Aspen Peaks School District, the successor district serving Alpine, Highland, Cedar Hills and Lehi, is spending $282,277 in state grant money to study which career pathways local students need most.

The grant landed in July. It arrived as a national Gallup poll found that just 32% of Americans are satisfied with K-12 education, the lowest figure in the survey's 27-year history.

Utah State Superintendent of Public Instruction Molly Hart responded to the Walton Family Foundation/Gallup poll in a Sept. 8 statement to the Deseret News. Hart said the poll's concerns about critical thinking and workforce alignment are relevant for Utah education leaders, even though the data is national. She outlined three priorities for the Utah State Board of Education: guiding teachers on ethical AI use, building standards that push past rote memorization toward real-world problem solving, and expanding career and technical education pathways tied to industry needs.

Hart said confidence in education is rebuilt locally by supporting teachers, partnering with families and focusing on student outcomes.

The poll, conducted Aug. 3–24 with 1,200 adults, found satisfaction down 11 percentage points over the past two years. Critical thinking ranked last among six areas respondents evaluated. Only 20% gave schools a positive rating for teaching students to think critically. Workforce preparation scored almost as low: 21% rated it positively, while 38% called it poor.

Even parents are souring. Their satisfaction fell to a record-low 66%, nearly 10 points below last year.

Gallup senior education researcher Zach Hrynowski attributed the broader decline partly to institutional frustration, telling the Associated Press that people "have a general negative vibe about everything in the country right now."

Those workforce concerns connect directly to what Aspen Peaks is building. The district's Applied Professional Education Experiences (APEX) Center Planning Grant, one of nine awarded statewide, funds a year of research into community workforce needs and career pathways before the district expands its CTE offerings.

"We didn't feel like we were ready to jump straight into implementation," Ryan Nield, Aspen Peaks director of CTE, said in an Aug. 27 district post. "This planning year gives us an opportunity to take a deep dive into what's sustainable, what's economical, what industry actually needs …"

Alpine School District, which currently enrolls about 87,000 students, has also launched ASD OpenSciEd, a new K–6 science curriculum built by district educators to emphasize hands-on investigation over memorization.

Alpine School District dissolves July 1, 2027, when Aspen Peaks and two other successor districts take over. The APEX planning year is designed to have CTE research finished before that transition.