WASHINGTON TERRACE -- There's about $700,000 left of Gov. Mike Leavitt's New Century High School pie, and local educators are joining together to get it.
The Weber, Ogden and Davis school districts are joining with Weber State University in a request to the governor's office for $1.2 million to start a technology-based charter high school.
"Basically there's about $700,000 left, and we need to get at it," Weber Superintendent Mike Jacobsen told the district's school board at a work session last week.
The $700,000 is money appropriated by the Legislature, and the remaining $541,000 needed is a planning grant from the Utah Partnership for Education.
The school would be a joint effort by educators that could combine virtual teaching techniques, home schooling and early college to produce technologically savvy students.
"Our preliminary thinking is that we want to look at all the possibilities for a specialized high school that would not need to replicate a traditional high school," said Ogden Superintendent Ted Adams. "This will help kids get really focused on technology."
The school is still under the conceptual stages, where educators are working out the details of how the school will offer the best education using the best resources each partner can offer.
"The hope is that we'll design something together," said Weber State President Ann Millner. "The better prepared they (students) are in high school, the better prepared they are for us."
The program is part of Leavitt's charge to educators to graduate more engineering and technology students to supply a work force for incoming high-tech companies.
The first such high school -- the Academy for Math, Engineering & Science -- will open in the fall housed in Cottonwood High School as a partnership with Granite and Salt Lake City school districts and the University of Utah. Jordan School District and Salt Lake Community College are looking to open another New Century High School at the West Jordan campus of the Jordan Applied Technology Center.