Soul of a Small Town: Lehi Farmland, Education & Change | RB-032

A Lehi educator reflects on family farmland becoming Ivory Ridge, education reform, the Beanie Baby craze, and preserving Lehi's soul amid rapid growth.

Soul of a Small Town: Lehi Farmland, Education & Change | RB-032

A Lehi educator reflects on family farmland becoming Ivory Ridge, education reform, the Beanie Baby craze, and preserving Lehi's soul amid rapid growth.

Soul of a Small Town: A Lifetime of Roots, Education, and Change in Lehi, Utah

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Role in Lehi

Time Periods Discussed

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Resource for Listeners

Episode Highlights

Key Stories from the Interview

From Farm Fields to Football Fields

The Teacher Who Would Not Quit

Twenty-Nine Schools, One Voice

Snowbound: When Students Stayed Overnight

The Beanie Baby Lottery

The Car Wash That Never Was

Her Mother's Paper

Historical Insights About Lehi

Community and Legacy Themes

Memorable Quotes

Related Lehi Topics & Episodes

Explore More from Roots & Branches of Lehi

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Soul of a Small Town Lehi Utah Farmland Education History Interview - Roots & Branches of Lehi Podcast

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A Lehi educator, counselor, school board member, and local shopkeeper reflects on growing up on farmland that became Ivory Ridge, fighting for pregnant teachers' rights, managing the Beanie Baby craze, and preserving the soul of a community amid relentless growth.

Work Hard Mortgage helps families achieve the dream of homeownership in Lehi and across Utah.

In this episode of Roots & Branches of Lehi , host Ryan Harding welcomes a guest whose life story traces the transformation of Lehi, Utah from a quiet farming community into one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Through the eyes of a lifelong educator, school counselor, school board member, and local business owner, listeners gain a rare firsthand account of how farmland became subdivisions, how classroom policies evolved, and how the fight to preserve community character continues today.

Her family's farm once stretched across the land where Ivory Ridge and Skyridge High School now stand. She drove trucks for her father at eight years old, watched water scarcity end an agricultural era, and later spent decades inside Lehi's classrooms and school board chambers trying to protect the town's educational values. Along the way, she ran a shop during the national Beanie Baby phenomenon, fought to save a historic building from becoming a car wash, and carried forward her mother's legacy of local journalism. This is not merely an interview—it is an oral history of Lehi's soul.

For anyone researching Lehi, Utah history , Utah County farmland development , education reform in Utah , or the community stories that define small-town America, this conversation offers irreplaceable perspective. It bridges the 1950s agricultural era with modern suburban expansion, connecting generations through land, learning, and an unshakable devotion to place.

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RB-032 — "Soul of a Small Town"

Educator, School Counselor, School Board Member, Local Shop Owner, Community Advocate

1950s–present, with emphasis on agricultural decline, 1990s–2000s suburban expansion, and modern development

Ryan Harding

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The guest's father farmed the very land where Skyridge High School now stands. Driving a truck at eight or nine years old, she remembers the moment her father looked across the fields and admitted, "I don't have enough water to keep this green." By 1956, he sold the farm to the church for $65,000—an amount that seems impossibly small today for land that would eventually become Ivory Ridge and one of Lehi's largest high schools. The story captures the heartbreak of water scarcity ending Utah County agriculture and the irreversible transformation of farmland into suburbia.

Before Rodonna Clark, pregnant teachers in Utah faced automatic termination. The guest recalls the systemic injustice: if a teacher was expecting, she had to tell the superintendent and resign. Rodonna Clark refused. She sued the district, declaring, "You cannot make me quit." When she won, the policy changed statewide. The guest remembers this case vividly because it represented a turning point not only for education policy but for women's rights in the workplace across Utah.

During her time on the school board, the guest oversaw 29 schools while another board member from a neighboring area managed only nine. The disparity revealed deep inequities in representation, resources, and attention. She left many meetings in tears, particularly one at Meadow Elementary where she knew her constituents opposed another remodel of Lehi High School but felt powerless against political maneuvering. The experience shaped her conviction that smaller, localized governance serves students better than sprawling bureaucracies.

Rapid growth strained Lehi's infrastructure long before the latest building boom. The guest recalls a time when buses could not reach schools due to weather and impassable roads, forcing children to stay overnight at school. It is a haunting image of a district expanding faster than its transportation network could support—a problem echoed in today's debates about traffic, school capacity, and boundary changes.

During the height of the 1990s Beanie Baby craze, the guest's shop became a local phenomenon. Demand grew so intense that new shipments could not simply be placed on shelves. Instead, customers drew numbers from a basket on Saturday mornings to determine their place in line. The guest became a savvy negotiator with Ty Warner's distribution machine, leveraging relationships built on other plush toys to secure scarce inventory. It was a moment when a small Lehi business briefly held national cultural power.

When the guest heard developers planned to demolish a beloved historic building and replace it with a car wash, she was horrified. Rather than surrender the structure to commercial convenience, she pursued buying it herself, pledging to restore it as a replica of the original building. The car wash plan vanished. The story illustrates how individual determination, when rooted in love for place, can still defeat development pressure in a rapidly changing city.

The guest's mother was an extraordinary force in local journalism. She wrote the paper, designed layouts, balanced the books, and served as Lehi's "number one cheerleader." Under her stewardship, subscriptions surged by three or four hundred because, as the guest notes, "people in Lehi want to know what's going on." That legacy informs the guest's passionate belief that informed citizens make better decisions—and that holding a physical newspaper still carries a legitimacy digital chaos cannot replicate.

This interview preserves critical context for understanding how Lehi, Utah evolved from an agricultural outpost into a modern city. These historical insights emerge directly from lived experience:

Beyond specific events, this interview reveals enduring values that have defined Lehi across generations. These themes connect the past with present challenges:

This episode connects deeply to the broader Roots & Branches of Lehi archive. Explore these related stories and subjects to deepen your understanding of Lehi's history:

Discover related episodes from the oral history archive:

To enrich this community profile, the following visual materials would strengthen the historical record and reader engagement:

Ryan Harding: Growing up in a small town, I learned that connections go beyond blood. They're built through shared experiences, friendships, and the moments we celebrate together.

Guest: We've lived in our same home now for probably 56, 57 years.

Ryan Harding: Okay. Good amount of time. That's a good amount.

Guest: It's hard when something you love so much does change, which I mean, the world itself has changed, I guess, too, right? But the nostalgia of that past is sometimes hard to let go of. Actually, Skyridge High School sits on my dad's farm. I was driving in a truck when I was eight or nine years old. He says, "Hun, you know what? I don't have enough water to keep this green." And that was about 1956. And then he sold the land to the church for $65,000. Wow. They got a deal. And that is what Ivory Ridge is now—my dad's farm. That's your dad's farm. And then he bought a dump truck and he's hauled for people for 25 years.

And back then if you knew that you were expecting a baby, you had to tell the superintendent and you were terminated.

Ryan Harding: Oh, really? Yes.

Guest: Oh, interesting. Rodonna Clark. Yeah. And she sued the district and said, "You cannot make me quit." Yeah. And she won. And from then on, women could be pregnant and teach. Young men need a good, strong male role model. Sure. And there's getting fewer and fewer and fewer in the profession, which is, I think, tragic. Feel like they have to move into administration to earn enough money to provide for their families. And that's, you know, I think they've got things backwards. The money needs to go into the teacher salaries. I love teaching very, very much. Yeah. But I went into counseling and was a counselor for 14 years. We didn't have professional development. In fact, I remember my first year at American Fork High School, the principal showed me my room and introduced me to my colleagues. I really worry about we test and test and test. Yeah.

And I have kids who hate to be tested that much. Yeah. So, we hired an honors English teacher and she was to prepare a test. This is true story. To select which kids should be in her honors classes. Okay. She only had a handful of kids. Sure. Who passed the test and testing creates an anxiety for the kids. Sure. And I remember one time there were several teachers and all they wanted to teach were the smart kids. And so kids get feelings of inferiority based on test scores and it's not a healthy thing. That's an interesting question. I don't know if they have gotten better. 35 kids in a classroom is really a hard thing. But you want to mass-produce that, right? How do you mass-produce those good teachers? Right.

Grandma, I'm not getting an education. I'm getting an indoctrination. I mean, I'm all about education, but let's make sure it's education with a purpose. But I think hopefully as a nation, we're we need to better prepare children for real life. I mean, what I tell my kids is just get good at something because the world will pay you if you're really good at something. If you're not really good at anything, then they don't know what to do with you. I think there's a general feeling that, you know, it isn't a valued profession as it used to be. Money attracts talent whether we like it or not.

Because I'd been in the schools for all those years and I did have an agenda. Yeah. And I remember at one time I had 29 schools that I was kind of responsible for. Yeah. And another board member from Orem had nine. So there were some inequalities that I saw there. So finally when it was time for the buses to come, they couldn't get up there. So the kids had to stay at school overnight. Oh wow. Well, there's been a need for a while. Yeah. And I know that the district was very much opposed to a split. Yeah. And I know there was a lot of fear associated with that. Will we keep our benefits? Well, you know, will we have an opportunity to what's going to happen? And the suicide rate at Herman went through the roof.

And so they needed—it was a good thing for them, too. Yeah. So smaller is better. Yeah. And when you're closer to the people that you serve, you can do a better job. I mean, we can make decisions very quickly here, right? You know, pivot left or right. Sure. But a big corporation, you know, there's benefits to a big corporation, but as far as moving quickly, that's not something you typically think of. Exactly. I left many meetings in tears. I really did because I remember maybe this is getting a little bit personal but I remember a meeting and it was at Meadow Elementary. Oh, okay. And we were discussing the remodel of Lehi High School. And I knew that my patrons did not want another remodel of Lehi High School. And one of the board members that was there with us, there was about five of us, said, "We don't need them."

The superintendent looked a little flushed and he says, "Yeah, we do. Why would we give them a tax break when they're bringing—" and it was a housing development. Yeah. Help fund the schools, right? You know, we actually do need an impact fee for education. Do we—I am very much in favor of an impact fee. We have a lot of developers in our legislature. Grandma, we're going to have butterflies right outside our school. They're more—they're probably the most important component in our society there is. And so it's good that these conversations are being had on how to improve things and make things better.

And I had heard that they were going to tear it down and put a car wash there. Oh. And I was horrified to think that that would happen. And then we went through the beanie baby phase. Yeah. Okay. And that was an interesting experiment. Yeah. Because it got so popular that we would not put out our new beanie babies until Saturday morning. And then people who we knew would come to buy the new beanies, they had to draw paper out of a basket for their place in line to go in and buy beanies. Oh, it was just incredible. Yeah. Wow. So, I've never seen such a phenomenon. Yeah.

And luckily, we had bought enough of Ty Warner's other plush that we could buy what we wanted. And he was really restrictive. I mean, within a certain area, you could only have this many Beanie Baby stores. So, he knew what he was doing. Obviously, a marketing genius. I would love to buy it. Mhm. And I will make it a replica of the old building. He wasn't going to make a car wash. Car wash gone. Yeah. Okay. Good. Good. So, it turned out it turned out great.

Mrs. Miller was driving this convertible and Larry was in the back of the convertible hanging on for his dear life. I guess my mom was an incredibly hard worker and she loved people. Mhm. And she wrote the paper. She did the layouts for the paper. She kept the books for the paper. She was our number one cheerleader for Lehi. People loved her for it. And we got probably three or four hundred subscriptions after publishing that because people in Lehi want to know what's going on. And what I found is that people want to know. Yeah. And the more they know, the better decisions they make about things.

I mean, you have to have the information to make a correct decision. And we've tried. I mean, it's very important to me that what we print is right. Yeah. And objective. I frankly, we need more of that. I mean, you know, if we all live in our little echo chambers, that doesn't help anybody. You never know what to believe. Yeah. On social media, especially now with AI and you can make videos of people doing different things. It's like, okay, this isn't real anymore. You know, I can't believe my eyes on different things. I, you know, crazy. The reason I like a hard copy is we can do more. Yes.

And there's something legitimate about holding a newspaper. It just feels better. I can't let my little ones out on the front lawn because the roads are too busy. Yeah. And that makes me very sad. I mean a Costco for heaven's sakes. Who would have thought? I think we are woefully under what we should have for open space regional parks. I will be damned if everything I love about Lehi is ruined so Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs people can have a faster route to the freeway. She says, you know, I couldn't live like that. I couldn't live in a community that's work, live, play. Emphasize what makes Lehi good.

Ryan Harding: I hope today's story helped you feel a little more connected to the people who make up our community. Remember, every person here has a unique story, and together, we're what makes Lehi feel like home. Until next time, keep growing those roots and reaching out to your branches. Take care.

Lehi Utah history podcast interview covering farmland development, Ivory Ridge history, Skyridge High School land history, education reform, Beanie Baby craze, local journalism, and community preservation in Lehi, Utah.

Lehi Utah history. Lehi farmland development. Skyridge High School land history. Ivory Ridge Lehi origins. Lehi school district history. Utah teaching history. Beanie Baby craze local business Utah. Lehi newspaper history. Lehi community stories podcast. Utah County development history. Preserving historic buildings Lehi.

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Soul of a Small Town: Lehi Farmland, Education & Change | RB-032