Following a reader’s letter, I dug in on the history of the Clearfield school for the 1982-92 school years. It got so complicated I had to make a spreadsheet. The Clearfield district, on the Taylor/Ringgold county line, dissolved in 2014.
- I was a year off on Clearfield’s last year for a high school; it was 1983-84 (Mount Ayr Record-News, 5/17/84). In that year, Clearfield and Diagonal had a junior high sharing arrangement, with seventh grade in Diagonal and eighth grade in Clearfield (MARN, 4/21/83).
- For 1984-85, grades 5-9 were in Diagonal and 9-12 in Clearfield except for physics, chemistry, and shop classes in Diagonal (MARN, 2/16/84). That was reversed for 1985-86, with 6-9 in Clearfield and 10-12 in Diagonal (MARN, 4/11/85).
- Clearfield switched to sending all students in 9-12 to Lenox for one year, 1986-87 (MARN, 12/26/85). The high school situation remained unsettled and ended up in a “first of its kind” program that allowed students to go to Diagonal, Mt. Ayr, or Lenox (MARN, 6/25/87). This arrangement appears to have remained in place despite various feints toward other combinations (Lenox Time Table, 7/1/87; LTT, 10/9/94; LTT, 4/23/97).
- Probably not helping: A superintendent quitting after one year — and announcing it on July 30 (MARN, 8/7/86).
- Diagonal stopped sending grades 6-8 to Clearfield in 1991, resulting in Clearfield extending its three-way-split open enrollment to grades 7-12 (MARN, 1/24/91).
- At one point, a Clearfield-Lenox deal died for, among many other things, “political and social problems between the two school districts” (Clearfield Chronicle, 11/2/94).
- This does make the crazy-quilt carve-up of Clearfield in 2014 a little more understandable. The extension of the Diagonal district into the town of Clearfield itself by using 170th Street came late in the process (Diagonal Progress, 7/25/13).