![]() ![]() ![]() They come across the entire valley,” he said. “For example, Highland has I think 8 to 12 bus loads of kids who come every morning at 7:00. But speaking with Buchanan before that in 1992, Collett said he wasn’t sure how well the boundaries were serving students from the west side. That richness strengthened the school, he told The Salt Lake Tribune, reminiscing in 2016. After South High School closed in 1988, boundaries for West, East and Highland were changed to spread its students across the three schools, which made Highland more diverse. He had seen Highland shift away from having “compact” boundaries in an affluent neighborhood, with few minority students, he said. He later took an intensive course and ended up teaching Russian for 15 years.Ĭollett shifted to working as a counselor in the 1978-79 school year, he said, and found students were more open to counseling than they had been in years past, as they struggled with academics and changing family dynamics. (Tribune archives) An undated photo of Dean Collett. That is how my Russian experience began.” Then I would teach it the next morning at school. I would go to school at night for three hours. “I went to school that summer and began the basics. “I couldn’t speak a thing,” he remembered. when he returned, graduating with a teaching certificate in 1956, first teaching math, then adding German, and then, with national interest in the language spurred by the success of Sputnik, taught Russian - although he didn’t speak it. when he returned in 1950, then left school again for military service in Germany during the Korean War. In June 1945, he graduated from East High School at 16, then studied for two years at the University of Utah before serving a three-year mission in Sweden for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I worked at a grocery store for all my years going through junior and senior high school for ten cents an hour, but enough to help bring food into the home.” ![]() “So we, as children, had to work most all of our lives, however we could, starting as a paper boy, doing yard work for neighbors in the area,” Collett remembered. Collett’s father was a banker who eventually lost his job in the later years of the Depression. An educator and advocateĭean Collett, then a guidance counselor at Highland High School, greets students in 2016.īorn in 1928, Collett grew up in Salt Lake City with five siblings, he told oral history interviewer Fred Buchanan in April 1992. Issues Collett raised as a Highland school counselor in the 1990s are being debated again today: Should students on the west side of the city be able to attend a high school in their neighborhood? And the district is once again dealing with declining enrollment, with school board members weighing whether to propose expensive rebuilds of Highland and West High. He saw Highland transform over his career: From a neighborhood institution with few minority students to a diverse high school that welcomed teens from across the city in the 1980s after district enrollment dropped, South High closed and attendance boundaries changed to recent conversations about whether its aging building should be torn down. But he returned in April 2008 as a student advocate and served in that role until April 30, 2021. His presence will be missed beyond words.”Ĭollett had a brief retirement, leaving his counseling post and the school in 2007. “His influence, guidance, example and friendship go far beyond the classroom. “A teacher, counselor, mentor and friend, he touched the lives of so many,” the Highland post said. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Highland High School community gathered at the school's football field on Friday, June 23, 2023, to honor longtime teacher and counselor Dean Collett, who died June 13, 2023. ![]()
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