Estherville-Lincoln Central, like many other small- to medium-sized school districts in Iowa, is consolidating all of its operations on one campus. In this case, there are separate buildings in one large area, and the newest addition will take the last students out of the original Estherville high school/elementary buildings on the west side of the city.
The district is one of a handful left in the state that still carry a township name or derivative of a township name.* In Emmet County, Dolliver is in Lincoln Township and Gruver is in Center Township, and those two combined to form Lincoln Central. In 1993, according to this short article in EdWeek magazine, Lincoln Central “tuitioned out” all its students to Estherville in a one-way sharing deal. That meant the school in Gruver closed and Lincoln Central existed only on paper from mid-1993 to mid-1997. To use the phrase I coined last May, it was a zombie district, technically not dead but not truly alive.