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Its new campus unfinished as school year starts, American Preparatory Academy in Draper works to manage traffic, overcrowding

Line of cars stretches down Lone Peak Parkway and faculty members direct drivers after incomplete permitting, construction snags delay new high school campus to mid-October. <br>

(Benjamin Wood | The Salt Lake Tribune) Faculty members with American Preparatory Academy in Draper helped direct traffic as families arrived Monday for the first day of the 2017-2018 school year.

Draper • By 7:45 a.m. Monday, the line of cars entering American Preparatory Academy had turned a half-mile stretch of Lone Peak Parkway into a 10-minute crawl of bumper-to-bumper traffic.

And as vehicles reached the school, vest-clad faculty members directed drivers along a serpentine route to designated drop-off stations where parents made their goodbyes through open windows before hurrying to get out of the way.

“We’re getting everybody ready for this afternoon,” school director Kevin McVicar said Monday of the drop-off and pick-up system. ”Once everybody knows [the process] and understands it, you can come back and you’ll be able to see how it flows.”

Traffic is not a new challenge for the Draper charter school, which has seen its efforts to connect to an adjacent, stoplight-equipped road frustrated by a yearslong property dispute that has raised major legal issues and sparked neighborhood controversy.    

But this year’s congestion has been compounded after administrators enrolled their largest-ever student body in anticipation of a new high school campus that remains unfinished as the 2017-2018 school year begins.

The flow of arrivals on the first day Monday eventually slowed to a trickle around 8:40 a.m., more than 20 minutes after the latest-starting classes had begun.

“They are a little bit late,” McVicar said as the final students arrived. “Last year, there was construction up there [on Lone Peak Parkway] so it was even worse.”

Construction on the charter school’s new high school campus began earlier this year, but incomplete permitting and concerns over emergency-vehicle access prompted the Utah Board of Education to briefly suspend work on the new facility in April.

“The school itself won’t be open — the building,” said Brad Findlay, chairman of American Preparatory Academy‘s governing board. ”But all of our teachers are here, all of our staff. We can get the kids in, and we can start school on time.”

Findlay said the new building will be ready in mid-October to welcome students in grades seven through 12.

Until then, Findlay said, roughly 600 middle and high school students are being split between the charter’s existing Draper elementary campuses, with daily shuttles to minimize the impact on families and city roads.

“We want to make it easy on them,” Findlay said. “The parents can come to one place, drop off all of their kids, and then we’ll get the high school kids over to the temporary rooms for the first few weeks.”

In a recent email to parents, Carolyn Sharette, the executive director of the private company that operates American Preparatory Academy, described plans for temporarily accommodating middle and high school students until the new building is complete.

Bathrooms and hallways have been designated for different age groups, Sharette wrote, with planned “transition routes” to maintain separation as roughly 1,000 students between ages 5 and 17 move between classrooms.

“The attached map shows the dotted blue line where the students will be able to walk with their friends and not worry about stepping on little ones!” Sharette wrote.

The school also widened its driveway by roughly 10 feet and instituted its new drop-off pattern, with parents encouraged to register and coordinate their carpooling assignments with school personnel.

Heather Williams, a parent of four American Preparatory Academy students, was confident in the school’s ability to find space for students and maintain organization. She was aware the school had struggled with traffic congestion in the past, but said Monday’s drop-offs were handled well.

Another parent, Sean Estes, said his family is new to the school this year and that he was anticipating a worse morning commute.

“It was smoother than I thought it was going to be,” he said.  

Findlay said the school still hopes to resolve its property dispute over a narrow strip of land that separates American Preparatory Academy from 11950 South, which runs along the school’s southern edge.

The school has experienced several losses in court, including a recent ruling that found the previous property owners had established a “boundary by acquiescence” along a now-defunct fence line. 

The dispute, combined with American Preparatory Academy’s push to expand with minimal vehicle access and without required permits, has frustrated neighbors, some of whom placed banners promoting ShameOnAPA.org along the fence line that students and their parents pass each day.

But Findlay said the school’s children want to remain at American Preparatory Academy for their high school years. Squeezing them in for now, he said, is preferable to excluding them until 2018.

“You have a choice between accommodating students for a short-term period of six to eight weeks versus sending them somewhere else for an entire year where they don’t really want to go,” he said. “To me, the other option makes zero sense.”