A crude metric for your place in the school ecosystem is as follows: If your district has been losing about 10 students every year for a decade, is it a rounding error, something to monitor carefully and attempt to remedy, or a cause for deep concern if not outright panic?
For too many districts in Iowa, it’s door number three. Plainfield will lose its school at the end of the month, reports the New Hampton Tribune/Nashua Reporter. Grades 4-6 will go to the elementary or junior high/high school buildings that are next to each other in Nashua.
Certified enrollment. Note Y-axis starts at 500.
Since 2000, Nashua-Plainfield’s plunge has been uncannily similar to Gladbrook-Reinbeck’s. They each had a certified enrollment around 850 in 2000, and today sit at 613 and 585, respectively. And we know what happened in Gladbrook.
The murmurs about Plainfield began in March and once you get to that stage it’s nearly impossible to get a reversal in course. It’s only happened once that I’m aware of, in Crescent.
I realize that the opening is something of a trick question because any school that loses 10 students loses about $66,640, which will cover a teacher’s salary. But only one-fifth of school boards in Iowa aren’t metaphorically up at night worrying about this to some extent.