There’s an educational jewel in West Valley City, a small high school tucked away in a neighborhood near radio towers and an industrial park. Its student body is small, slightly over 200 in number, and its focus is to help each of these young people achieve all they can with the fruits (and vegetables and farm animals) of their labors.

Roots High School was founded in 2015 by Tyler Bastian, a former documentary film maker who turned his career toward educating and motivating youth. He said as a filmmaker, “I was seeing a real lack of character and challenges with anger management in teens, just something missing in those social soft skills.” So he quit making films and found a location to open Roots. 

 The first few years were challenging for Bastian and his team. His enrollment was about 200 students, like today (it’s capped at 220, with a waiting list of between 40 and 50), and he first thought Roots would be “an entrepreneurial school, teaching students skills through private education.” He shifted toward teaching character development instead.

“I wondered how I could create an environment where there’s authentic opportunities to learn and to build character,” he said. “What better way to do that than with a farm? That’s one reason why we put it here in West Valley–the space worked for our 6-acre farm–and we love West Valley.”

It’s a Utah charter school, but not part of any other school district. It receives some state and federal funding, but depends on grants and other donations to raise the additional funds it needs to survive–about $700,000 a year. 

“We want to keep the student count low, because we want to serve kids and maintain our ability to do that,” Bastian said. “We want everybody to know everyone else and help develop leaders. So we really treat Roots more like a nonprofit–we’re providing a lot of different services.”

Every student gets free lunch–no questions asked–and Roots doesn’t take any federal funding for that. The school buys every student a TRAX pass to be sure they can get to school. There’s a TRAX station about two blocks away. Student-to-teacher ratio is 7 to 1, making it easy for connection with adults. A lot of students come from traumatic situations, Bastian said. And on every wall, you can find the numbers “243” written or painted.

“When we first started Roots we were averaging six to seven suicide attempts per school year,” Bastian recalled. “I went into that summer trying to figure how to deal with that. That’s when a documentary came out about Fred Rogers (“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”)—he was always an important part of my life growing up, and he always had the number 143 on his sets. He said it stood for three words: 1. I, 2. LOVE, 3. YOU.” So that summer, we spray painted 243 everywhere–meaning “2-WE 4-LOVE 3-YOU.” We told the kids, ‘when you’re feeling down, just look up and you’ll see that you’re loved.’ We’ve only had two suicide attempts over the past two and a half years. It sounds weird, but it sounds so simple, and it made all the difference. When you focus on making sure every kid feels seen, they feel loved and they know that they belong. They can go to an adult and talk to an adult–and oftentimes for whatever reason, that person won’t be a parent but an adult at their school.”

Roots does have farm classes, since it operates a 6-acre farm adjacent to the school that has hosted Spring and Fall Festivals in the past. The farm has an assortment of both large and small animals, as well plants and trees for fruits and vegetables. Students do chores on the farm, but the school also has classes in math, science, English and the arts. A lot of students come in as 10th or 11th graders, so Roots helps them with school credit recovery. At least five former students have returned as part of the team and other success stories of graduates abound.

“A lot of parents bring their kids here because they’re worried their kid is going to fall through the cracks socially and emotionally,” Bastian said. “Some were bullies, some were bullied, and some were running from something else. They come here and they all get along. When kids come here, it feels healthy, it feels like things are growing.”

Literally and figuratively. λ