The shared dream of two Christian women has turned tragedy on its head and opened a bright future for hundreds of students in Park City.
Renowned for its Hollywood-like glitz rather than its quiet religious population, Park City is home to a Christian academy that is growing so rapidly its founders just purchased 15 acres to build a new high school.
But the success story has a bittersweet beginning.
Fran Johnson and Pat Russell both found themselves commuting with their children to Salt Lake City's Carden Memorial School in the early 1980s. The Park City/Summit Park residents loved their communities but couldn't find the Christian education they sought in the then-sparsely populated area.
A public school teacher by profession, Johnson took a position at the private school so she could stay all day while her son, David, was in class. Russell, a minister's daughter well-versed in teaching Bible classes, honed her skills on students there.
The two became fast friends and started talking about opening a school of their own.
They did a lot of verbal dreaming about how they'd structure their own school in their own way, but neither was independently wealthy or had any business management background.
While funding questions didn't derail their dream, the immediate discussion surrounding the school came to a screeching and tragic halt on April 16, 1982.
Johnson's family had joined friends for an evening at Hansen Planetarium downtown. Following the show she split from her husband and 8-year-old son, David, to pick up a car parked at Crossroads Plaza. The others and their friends were off to retrieve a car parked near the Capitol Theatre on 200 South.
While waiting for the light to change at the intersection of 200 South and Main, a drunken driver swerved onto the sidewalk and hit David, killing him as his father watched.
The death of her son made Johnson all the more determined to open a school. "David loved Carden. He really enjoyed his association with the students there, and he was just thriving," she remembered.
Grief took its toll, but Johnson held on to the dream. Russell clung to it as well, though neither was in a position to make things happen financially. Then one morning in June 1987, Johnson got a phone call. It was Russell.
"She'd had this dream she said she needed to tell me about," Johnson recalled.
The dream's details weren't crystal clear, Russell said, but the message was. It was time to open a school.
Still, they wondered where the money would come from.
"God just opens it for you," Johnson said, recalling how a court settlement from David's death provided her with seed money to start the school.
Combined with some money Russell's family came into unexpectedly, the two set out to make their dream come true.
Carden gave its consent, and in 1988 they managed to secure space to hold classes in a local hotel.
Yet skeptics abounded.
A consultant they hired questioned their sanity. "Why would you do this — this can't work — why up here in this little teeny town?" he asked them. "But it had never occurred to us to say 'no' to God," Johnson recalled. "Once we decided, it didn't occur to us that we could fail. God doesn't start things he doesn't plan to finish."
The school outgrew its hotel space, and a new school was built, tucked into the hills just off the Jeremy Ranch exit from I-80. Built to house a maximum of 205 students, the building now holds 191 enrolled in preschool through 8th grade.
Marketing and development director Shannon Dare said the school has been accredited to accept students through grade 12, and the new building being planned adjacent to the current campus will house both junior high and high school students.
"I've been here 12 years, and we've seen average growth of 18 (percent) to 20 percent a year." The non-denominational school caters to a wide variety of religious affiliations and some with no affiliation but the desire for a morally centered education, he said.
"We have 17 different religious groups represented, including Jewish, Mormon, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Evangelical Free. Those represent the major ones. We've even had families from the Buddhist faith here in the past."
Dare estimates some 1,300 students have attended Carden and that it will continue to attract larger numbers of students once the new building is finished. "We'll do a three-stage building program, with about 100,000 square feet added over the next five years. We'd like to do an auditorium similar to the Eccles Center that will seat about 800." A full-size gym and a 25-meter swimming pool are also part of the plan.
A new state-of-the-art computer lab will be added, along with a large media center, two science labs and a large art room with pottery wheels, as well as facilities for band, choir and orchestra. Officials hope at one point the school will compete in state 4A athletics.
While it all sounds like an ambitious undertaking, the two founders — both of them now grandmothers — say they're looking even further ahead.
"We've assured our husbands we don't want to start a college," Johnson smiles, "but we do want to provide an alternative school someday. There are a lot of what many people consider 'throw-away kids' out there, and God means us to help kids.
"Every time we want to say 'no' we feel like God is saying, 'didn't I teach you better than that?'"