I finally made good on the first part of a personal New Year’s resolution: I went through my entire timeline of school district and building changes and made year notations on a list of Iowa towns for closed buildings. (The spreadsheet is the one that I use to track my visits to each town.) That resulted in some cleanup of double-counted locations and a few additions.
- Research into the Mid-Prairie schools’ history for a blog post led me to a KCII story about the West Chester building, which mentioned it closed in 1981. I pushed the timeline a year back to get that…
- …which, in turn, resulted in adding the closure of the Albion school building that year, plus two documented consolidations.
- Aerial photos show the demolition of the entire Menlo school complex. Everything but the core original building was gone by the time of the summer 2010 aerial photos, and the rest was gone in the next year.
- The original school complex in Guttenberg, except for the gym, has been torn down as well.