Alpine School District split: Proposed maps for new districts, seats released
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- Proposed rendering of the South District seats after the Alpine School District split.
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- Proposed rendering of the Central District seats.
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- Proposed rendering of the West District seats.
The Utah County Commission publicly released the proposed boundaries and seats for the three new school districts deriving from the Alpine School District split.
Mac Sims, the committee chair of all three redistricting committees, presented the proposed renderings to the county commission at their Wednesday meeting. The commissioners will vote to adopt final maps on March 26.
Proposition 11 passed last November to create a new district in Alpine, American Fork, Cedar Hills, Highland, Lehi and the Utah County portion of Draper.
Proposition 14 passed to form a west district of Cedar Fort, Eagle Mountain, Fairfield and Saratoga Springs.
As a result, Orem, Lindon, Pleasant Grove and Vineyard will create their own district as well.
Each district will have seven seats.
The redistricting committee used 2023 population data from the Kem C. Gardner Institute to determine how to balance the new seats. Each seat will be represented by a school board member.
Part of the criteria in creating the seven seats in each district was equal population, compactness, effort to follow city and seat lines and maintaining communities with shared economic, cultural or geographic similarities, Sims said.
Certain seats across the districts may have lower populations than others, Sims acknowledged, to make way for future population growth and development.
“The redistricting committees have put tremendous effort into creating the proposed maps, carefully considering the local needs of their communities,” Commissioner Skyler Beltran told the Daily Herald. “They have presented maps that have broad support. The commission will now review them in detail, solicit additional public comments and adopt the final maps during the March 26 meeting.”
West District
Courtesy Utah County Government
Proposed rendering of the West District seats.
With Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs making up the majority of the population of the district, the two cities will control most of the seats. Eagle Mountain is proposed to have 3.71 seats and Saratoga Springs will have 3.25 seats.
Seat 1 encompasses the west portion of Eagle Mountain and Fairfield and Cedar Fort, a population of 14,691. Seat 3 is the northern portion of Eagle Mountain (17,263 people) and Seat 6 is the east half of the city (14,722 people).
Seat 2 is the northern part of Saratoga Springs (15,765 people), while Seat 5 contains central and east Saratoga Springs (14,747 people) and Seat 7 is the southern portion of the city (17,073 people).
Seat 4 is split between Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain to the north (15,434 people).
“The fine tuning was, how does Saratoga Springs want their seats kind of divided up in their community?” Sims said. “How does Eagle Mountain want their three seats? And then where do they meet together? And where is that? Where’s that combination seat between the two of them?”
Central District
Courtesy Utah County Government
Proposed rendering of the Central District seats.
A challenge for the Central District, Sims said, was maintaining the cohesiveness of the cities with the different seats.
Lehi is the largest city in the Central District, comprising 50.8% of the 173,029 people, and in turn will have 3.56 seats.
Seat 1 contains north Lehi (23,610 people), Seat 2 is east-central Lehi (22,171 people) and Seat 5 is in southwest Lehi (26,003 people).
Seat 3 will consist of Highland and a northeast portion of Lehi (22,171 people).
Seat 4 encompasses much of Alpine and Cedar Hills (23,951 people), Seat 7 is American Fork (26,508 people) and Seat 6 is Lehi and American Fork, mostly below Pioneer Crossing (25,677 people).
South District
Courtesy Utah County Government
Proposed rendering of the South District seats after the Alpine School District split.
Four of the seven seats in the South District are solidly in Orem, which controls 4.23 seats in total.
There are 22,887 people in Seat 5, encompassing northeast Orem and up Provo Canyon, and 23,611 people in Seat 4, which is in Orem west of Orem Boulevard and north of Utah Valley University.
Seat 6 is in Orem east of State Street and south of 800 North (23,370 people), and Seat 7 is south Orem west of State Street (22,595 people).
Seat 1 includes much of Pleasant Grove (24,943 people), while Seat 2 consists of Lindon and the southern portion of Pleasant Grove (24,461 people). Seat 3 contains all of Vineyard and a portion of Orem to the south (20,906 people).
