Down the hall, a teacher read with two first-graders while a parent volunteer worked with four others. The three remaining students read quietly on their own.
Highland's Freedom Elementary School is home to all of this small-group activity. It sits in the Alpine School District, one of the largest and fastest-growing districts in a state with the nation's most crowded and sparsely funded classrooms.
Like most Utah schools, Freedom takes extraordinary measures to stretch funding. It invests in technology, relies on parent volunteers and employs creative scheduling to shrink classes for part of the day.
Such efficiency seems to work. Students perform better on standardized tests than their peers in Utah and nationwide.
If all schools were like Freedom, Utah might not need to worry about ranking last in the nation for what it spends per pupil, but every Utah school is not Freedom.
Alpine district has few disadvantaged kids who cost more to educate, yet such demographics as Alpine's are becoming less common.
School-funding challenges created by Utah's large families and relatively small, low-paid work force are taking on a new dimension as the state's demographics change. Utah's Latino school population, for example, has grown 120 percent in 10 years, and schools often must offer special services to help them succeed.
How much more does it cost to teach kids who are learning English or come from disadvantaged homes? And how many special services should parents expect from free public schools? In short, how much does a decent education cost, and does Utah spend enough?
A state school board study group, looking for ways to ensure education quality knowing Utah is unlikely ever to give up its last-place rank, will wrestle with such questions this summer.
"We've never looked at it from that perspective," said Patrick Ogden, associate superintendent at the Utah State Office of Education, who is guiding the study group. "We haven't gone and looked at how much it costs to educate a child; we've only looked at how much money we allocate."
All students are not equal: It's difficult to estimate the price of a good education because some kids are more expensive for schools than others.
Children who live in poverty cost roughly 50 percent more to educate, according to a 2006 analysis from the nonprofit Education Trust. Plus, children of immigrants require more resources while they learn English.
Utah to date has been able to avoid some of those expenses because the state populations of white students and those living above the poverty line are among the highest in the nation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Yet, state demographics are changing. The percentage of white children in schools has shrunk from nearly 89 percent in 1997 to roughly 80 percent this year.
The number of Latino students, many of whom are learning English, has more than doubled in the past decade, accounting for 80 percent of the growth in public school rolls since 1997. During that period, state education funding has increased 58 percent, according to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office.
"State allocations appear to be based on some very antiquated notions of the classroom: a classroom that perhaps served a monolingual, English-speaking population," said Sandra Buendia, principal at Salt Lake City's Jackson Elementary.
How schools are funded: Funding for Utah schools comes from a variety of sources, and the state strives to send state education money where it's needed most. Its primary funding tool is the state's Minimum School Program, which funnels more money toward students who cost more to educate.
The program's "weighted-pupil unit" - $2,417 for fiscal year 2007 - represents one average child with no special needs. Complicated funding formulas send additional money to schools for needs such as special education, career and technology education, gifted and talented programs, and students at risk of dropping out.
In some cases the effort succeeds. The Salt Lake City School District in 2005-06 spent roughly $1,370 more per student than similarly sized Nebo School District south of Provo. That's largely because 90 percent of Nebo district students are white and at least 80 percent live above the poverty line, compared with the Salt Lake City district, where fewer than 50 percent are white and nearly 60 percent live in poverty, according to the census.
Despite state efforts to spread education funds fairly, local factors drive huge, often unfair, disparities. The two biggest culprits: property values and enrollment growth.
All funding is not equal: The state sends districts money to run schools, but local property taxes pay the bulk of the bill for buildings. District residents vote on the property tax rates and bonds that bankroll building projects.
Growing districts must build new schools to accommodate swelling ranks of students, and older schools require costly renovations. The cost of those projects can boost the taxpayer burden by 20 percent - adding $1,000 or more to the per-student price tag.
But the largest inequities between districts arise from property taxes.
The rural San Juan School District, for example, generated a paltry $438 per student from property taxes last year, compared with $5,282 in Park City, where a lower tax rate pulls in more money because property values are so much higher. Although less state funding flows to Park City to compensate for the imbalance, the district still enjoys far more per-pupil funding - nearly $7,500 per student last year, not including building costs, compared with a state average closer to $5,200 per pupil.
Residents can't control property values, but they aren't powerless. Any community can vote to raise the rate of a dozen different taxes that funnel property taxes to the local school district, said Larry Newton, the state education office's school-finance director. Willingness to do so, however, depends largely on "the tenor of how the community views the world," he said.
How to stretch a dollar: Districts do what they can to make the most of tight budgets. Utah spends less than other states on administration. On average, 68.4 cents of every dollar go toward instructional expenses - only eight states (none in the West) spend more of each dollar in the classroom, according to the U.S. Education Department.
Also, many schools boost resources through donations. Alpine Elementary School, for example, relies heavily on parent volunteers, community donations and teachers who take automatic paycheck deductions to buy classroom supplies.
More than 80 percent of Alpine Elementary teachers take such deductions and nearly half of the school's roughly 400 families volunteer time, Principal David Stephenson said.
District and community grants also help. A technology grant has provided laptop computers for every Freedom Elementary sixth-grader and for every two fourth- and fifth-graders. At Alpine Elementary, a grant, matching funds and parent donations pay the salaries of four part-time art and music teachers.
"More money would be helpful but since it's not available currently, we have to look out to the community to help the school," Stephenson said.
Of course, community support varies by neighborhood. The state's most impoverished schools have a harder time garnering donations and recruiting parent volunteers.
"We can't do fundraisers that raise $20,000," said Dahlia Cordova, principal of Franklin Elementary in Salt Lake City. "But we raise funds that do provide support for different things" such as day planners for the students, she said.
Solution No. 1: more money: People on all sides of Utah's school-funding debate - including members of the state school board, tax watchdogs and education-office employees - agree Utah will never be able to rival spending in other states.
"It's unfair to compare us to other states that have completely different economies and family structures," said Bill Colbert, a state school board member. "There's no way to afford what some people think we should spend."
To reach the national per-pupil spending average, Utah would have to nearly double income taxes, said Mike Jerman of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "Utah will never be able to compete with the rest of the country in per-student spending," he said.
Yet Utah's frugal Legislature made a sincere effort to close the gap this year by adding nearly $500 million in funding to Utah's public schools. Educators say it's a good start but needs to continue because more funding is the only solution to some of Utah's most glaring problems.
Class-size reduction - which tops the wish list of both parents and teachers - requires two of education's most expensive commodities: teachers and buildings.
Technology could give students more individualized instruction, but computers and software don't come cheap, either. At Alpine Elementary, where supply money is thin, students get a mere 30 minutes a week in the school's only computer lab.
Solution No. 2: more reform: Advocates of education reform insist more money would be available by increasing efficiency. One idea involves finding ways to slow demand for new schools.
State education leaders are already pondering schedule overhauls to boost how efficiently districts use schools and teachers. Modest versions of their proposals already can be seen in many districts.
For example, most Alpine District schools use creative schedules to lower class sizes for core subjects. At Freedom Elementary, half of the students come to school at 8 a.m. for a block of low-density learning, which is usually focused on reading. Their classmates arrive 75 minutes later, bringing class sizes up to about 25 kids for most of the day. When the early group goes home, the later group gets its reading time.
Such schedules are designed to give one-on-one help to kids who might otherwise fall through the cracks. Yet such fixes pale in comparison to what other states offer.
"We came here from Vegas three years ago - they have a lot of money for schools and lots of programs there that aren't here," said Julie Reese, mother of six children, two of whom are Alpine Elementary students. "It would be nice to have a few more things for kids on either end."
She's referring to kids who benefit from special programs because they excel or struggle in regular classrooms. As the state's population grows and changes, far more students will reside on either end of the bell curve.
"Being stunned by this and immobilized is not what the state should be doing," said State Schools Superintendent Patti Harrington. "It does take substantially more funding to support the needs of" kids at both ends.
Tough choices: As parents demand such options, districts grapple with how to fund them.
"Is that really our responsibility to fund all options that are desired?" Colbert, the state school board member, asked at a recent funding study session. "You can't do everything everyone wants - we don't do that in any other government program."
Advocates of education reform say the solution is to let public education funds flow to charter or private schools, which may use different education models.
"It's really unfair to expect the public schools to adequately educate every type of student," said Jerman, of the Utah Taxpayers Association. "It's practically impossible for every school to be the best choice for every student."
Proponents of "school choice" say the solution is making more options available to public schoolchildren, including charter and private schools. Public school stalwarts say they could improve options for all students with more funding.
Both camps agree on a few points: Utah does a pretty good job with its meager public school budget; boosting fundings is crucial to keep pace with changing demographics and the demands of a global economy; and no silver bullet can solve Utah's school-funding challenges.
But they disagree bitterly on the solution. Some want a more market-based system with differential pay for teachers and more affordable options for parents. Others say public schools need more money to better serve students who have unique needs.
So the question policymakers keep returning to is this: How many options can or should public schools offer?
"We're not giving them a Mercedes-Benz here," state school board member Laurel Brown said. "We're giving them a Chevy."
nstricker@sltrib.com
Coming Monday:
What Utah's test scores say about quality
