So far over 400 people have shared their ideas with Wasatch County School District leaders about the student experience they’re hoping for once Heber Valley teens are split between two high schools.
In a community survey, families said they want students to have equal academic opportunities, support and extracurriculars, plus a strong school community.
“One high school shouldn’t be the ‘AP’ [Advanced Placement] school while the other just gets the basics,” one person wrote in.
Class sizes are a related concern for some families.
School board member Brad Ehlert said at a meeting May 27 making classes smaller won’t inherently be addressed with the opening of Deer Creek High School and proposed setting a new policy.
“As of right now, as a board, I don’t think we’ve set standards for classroom sizes at the high school level,” he said. “There’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to reduce class sizes unless we hire enough teachers to reduce class sizes. So, if that’s a priority for the community, then the board has to hear that.”
Community members also told the district they want the two high schools to be well balanced demographically and roughly equal in size.
The district’s director of student services, Eric Campbell, said the most emotionally charged issue for the boundary split is relationships.
“Friends are a huge part of a teen’s support system,” a resident said in the survey. “Don’t split the elementary cohorts.”
The school district won’t decide until October which students will go to each high school in fall 2026, but it has created four possible scenarios.
One option would use the current middle school boundaries to determine who goes where. Students who attend Rocky Mountain Middle School would be sent to Deer Creek High School, and students at Timpanogos Middle School would go to Wasatch High School. That would make Deer Creek the smaller school by several hundred students.
Two more options would keep the elementary school cohorts together, but with different combinations. Both choices project that the two high schools would be similar sizes after a few years.
A fourth scenario would divide the county’s students based on who lives on each side of U.S. 40. That choice would also give the high schools similar populations.
Before the choice is finalized, residents can share public comments about the school boundary process in August.
Deer Creek High School is under construction along state Route 113, just west of downtown Heber.
