The scale is very different compared with what would happen in Iowa, but a Chicago NPR station found out that a couple old schools there are serving as equipment and textbook repositories for material from 43 buildings the city closed. Everything is sorted, cataloged, categorized, and stored for redistribution or disposal.
In the week since the story was posted, the cost to empty the buildings has risen to triple its initial estimate. (At least the city is doing it right, and isn’t leaving stuff to rot. The buildings themselves, we’ll have to see.)
A note from the bottom of the story: Chicago stopped giving the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in 2005.