While their teachers waved placards at cars and knocked on neighborhood doors, Utah students hit the slopes and the malls on their unsolicited day off Tuesday.
"Business was good today," said Missy Jacobs, who works in the front office of Brighton ski resort. "The kids are loving it."
The resort's snowboarding runs, Terrain Park and Halfpipe, "have been extremely busy with kids today," Jacobs said.
An Alta official said business there had also picked up, and other ski resorts reported increases up to almost half again the usual weekday traffic.
But it wasn't just the slopes. Crossroads Plaza marketing director Tami Ivy said foot traffic through the mall Tuesday was up a whopping 27.5 percent over the same December Tuesday last year.
"We're pretty busy here," she said. "It looks like a lot of families, parents with their kids. There's a lot of shopping going on."
The same was true for Cottonwood Mall, which was dotted with several groups of junior high and high school students there on the day off.
Though more than a dozen students interviewed cited many of the same choices on their ways of spending the day — video games, Christmas shopping for boyfriends, the movies — some were able to spend it with their family, like Butler Middle School ninth-grader Erik Larsen, whose mom and sister normally work in the Brighton High School cafeteria Tuesdays.
Unlike many of their peers who spent the day hanging out at the malls, one group of Riverton High School students was hanging out for a purpose. About 10 of the youths stood in front of Salt Lake City's ZCMI Center for a few hours singing carols and soliciting money for residents of Common Thread, a Draper-based home for indigent hospital patients and other disadvantaged people.
The students were trying raise enough to pay for a homeless man to travel to his family in Colorado for the holidays, a transplant recipient to her home in Idaho, and others. The effort was part of a schoolwide push to raise $25,000.
The group of friends began singing and raising money almost on impulse.
"It started out as a joke, but it turned into a serious thing," said Skyler Hutchison, a sophomore. "We're going to set up a tradition."
Working parents dealt with their children being out of school by taking the day off or dropping them off with relatives or at day-care programs. The Greater Salt Lake Boys and Girls Clubs opened their usual after-school drop-in programs at 8:30 Tuesday morning and "it was cranking," operations director Lee Ann Saldivar said.
Other parents made the free day a family affair.
"Just judging from my neighborhood (the Avenues) people have been taking off, taking their kids, going shopping," Salt Lake Downtown Alliance executive director Bob Farrington said.
Granite District teachers did not participate in the job action, so students there had a normal school day — almost. Morning disc jockeys from the radio station KZHT were urging Granite students to join their peers and stay out of school. As such, several were found hanging out at Cottonwood during normal school hours.
Other unions got into the act as well. The Utah Public Employees' Association issued a press release stating that its members, too, should get more money.
"While UPEA believes the teachers should be given adequate wages, the fact remains that other public employees deserve a pay increase on par with teachers," wrote UPEA President Sharlene Thomas.
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