Whether this small town really needs a new high school is the question Lorie Pearce asks as she campaigns for a seat on the board of the South Summit School District.

"People I talk to are very concerned that the one we have now is only 7 years old," said Pearce, a former attendance and vocational secretary in the approximately 1,200-pupil district.Nonetheless, growth is the issue here - as it is elsewhere on the eastern slope of the Wasatch Mountains.

"It's put a burden on the school system," said Rod Maxfield, the incumbent running for re-election against Pearce. The two face off for the District 1 seat to the five-member board; the winner will represent the Francis-Woodland area of the Kamas-centered school district.

Maxfield said the school board in recent months has looked to the future by lobbying for - and getting - sizable land donations for future school sites. The district has acquired one 38-acre parcel valued at $385,000 through a private gift and is working on another 40-acre donation.

Such charity is critical, said Maxfield, in a time in which land prices have shot through the roof and the cost of a building lot in the Kamas Valley is beyond the means of many families.

Pearce said questions about how to handle an ongoing population boom aren't the only ones board members should consider, however. Near the top of her agenda is restoration of certain classes eliminated in recent years.

"We're not giving our kids enough vocational opportunities," said Pearce, explaining that the district's auto-repair curriculum has been lost to budget cuts and that such programs are vital to students who seek careers that don't require college.

In contests for two other school board seats:

- Automobile auctioneer Kevin Page is challenging incumbent Kathy Gordon for District 3, roughly defined as Kamas and its immediate surroundings.

Page, who has six children in the three-school district, is also talking curriculum as he campaigns, arguing that gifted students are given short shrift when administrators divvy up resources.

"We need an increased focus on academics and more opportunity for our best students," said Page.

Gordon, who has a number of grandchildren in the system, said school board meetings during the past year or two have been dominated, though, by problems associated with growth.

"Probably in four years or so we'll have to have a new high school," she said, noting numerous predictions and widespread expectations that the booming Sny-der-ville Basin to the west will continue to bleed into the Kamas Valley.

Of particular interest, she said, is the proposed Star Pointe development between Kamas and Kimball Junction, an enormous project that would bring hotels, a golf course and hundreds of new homes to the area.

She noted, too, that in Francis, Kamas and Oakley - all towns within the district - planners are considering large subdivisions that could bring 200 new houses to each town.

"This is why we're worried," said Gordon.

- In the District 2 contest for the school system's Oakley seat, local contractors Kendell "Tiny" Woolstenhulme and Glen Jones - who is also a former teacher here - are vying for an open seat on the board.

Jones said the valley's growing status as a bedroom community to commuters who drive 45 minutes each way to the Wasatch Front is behind the growth boom. And he sees no end in sight.

"I'm sure we're going to have to raise (property) taxes" to pay for new schools, said Jones, noting the Legislature's relatively new ban on school impact fees - once the preferred mode of taxation by growth-strapped communities.

But he said the Kamas district's best response to expansion might be in spreading schools around.

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"What I'd like to see is a way to keep the flavor of small communities by putting new elementary schools on opposite ends of the valley (at Oakley and in the Francis/Woodland area.)"

The district's sole elementary, middle and high schools are currently located in Kamas.

Woolstenhulme said the district might do well to consider supporting affordable housing, as local half-acre lots routinely sell now for upward of $50,000, too pricey for many educators.

"People like living up here," he said. "But it's too dang expensive now for a lot of them."

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