June 24, 2017: The school in Odebolt was a sticking point in previously failed reorganization votes. Residents were afraid the town would lose its school.
The Odebolt-Arthur and Battle Creek-Ida Grove school districts will consolidate in 2018, the Sioux City Journal reports. This was the third attempt at the vote. The second one, which failed last year, drove enough hard feelings the Des Moines Register wrote about it. The high school will be in Ida Grove, which tore down its 1923 school that was right by the courthouse four years ago. (Until 10 days ago my last stop in Ida Grove was a decade ago, when I wasn’t thinking about taking pictures of all the old schools, so it’s lost on my list.)
The combined district will be over 350 square miles — a number that a decade ago would have been semi-notable but now doesn’t even make the top 20 for one-high-school areas — and run along IA 175 from the Woodbury/Ida county line to the new IA 471.