October 3, 2016: The welcome sign for Royal, pop. 446, former end of IA 240 and soon-to-be-former football field for Clay Central-Everly.
For the tenth time this decade, an Iowa district is closing its high school without getting any students in return.
The Clay Central-Everly school board on March 11 voted to “tuition out” students in grades 7 through 12. (Stories: KIWA, Spencer Daily Reporter, KTIV.) As mentioned here earlier, the district has been considering its options. The more recent stories show a split among the district’s residents about which school to join with. That means that there won’t be any formal whole-grade sharing deal, at least for 2019-20. (The only quasi-similar situation right now is Hamburg, which is “tuitioning out” its students to Sidney but doesn’t have a whole-grade-sharing agreement.) The survey also showed that only about three-fifths of students would be coming back.
The four-way preference split reflects a problem shrinking districts are going to be having more often: In many cases, going with one neighbor will not be a good fit for at least some of the geographical area. CCE is an L-shaped district that wraps around Spencer (a district that expanded southeastward when it got the north half of South Clay). There are parts of CCE that are closer to high schools in Hartley and Sioux Rapids.
The board has not decided which town (Everly or Royal) will lose its school building, though. Just because elementary grades are being retained does not mean the current setup will remain. This happened in the Harmony district, where Bonaparte Elementary was closed and students moved to the isolated building on County Road J40.
The decision means that last fall’s CCE homecoming court will be the last for the Mavericks. It also means the end of a sports lineage that included the 1960s Everly Cattlefeeders girls’ basketball teams, winners in 1966 and runners-up in 1968 against Union-Whitten.
Clay Central-Everly’s enrollment is 312. Clear Creek Amana, CCE’s almost-neighbor alphabetically but polar opposite in every other way, added 377 students in two years.
(h/t two readers reassuring me I’m not screaming into the void)