Editors Note: This article was originally published in the March 27, 2024 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
A dozen blue shovels, white hard hats hanging from their wood handles, were lined up, standing across the middle of a patch of sand placed neatly on the southeast lawn of Millard High School last Friday morning.
It was the official groundbreaking for the school’s $30-plus million dollar renovation project set to commence in the middle of next month.
Students and staff, elected officials and Millard School District administrators, joined the project’s architects and builders to commemorate a vision more than a decade in the making.
School board member Adam Britt, a Fillmore native who graduated 43 years ago from the “old, old” high school, called it a “great day.”
“This has been 12 years in the making, since I became a board member. It just doesn’t seem like it’s real, but it is,” he said.
He asked the sophomores standing in the morning sun to shout out and tell him where they are. He told them they were going to be the first class to graduate from the new school—and he expected perfect grades for many of them.
“Going into your senior year, you are going to walk into a new high school. And it’s going to be great,” he said. “I know that when the (new) Delta High School opened, the enthusiasm in the school was great, it was just a whole different atmosphere, for not only the students, but the teachers, the staff.”
Britt thanked the two west side school board members in attendance—Jenni Finlinson, the board’s vice president, and Sarah Richins, one of the board’s newest members—for supporting the district in pursuing the new campus in Fillmore.
“Without them voting for this, this could never have happened,” Britt told the crowd. “I want each of you students to bake a dozen cookies and send it to them.”
He also thanked Philip Wentworth, the architect whose renovation designs sat like artwork on easels near the dais for all comers to view during the ceremony.
Wentworth is vice president at Naylor Wentworth Lund Architects. And every January at the annual Utah School Board Association conference in Salt Lake City he sets up a booth where educators from across the state can come talk about campus construction.
“Every year I’d go up to him and say, Philip, we’re going to do this,” Britt recalled. “We’re going to do this. He’s like okay, yeah, sure. Anyway, so we are here. Philip, we made it.”
Millard High Principal Derrick Dearden (left) poses for a photo with MSD school board member Adam Britt at last Friday’s groundbreaking ceremony for the new Millard High campus in Fillmore.
MHS Principal Derrick Dearden spoke next.
He, too, was effusive in his excitement for the project. He said of all the things society spends millions of dollars on—pro sports and entertainment—he couldn’t think of a more worthwhile place for Millard County’s communities to spend their money.
“And this is a multi-million dollar project that we’re going to be doing here,” he said. “But what better thing to spend millions of dollars on than our youth. You guys are our future. You guys are going to be the future people who are up here in these positions. You’ll be the architects. You’ll be the superintendents. You’ll be the board members. You’ll be all these people up here. And someday one of you is probably going to replace me as principal.”
He said he couldn’t think of a better way to honor the Fillmore community than building a state of the art high school in the heart of the city.
“There are some amazing things that are going to happen,” he said.
Later, Dearden confirmed the school plans on setting up a video camera to record building progress as the new two-story renovation rises.
Superintendent David Styler told attendees that Fillmore will likely not see a bigger project in the next two decades.
He heralded the benefits the community will see and the impact a new high tech learning environment will have on the city’s children.
“What better investment than in our kids,” Styler said.
The superintendent said even though this year’s graduating class, nor the next, will get to walk the hallways of the new building as students, they will forever be part of the next generation of students who remember an important transition, into a high school that one day their own kids might attend.
He also acknowledged a brief period of inconvenience—the large parking lot on the campus will be the first to go—but said it was for the worthiest of causes.
“It’s a beautiful facility. But to get there, again, there will be a little bit of inconvenience…Recognize it’s for a great end,” he said.
The district celebrated its groundbreaking more than a year after beginning discussions on a major building spree across the district—the original plan was to ask voters to approve $75 million in general obligation bonds for major projects at both high schools.
But given skyrocketing property taxes, the district eventually scaled back its plans, deciding to go to voters and ask for $47.5 million in bonds instead, arguing the bonds would not require a tax increase at all.
After the November election, when voters rejected the district’s ballot initiative, officials decided to issue new lease revenue bonds, which don’t require voter approval.
Last week the district closed on $50 million worth of those bonds.
With construction starting next month, officials anticipate the new school will officially open in August 2025.
Millard High students also participated in last Friday’s groundbreaking ceremony, coming up a dozen at a time to commemorate the start of the new campus renovation project. Superintendent David Styler, seen behind the students standing on the dais, called groups up to the shovels at the end of the community event.
