A year ago a six-alarm fire ripped through Wasatch Junior High School while onlookers in the tight-knit community stood helpless, some teary, as the 46-year-old building burned.
The culprit in the fire on July 11, 2005, was an electrical problem in a computer server area. Forty percent of the school was destroyed by the fire, smoke and water.
Now Granite District officials are in the process of nailing down building plans for rebuilding the school.
During the next year the district will be in the planning and design phase. Construction is slated to start in July 2007, and officials hope to move students in the new building by January 2009.
Meanwhile, Wasatch students will continue to share a facility with Churchill Junior High.
After the blaze last summer teachers were devastated. They'd lost decades of work, teaching materials and even personal items. They then had two months to prepare for the next school year in a new building while starting from scratch.
Staff worked tirelessly, scrambling to rearrange classroom assignments, bring in new portable classrooms, change class times and ensure teachers who lost everything had materials to teach with.
"It was kind of like a death when you don't get a chance to grieve — we just had to put everything aside and just get the work done," said Sam McBride, a Wasatch Spanish teacher.
He said he lost four cabinets full of teaching materials and things he had created over the years as well as items he had accumulated from traveling to Mexico.
"That's just hours and hours of work lost," McBride said. "I had the corner room where the fire was really intense — the only thing left in my room was a world globe and it was metal."
But staff and students at Churchill, formerly sprawled out in a building with decreasing enrollment, moved over and made room for Wasatch students, creating two schools in one building while district leaders decided Wasatch's fate.
"It went amazingly smoothly. There were a lot of things that they had to give up, the rooms and accommodations, and they were very gracious in doing that," McBride said. "(The building) went from having 700 students to about 1,600 — it was packed right to the gills — but it was a remarkable achievement of coordination and accommodation."
Leaders say the big challenge was sharing playing fields and stages for sports and performances, but the common site came in handy when the two schools went head to head in the championship girls soccer match last fall.
According to teachers at the schools the rivalry continued to thrive, but students still got along.
Now Wasatch will have another two years in Churchill's house before the move into their new and improved school.
E-mail: terickson@desnews.com