The Highland school district is proposing to close two elementary buildings that haven’t been around all that long.
Highland, a name that falls firmly in the “tells you nothing about its location” category, is Ainsworth and Riverside in Washington County. The junior high/high school is not in either town but along old US 218 halfway between the two. The district is going to have a bond referendum this fall about building a new elementary near that complex, and both towns would lose their schools.
The oldest part of the building in Ainsworth besides the gym is only 42 years old (in Iowa, that qualifies as only) — and has an addition from 1999. Meanwhile, Riverside Elementary was built in 1995!
The district cites multiple categories of “efficiency” — staff, transportation, energy — as reasons for construction, but it’s up to the district’s voters to decide if that merits emptying out two places that, at least partly, just date back to the Clinton era.