The man who took over and then walked away from a 15-year-old private school for special needs students last year without paying teachers for several months of owed salary is now in negotiations to open two new schools in the old Utah Fun Dome site in Murray.
The Murray Journal has reported that an investment group called Trojan Family Pride is negotiating to buy the building that once housed a game and recreation center in order to house a mainstream secondary school. The John Locke Academy would offer a full range of academic programs and athletic teams. The School for Autistic Healing would cater to special needs students in grades 6 through 12.
Bob Jones was mentioned as the negotiator working with the potential ownership group. He told the Murray Journal that the group hopes to open the two private schools this fall.
The arrangement would be similar to what Jones attempted to do when he took over the Woodland Hills School, a nonprofit that took government funds to provide programs for special needs students. Jones combined that school vision with his Utah Southvalley Community School (USC) that put much of its resources into a football program, as well as academics.
Jones eventually separated the two, leaving the special-needs school virtually closed and its teachers unpaid for months. Many of the teachers are still trying to get their back pay. They also learned several weeks after the fact that their health insurance had been discontinued in the middle of the 2007-2008 school year.
He later discontinued USC.
Can't win for losing: Weber School District acted promptly and appropriately earlier this month when district officials made Rocky Mountain Junior High Principal Craig Jessop apologize to a student for forcing him to remove a Scottish kilt he had worn to school as a prop for an art project. Jessop had told the student he couldn't wear the kilt because he would be taken as a cross dresser.
The story made it onto some Scottish-American blog sites and, despite the district's prompt action to correct the principal's mistake, it still has been bombarded with e-mails from Scottish-Americans irate at the suggestion that wearing the traditional Scottish garb is tantamount to cross dressing.
The district also has received a number of e-mails from the transvestite community asking what is wrong with cross dressing.
Correction : In Wednesday's column I inadvertently identified the presiding judge of the Utah Court of Appeals who is retiring at the end of this year as Pamela Atwood. Her name is Pamela Greenwood. I've always been an admirer of longtime Republican politician Genevieve Atwood and homeless and low-income-family champion Pamela Atkinson. I must have had one or both of them on my mind.
