 13 miles away, in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. But the winding road to Little Cottonwood Canyon closes frequently due to avalanche danger — more than 30 times last year, when Alta had 903 inches of snow.
Beyond eliminating dangerous travel, the school contributes to the ongoing fight to, as Mr Bourke put it, “keep Alta Alta”. While other ski resorts have been bought up by conglomerates and developed with condominiums, Alta, founded in 1938, is still owned by the same families who have owned it for generations and is little more developed than when it began in as a silver mining town. There is no nightlife, no red lights and no snowboarders allowed. Alta, as the T-shirts say, is for skiers.
The town, which spans just four square miles, is centered on the resort town and occupies primarily National Forest Service property; he fought attempts to develop existing private lands. Canyon signs and stickers on skis declare opposition to a gondola that the state Department of Transportation has proposed building to transport larger crowds to the canyon.
“It’s a different pace of life in today’s hustle and bustle,” said Brian Babbitt, a ski patroller, as he picked up his daughters, Miles and Collyns, after school. “They can focus on different qualities of life, recreating and being in nature, without being stuck in front of a screen or computer.”
The girls are 6 and 8 now. “They have been skiing on their own since they were 3 and 5, although my wife would say it was 4 and 6,” Mr. Babbitt said. “I know 100 people by first name on the mountain, so they are constantly monitored. » (“Really?” Miles asked.)
Most skiers visiting Alta would have no idea the school exists, although they might be amazed at the little skiers bouncing expertly along the mountain’s famous long traverses – it’s the ski course. physical education.
Cars full of skiers have not begun to fill the parking lot as the 14 students begin their day. As the sun hits Mount Baldy high above them, they begin with an observation walk along the cable that stretches from one end of the station to the other, their teacher, Jaeann Tschiffely, slipping in little lessons on the science of weather.
Then, passing through a side door of the Goldminer’s Daughter Lodge, they sharpen their pencils for their daily timed math quiz, giving Ms. Tschiffely time to participate.
Except that the windows are almost completely buried in snow, the school looks like a typical classroom. But having to teach students at nine grade levels keeps Ms. Tschiffely in constant, steady motion, even more than most teachers.
In math, she moves between an eighth-grader working on quadratic equations and a kindergartener learning to group as she adds. During science class, she stands over the desks of two sixth graders, using a hand warmer and an aluminum can to demonstrate heat transfer. At a desk behind her, a fourth-grader uses a thesaurus, a knitting skein and a ruler to build a tape dispenser, a lesson in Rube Goldberg machines.
Students come together to make art and watch a short video about an artist who used quilts to tell stories, then split up to make their own paper quilts. Many recount adventures and misadventures in the mountains: Collyns, in third grade, cut out shapes in soft pink and black to represent her leg and the brace she wore after tearing her ACL (this leads to some one-upmanship site-specific in class: “My mom tore her ACL,” calls one student, another responds, “My mom tore her ACL twice. And his meniscus. “)
Ms. Tschiffely, whose father and grandmother both taught in one-room schoolhouses, ran the Alta school for nine years, then left for nine years to teach in schools overseas. She returned three years ago when the teacher who replaced her left to raise her children. He missed having the same students year after year and the possibility of individualizing teaching.
“I always looked at this school as the place where I really learned how children learn and how they progress,” she said. “We say they should read at 5, do this at 6, and do that at 7. But from what I understand about children, that doesn’t make sense. Development is a continuum.
With a small school with no levels, Ms Tschiffely said: “We could put everyone where they were. They caught up when they caught up.
Jenn Life, who came to Alta as a housekeeper and became part owner of the Goldminer’s Daughter Lodge, made room in the school’s storage area, and later had two children and sent them there- down. “There are always naysayers who say it’s too small, how will they adapt?” she says. “But they all did well. They learned to work independently and be self-reliant because the teacher was busy teaching at different levels. »
Like the city, the school feels like a family. Parents help lead physical education classes on the mountain (the resort offers discounted lift tickets) and students also spend most weekends skiing together.
Student numbers will decline somewhat before the end of the school year, as ski season ends (Alta’s official last day is April 21) and some parents turn to other jobs seasonal, as far away as Thailand. Marly Korpela, who manages reservations at Alta Lodge, said her son, Tade, sometimes wishes there were more than one other fourth-grader. But when he thinks about going to school in the Valley, he thinks of what most people do when they think of Alta: skiing.
“He said, ‘Then I should pay the full ticket!'”
