The Grouse Creek school buildings life is coming to end soon. It is set to be demolished.
GROUSE CREEK – The Box Elder County School District is set to demolish the Grouse Creek School Building built in 1912 because the sandstone building doesn’t conform to earthquake standards, a corner of the foundation is deteriorating, and the roof needs to be replaced.
Grouse Creek is in the northeast corner of the state a few miles from the Nevada border. The closest community to the small-cattle town is Oakley, Idaho nearly 36 miles away.
Steve Carlsen, Box Elder School Superintendent, said the state performed a seismic study of all the state-owned buildings built prior to the 1970s and Grouse Creek School failed.
“The building doesn’t have a real foundation,” the superintendent said. “The builders dug a hole and dumped a bunch of rocks and mortar for the foundation. And the mortar between the large sandstone blocks needs to be reinforced with steel. The building is just not educationally friendly.”
Although it is deemed unsafe, the old sandstone structure is still being used by the district as a school. They tried to install cross beams to hold up the ceiling and roof to stabilize it, but the beams are starting bow due to the weight.
In 1984 the school district built the gym onto the school some 150 miles from the district office in Brigham City. The last 20 or so miles is dirt road. It is the most remote school in the county and district.
“We want to demolish the current building and build portable classrooms in Tremonton and take them to Grouse Creek then connect them with a breezeway,” Carlsen said. “We will connect the classrooms to the gymnasium.”
Cache Valley contractor Darrell W. Anderson Construction will build the portable classrooms and take them out to the site.
“The state legislature gave $91 million to the schools for capital improvement projects. Of that money, our district got $1,666,000,” he said. “We think we can do it for less.”
There are some people who want to save the building and some that don’t. Most of the people who don’t want to save the building live there and most of the people who want to save the old school no longer live in the small cattle community.
“There are a lot of names and initials carved into the two-by-three feet sandstone blocks the school is built out of,” he said. “Currently, they teach kindergarten through 10th grade, then students leave and live with families in another city for their 11th and 12th grades.”
Some students go to Oakley, Idaho and some go to Tremonton with students from Park Valley and stay with families during the week and go home on the weekends.
Grouse Creek is the most remote of any of the school in the district and has a small student body. They currently have six students with some of them coming 40 miles from the south in Lucin.
“The state of Utah has a special grant for remote schools,” Carlsen said. “The Necessary Existence Small School Grant…is money set aside to help schools that are so far away that they need to help to cover the running of those schools. Those funds pay for the personnel and a fair chunk of the electric bill.”
When the school was built the U.S. Census for the town’s 1910 population was 337 people. Today, the population has shrunk to less than 100.