Like all rural school districts in Iowa, Gladbrook-Reinbeck is experiencing a long-term decline in enrollment. To get a better grasp of what’s going on overall, and the trends, the district hired a consultant.
The resulting report (PDF), on the macro level, doesn’t really find anything earth-shattering. What’s more interesting is how data-crunching strategies and boilerplate text more geared toward population-dense areas are applied to a rural, homogeneous school district. (Rural Tama County has a lot of pre-WWII homes.)
Then there’s this sentence, which makes you wonder if anything in the report can be understood at all:
The Gladbrook-Reinbeck Community School District is located in within Blackhawk, Grundy, Marshall, and Tama Counties is Southeast of Cedar Falls.
Now my brain hurts.