When Lynnae Jensen heard the news, she thought it was “fabulous.”

On Aug. 20, Canyons Board of Education voted 5-1 to purchase eBay’s regional headquarters, a 36-acre educational campus in Draper to serve as a new technical education high school. The school board and Canyons administrators target fall 2026 for the opening of the new school.

Jensen is a mother of children who attended Canyons schools and has worked at eBay.

“As a school for high schoolers wanting to do trade work and get training, it would be great for that. It’s a big campus, there is public transportation right there and the facilities would lend itself very nicely to a school,” she said. “CTEC (Canyons Technical Education Center) right now has a few small buildings, so this will open it up with more space, better facilities with a nicer campus. By putting in more resources and getting the right programs and partnerships, there’s going to be more demand and more students.”

Jensen added, “With the numerous computers and programs we ran, eBay invested millions of dollars in the servers to handle all the data that was going through so it should work nicely for hundreds of students. It’s a good fit.”

Canyons District plans to pay $50 million for the two eBay buildings, with 16 acres of developable land which could serve as a site for an additional future school to accommodate the projected student growth in the area.

The eBay campus which includes a 400-seat auditorium, commercial kitchen, workout facilities as well as outdoor basketball and pickleball courts and a half-size soccer field, will be purchased by Canyons School District to create an innovation center near the new residential and business development, The Point. (Julie Slama/City Journals)

The purchase will be made with money from capital funds, proceeds from the sale of CSD properties and from lease revenue bonds, said Leon Wilcox, Canyons School District business administrator.

No property was immediately named to liquidate, but Canyons owns properties such as the current aging CTEC in Sandy; the former Crescent View Middle in Sandy which currently is being used for Life Skills Academy for adult students with disabilities; a property in west Draper that has been discussed as a future elementary school site; former school locations now being used as city parks in Midvale and Cottonwood Heights.

Canyons spokesman Jeff Haney said, “Right now, we’re in negotiations on several pieces of property that we own which we can liquidate. These properties at one time were either purchased for future schools, or we had schools on them and they’re not there anymore. The Board of Education has no current plans to shut down a school and then sell that property for this particular contract.”

Wilcox added, “A couple of those we could move fast; a couple others will take a few years. We could look at moving $2-4 million range to help cover this from our capital fund balance. The majority of this will be through lease revenue bonds. We can look at issuing around $38 million, give or take, in lease revenue bonds to do this.”

While general obligation bonds frequently are used for the construction of public schools, lease revenue bonds can be used and usually are issued at a higher interest rate, he said.

“They cost the District more; the yield the buyer of the bonds gets is up to the market at the time,” Wilcox said.

He said lease revenue bonds were issued before with the building of Glacier Hills and Peruvian Park elementaries three years ago as well as this past spring, with improvements at Eastmont Middle and Jordan, Hillcrest and Corner Canyon high schools.

“Lease revenue bonds save us the time we would have to wait until a (general obligation) bond would pass to get in a contract with eBay,” Wilcox said, adding it is a common practice for single buildings or renovations such as this. 

The lease revenue bond could increase taxes an estimated $20-30 on the cost of a $703,000 average home in Canyons District, he said.

Wilcox said the process of issuing the bonds will begin in September and public hearing will be held in October. The bonds will be issued in November with the expectation to close on the purchase in December. eBay still operates in part of the campus and has the option to lease the property from the school district for up to one year, so CTEC will operate in its existing site at 825 E. 9095 South for this and next school years.

The decision to purchase comes with one school board member, Holly Neibaur, voting against it. She wasn’t opposed to the purchase, just the procedure in which the district is obtaining it.

“My vote is not a statement for lack of support for our awesome CTEC programs,” she said before the vote. “A general obligation bond would have provided for much more public engagement.”

At the Aug. 20 meeting, Canyons school board members voted 5-1 in favor of purchasing eBay’s regional headquarters for a new innovation center to open in fall 2026. (Julie Slama/City Journals)

The main 215,000-square-foot building at 583 eBay Way comes fully furnished, has a 400-seat auditorium and commercial kitchen, a workout area and the campus includes outdoor courts for basketball and pickleball and half of a soccer field.

The campus sits north of the former state prison site, an area now under development as The Point, 600 acres of state-owned land that will be developed to create thousands of high-quality jobs with cutting-edge innovation and be environmentally friendly.

The area falls into Canyons School District’s boundaries to educate youth living in that area.

Canyons Career and Technical Education Director Janet Goble said the new innovation center isn’t just going to be a move from CTEC, but programs are being reviewed and input from industry is being sought.

“We’re wanting to learn what the workforce needs are so we can educate students for those jobs and align our curriculum to fit the training needed for the workplace now and the future,” she said, adding they, along with other administrators and board members visited six other technical centers nationwide to better understand their business partnerships and programming curriculum.

CTEC Principal Doug Hallenbeck said the 17 existing programs serve about 850 students and will be reviewed as well as those career and technical programs offered in Canyons five comprehensive high schools. Some may make the move to the new center while others may be adapted in the comprehensive high schools. They may expand existing offerings to reduce the wait list of students in programs such as cosmetology and barbering, welding, construction management, heavy-duty diesel mechanics, medical assistant and pharmacy technician.

District officials say career and technical educational programming could include robotics, engineering, business and medicine and others.

Haney said Canyons wants to target high skill, high demand, high wage jobs that the companies in Silicon Slopes need.

“For example, if a company in Silicon Slopes says, ‘We really need beginning coders, please send us beginning coders,’ then we’ll create a program that allows students to gain the certification in coding so they can immediately find work in Silicon Slopes doing coding,” he said. “This building will allow us to grow our popular programs because our existing space at CTEC is limited and we couldn’t expand those programs for more students to be accommodated.”

Once it’s decided what the curriculum will offer and how it will be offered, retrofitting the interior for specific program use may begin. Currently, some of the main building has walls while other sections are cubicles.

“I can see with the full kitchen, we may look at offering culinary arts here or their workout facility, I see it being used for a physical therapy program as it’s kind of already set up that way so that could work out great,” Hallenbeck said. “We’re needing to learn what our business and industry partners need. I’m excited about the auditorium. It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to the most because we’ve never really been able to pull groups of kids and industry partners together to do presentations. It will be awesome.”

Hallenbeck anticipates the new innovation center would replace the 42-year-old CTEC, which recently received a C- grade in its existing facility and was determined it would cost more to renovate than rebuild. The current CTEC campus covers 65,000 square feet in its five separate buildings on just seven acres.

It’s cost-cutting to purchase the 12-year-old eBay campus instead of building a new school, District officials say.

“The timing of the availability of the property coincides seamlessly with the region’s economic trends and the District’s long-range and strategic plans,” Canyons Board of Education President Amber Shill said. “Furthermore, our innovative plan to retrofit eBay’s former offices into a school instead of paying for new construction will save millions in taxpayer money.”

The negotiated deal translates to $230 per square foot for the eBay building. By comparison, the cost of new construction and design in Utah is about $500 per square foot, Wilcox said.

“Roughly, it’s about half the cost,” he said, adding the cost doesn’t include refurbishments and upgrades. “We think they’d be fairly minimal at this point as the building is fairly new and is built to house educational programs—that’s why we were so attracted to it.”

With the eBay campus being across the street from Draper’s FrontRunner station and close to the I-15 freeway, the site may become a new permanent home for Life Skills Academy, Canyons’ vocational program for adults with disabilities. There is discussion about providing an employee health and wellness clinic and employee childcare center at the location.

Canyons Superintendent Rick Robins says the proposed innovation center’s educational vision will link students with teachers and professional mentors to solve real-world problems using the tools of the industry. An advisory panel of industry experts also will provide guidance on the center’s partnerships with businesses.

“The vision is to elevate all the programs that are preparing students for the workforce pipeline,” he said. “We see this center as the ultimate experience for students and to lift our mission of ensuring our students are truly ready for the demands of college and careers when they walk across the graduation stage.”

eBay issued a statement saying the company plans to stay in the Salt Lake Valley. 

“eBay is happy to learn that the Canyons School District has approved the contract for the purchase of our Draper, Utah campus. As a global commerce leader, who continues to innovate for our community of buyers and sellers, we’re excited that the Draper site could become a hub of learning, designed to cultivate the tech leaders of the future. As to eBay’s intentions, we are committed to Salt Lake City and will continue to evaluate all available local options to ensure the best outcome for our people and eBay.”

With the $45-million lease revenue last spring, Canyons is in the process of updating one middle school and three high schools.

The $13-14 million updates to Eastmont Middle include installation of a new roof, which is almost complete, Wilcox said. Updating the elevator will be next and a new gym floor and additional classrooms are on the schedule.

At Jordan High, plans are to build a fieldhouse, a black box theatre and a softball concession stand. Wilcox said bids should go out in October. Meanwhile crews are working on restroom upgrades and extending parking to the former Johanna’s restaurant site on State Street. Work at the school should come in between $21 to $23 million, he said.

Hillcrest High will get an expansion of the track lanes, which means tearing out the bleachers on the visitor (east) side of the field. The football field also will receive new turf. The construction date has yet to be determined, but it should take about five months at an estimated $5 million, Wilcox said.

By the end of September, Corner Canyon High should have a secure vestibule entrance and new baseball field turf. The softball field turf is expected to be complete by mid-October and the new soccer field and a field house are expected to break ground in November. Wilcox said cost for the projects is $13 million.