Salt Lake Tribune

SALT LAKE CITY — All Steffi Falla and her sixth-grade friends want is more space to play. A long white tent gobbles up a wide section of their playground at Dual Immersion Academy, a new charter school in Salt Lake City.

It looks ready for a wedding reception or some kind of fiesta, but instead, it is where the kids crowd together at tables and eat lunch as the weather turns nasty.

"Sometimes it's cold in here," fifth-grader Sophia Taddeo said while standing in the improvised cafeteria.

Nearly three months after the school launched this fall, renovation is far from complete on more than one-third of the school housed in a former shopping plaza, to the utter frustration of the school's angry, disillusioned founders who are locked in an ugly dispute with the company building the school.

The tent, which the school recently rented and was cozy warm earlier this week, is actually an improvement over eating in the school's halls. The children still are waiting on the gym where they one day will be able to play basketball or jump rope.

But this is the world of charter schools, where companies such as U.S. Charter Development take the lead in school construction, and parents, often inexperienced with multimillion-dollar building deals, learn as the roof leaks. The leaky roof at Dual Immersion Academy led to the growth of black-colored mold.

The school's director emphasizes that children are not in danger, but teachers have enough to worry about without all the construction troubles.

"We're doing a great thing and kids are learning," Julia Barrientos said of the school, which aims to help children master English and Spanish. "It's sad, a school with so much potential and so much success already has to put up with this situation in our first year."

The academy's board had few options when planning the school more than a year ago. The only company board members could find that would work without requiring a down payment was U.S. Charter Development, a Spanish Fork, Utah, company owned by Jim Ferrin, Mike Morley and Glenn Way. Ferrin, a former legislator, has previously come under attack for his support of legislation aiding charter school development, from which critics say he eventually profited.

Three days before U.S. Charter closed on the academy property, it presented school founders with an updated lease that increased the eventual purchase price by about $500,000, said Barbara Fink, the school's board president. The justification for increasing the price was that the actual square footage was higher than previously estimated.

They "specifically said we will walk from this property if you do not sign this," she said. "From our perspective, they got us over a barrel."

Ferrin said he did not recall ever saying anything like that.

"I don't know any one of us ever would have said such a thing because we became very committed the moment we wrote the check to purchase the building," he said.

The plan is for the school to initially lease the building, then have the option to buy it.

But the problems have been about more than money. Weeks later than anticipated, enough of the building was ready that the school could finally move in, just a few days before students arrived.

Needed repairs have lingered for months, Fink said. A crumbling wall near the playground holds back a big dog that growls at the children. The school says U.S. Charter promised to fix the wall.

A hole in the floor, big enough to fit a child's foot, next to one of the doors to the playground wasn't covered until weeks into the school year, Fink said. The front-door lock only works part of the time.

"The school has asked us to do many things, many of which we're able to do and some of which we're not able to do and some of which we can do but weren't ever contemplated in the lease rate that was quoted," Ferrin said. "We're happy to amend the lease and do whatever they want."

On Thursday afternoon, Ferrin said the school would be completed in a "timely fashion" but he didn't have the general contractor's timeline.

"I don't know what he considers a timely fashion; we've been in school for three months already," Fink said.