An announcement on the sports-oriented, private high school's Web site Thursday said the school was closing. Last week, school owner Bob Jones scrambled to find a new home for USC amid revelations about his troubled home-building business and complaints from teaching staff that they had not been paid.
"Due to circumstances beyond our control we are no longer able to keep the school open," said a statement on the USC Web site. Neither Jones nor Mike Condie, the school's athletic director who later became its principal, could be reached for comment. The site said students could request academic transcripts once lunch fees were paid and athletic equipment was returned.
Meanwhile, Jones' former partners have been searching for the academic records so parents can transfer their children's credits elsewhere.
Dennis Liddell, who with Pat Murdoch founded the special needs school that would eventually bring Jones onto its board of directors, tracked electronic versions of the students' records to a computer at the home of Bryan P. Sullivan, the IT manager for Jones' homebuilding business. Sullivan is listed as a child abuser on the Utah Sex Offender Registry.
Sullivan said he has been printing the transcripts at Liddell's request, but Liddell said he recently recovered the physical files from a garage in a Murray townhome development called Holladay Springs, one of Jones' half-built housing projects.
"These kids need to move on with their lives and get into new schools," Liddell said. "Some records have been held because they have balances owing. We're making sure everyone can get their records as quickly as they can. We don't want kids and families left in the lurch."
Liddell is moving his Woodland Hills' office to Ogden where he plans to continue the school's satellite program. In the meantime, he will maintain Woodland Hills' records.
"There are 15 years of alumni who may decide to go to college and they would need their transcripts," he said.
Utah Southvalley Community School at Woodland Hills has been a magnet for controversy since Jones joined the board of Woodland Hills, a school for middle and high-school students with Asperger's syndrome and other behavioral problems. Jones promised he would invest heavily in the school and institute a comprehensive sports program for students.
Jones changed the school's name to Utah Southvalley Community School at Woodland Hills in the summer of 2007, and began recruiting and enrolling students on full scholarship to play on its athletic teams.
Tuition-paying parents of special needs students, meanwhile, complained their children's needs were short-changed in the process. Some withdrew their children, and a few won judgments in small claims court for tuition refunds.
Jones told the Tribune on Monday that he subsequently split the school in two, separating his sports programs from the original Woodland Hills. That school's Murray location was left shuttered and empty in July as Jones searched for new facilities and athletic fields for his USC school.
He announced plans to move USC to an office-park in West Jordan as his school's football team prepared for games in American Samoa and Japan. After that lease fell through this week, Jones said he had a second, undisclosed location in mind. His long-term plan was to transplant the school to a multiacre, multimillion-dollar athletic facility and campus in Herriman.
Murdoch said she and Liddell are busy picking up the pieces of the original school they founded. Liddell said he hopes to continue a satellite program of the school in Ogden, while Murdoch said she is working with the Attorney General's Office so she and Liddell can become trustees and freeze the school's assets from Jones' reach.
"He [Jones] has ruined it," Murdoch said.
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* PAUL ROLLY contributed to this report.
