The Harmony Rockets are being taken off the launch pad.
The school district in eastern Van Buren County, whose high school is not in the town of Farmington but at the intersection of J40 and W46 along the Henry County line, will send grades 7-12 to Van Buren in Keosauqua in 2016. According to the Keokuk Daily Gate City, Harmony Elementary in Bonaparte will close and those students will go to the high school building.
Van Buren County will become the eighth county in Iowa to have only one high school in its borders. That number has doubled in the past decade, and more counties only have two high schools. The two districts together, about 520 square miles, will be the third-largest one-high-school area in Iowa, bigger than the Davis County district to its west.
That means this is the last season for Harmony sports. In football, after sharing two years with Central Lee, Harmony revived its own 8-player team last year, only to be outscored 568-104 in a winless season. The Rockets have already been routed once this season.
I believe there will only be two three Iowa high schools left with a nickname of Rockets: Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont, Paton-Churdan (which shares football with Greene County but has other sports itself), and Remsen-Union (which won’t be for long). In a roundabout way, this could be considered a sign of the fading of the Space Age.
Just over the border, in Missouri, the Gorin elementary district ceased to exist July 1, sending all its students to the county seat of Memphis.
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Omitted Remsen-Union.