RETIREMENTS: Jay Hart, St. Joseph Catholic High School

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Jay Hart

OGDEN — For close to 40 years Jay Hart has been teaching at St. Joseph Catholic High School. During that time, he taught 13 subjects to hundreds of students. This year, his final year, he taught “only four,” he said – AP U.S. government, humanities, gender studies and AP English.

Originally from Nebraska, Hart, the son of a professor, lived all over the country before he came to Utah. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in history and social studies from Kent State University, Hart taught for several years at Bishop Kelly High School in Boise, Idaho before deciding he needed a change.

In 1985 at the suggestion of his friend Mark Hoffman, who was then a teacher at St. Joseph CHS, Hart applied for a position there and was accepted. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It has been a great experience, Hart said, primarily because the administration always supported him in his teaching goals.

‘I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted, and in the way I wanted to teach, [along with] really, really wonderful kids who were willing to keep a sense of humor and do the work,” he said. “In fact, three of the classes that I teach currently were originally created by the kids. The kids asked, ‘Could we try them?’ and we started out with those classes outside of the regular school day, and they became popular enough that we moved them into the school day.”

While teaching, Hart went back to school himself and earned graduate degrees in English, education and U.S. history from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Washington and the University of Utah as well as working toward two PhDs. For the last decade, he has served as an adjunct professor at Weber State University.

Hart has loved teaching St. Joseph Catholic High School students all these years, he said.  He feels “enormous gratitude that they put up with me as long as they did,” he said. “The running joke there was that my humor is so bad that I could cause internal bleeding.”

“[The students] burrowed their way into my heart very deeply,” he added. “They love to know things. They really pride themselves on knowing things. They have incredible senses of humor. And the small size of our classes really gives all of us an opportunity to create some special environments that a lot of my peers and other schools, they just don’t have that opportunity.”

Hart fondly remembers the many mock congresses the school put on over the years.

“They used to take over the school in the best possible way,” he said.

In the coming months Hart hopes to travel to Ireland to visit his dear friend Father Norm Allred, a former St. Joseph Catholic High School principal who was ordained in 2020 and now serves as a parish priest in the Diocese of Meath. He will also spend more time in Boise with his mother, who is nearly 92, and will continue his annual visits to friends in Sonoma’s wine country. His garden will also benefit from the extra time he will be able to spend there, he said.

Principal Clay Jones appreciates the contributions Hart has made to the high school over the years.

“Jay Hart is a master teacher who has prepared countless numbers of students (including my son) to succeed in college,” Jones said. “He has been a calming force for St. Joseph over his years. After 39 years his Jayhawk journey ends, but I see him spending time doing his wine classes and maybe drinking some, too. All the best!”