After seven years of working with the Park City Winter Sports School and helping it transition from public to private, the institution’s head of school Tess Miner-Farra was chosen as the recipient for the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools’ Administrator of the Year Circle of Excellence award.

Winter Sports School offers a unique April-to-November school year that makes it a compelling choice among high-ranking and highly competitive student-athletes who specialize in winter sports, though Miner-Farra said the current class includes students from 14 different sports including mountain biking to surfing.

The school’s alumni have earned 15 Olympic medals, 33 World Championship medals, 92 World Cup titles and 222 World Cup podium spots. In the 2022 Olympics, 11 students competed, and 24 students are currently on national teams.

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Looking back at her time working with the Park City institution, Miner-Farra said she first arrived in 2017 after decades of experience in private schools. Already she was no stranger to the rigors of students’ needs to balance education with their athletic goals: She married an olympian, and her daughter was a biathlete enrolled at the Winter Sports School.

She came to the table with “an understanding of the student-athlete and a real commitment to the learning piece,” she said. “At the time that Winter Sports School was coming into being in the early ’90s, we were in Lake Placid working with athletes in a different model but a similar idea, trying to help meet those students’ needs. When this position came available — even though it was a public school rather than a private school. … I knew of the school and what it was trying to do entering the public school space here in Utah.”

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She believed her private school experience and knowledge of the public school realm could be helpful during the transition, and — if the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools’ recognition and the schools’ students’ successes are a good indication — she’s proved that belief to be correct.

Miner-Farra explained that among the changes that came with the transition from private to public was increased accessibility for students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The majority of these kids come from Summit County, though there are some from Wasatch County, Salt Lake City, Provo and even Ogden. Students from other states can apply, but Miner-Farra said the school only enrolls three to five of them in its 110-120 total enrolled students in any given year.

“We are able to provide opportunity for Utah resident students for a free public education in a charter school that seeks to meet the needs of these unique student-athletes, kids who have demands placed on them athletically and academically for whom this sort of alternative calendar provides the balance and support that allows them to succeed in both arenas,” Miner-Farra said. “The students that come here typically that seek us out are pretty ambitious and are seeking ways to pursue those ambitions without having to compromise in some of the ways they find they have to in a more traditional framework.”

Along with the unusual school year schedule, Miner-Farra said the Winter Sports School also allows students to have an environment where teachers and school professionals expect and understand that they will need accommodations as their athletic careers will often necessitate them to miss classes.

That, however, doesn’t equate to a loosening of coursework. Miner-Farra said the traditional school part of high school has also been a focus for her during her time as Winter Sports Schools’ head.

“In that timeframe, what we’ve also been working on is how to continue to better meet the needs of our students’ advancing programing so that we can continue to challenge those students who might be really ambitious academically and athletically,” she said, “and want to be able to seek places to ski NCAA at some of the best colleges or universities or to attend those schools and go on to law schools and med schools.”

Though the school’s unique schedule means it wouldn’t make sense for it to offer traditional Advanced Placement courses students might find at other public schools, several Advanced Placement tests are still administered to honor-level students each year who study and prepare for the rigorous exams and the potential college credits they can gain from passing them.

Graduated students’ continued educational paths further show that the school is much more than a diploma mill for athletes. Within the past four years, graduates have been accepted to Williams College; Dartmouth College; University of California, Los Angeles; Harvard University; United States Air Force Academy; John Hopkins University; Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley just to name a few.

Miner-Farra said some alumni are in their second decade of competing as professional athletes. Others are working toward professional careers in challenging fields. Either way, she said they know “there’s going to be something after sport,” and she wants to make sure they’re prepared for whatever that is.

“When I first started here, that was part of the perception problem we needed to fight was that, ‘Oh, if you’re really committed to sport, it’s a good place to be, but you’re not going to be able to prepare for an elite-level academic career at a place like that,'” Miner-Farra said. “My effort has been to bolster for the teachers their ability to establish and maintain rigor, helping them find ways to be flexible with that — it can’t be one-size-fits-all — but to be OK with also developing among our families and students a clearer idea that they will not be asked to do less. They will be asked to do more to achieve what they want.”

To make sure kids don’t fall behind, school educators use a variety of communication and teaching methods.

“We leverage the online learning platform to be able to stay connected for coursework while they’re gone,” Miner-Farra said. “We have a structured advisory homeroom time every day and on different days of the week that helps us provide students with additional supports.”

Still, she added, students are expected to take initiative in their education, and she’s well-aware that her students will need to make sacrifices to pursue their education and their athletic endeavors. They are in school while most of their peers are out in the warm weather; they might need to miss vacations, and they have to face those difficult decisions.

“It really takes a student investment in owning their learning to be as successful as they want to be when they come to a school like ours,” she said.

Miner-Farra is much more comfortable speaking about her school and her students than herself, but she did express what the award meant to her personally.

“The honor that I felt having received the nomination was learning that it came from one of my staff members and was supported then really enthusiastically by all the rest of the staff members who stepped up,” she said.