Grinnell-Newburg is the most lopsided school district name in terms of population disparity: one near 10,000, and the other unincorporated. Newburg, just east of the intersection of F17 and T38 in Jasper County, is typically ignored in the sports team names.
Newburg has been a part of the district since 1958, and it had a school. However, nailing down the year the building was shut down has been hard. The gymnasium was destroyed in a fire in July 1978. Voters did not approve a sale of the building, which dates to 1925, until September 1982. The school was the subject of a Des Moines Register article in July 1992, when the new owners were restoring the building. Or I should say were attempting to restore, because it … isn’t.
A concrete answer on the closure comes from an unattributed history of the Grinnell-Newburg district that was compiled around the turn of the century and resurfaced while the school district was seeking a bond issue two separate times in 2018 (it failed both times).
This history also reveals that the oldest school currently in use in Grinnell is Davis Elementary, from 1917, and it was completely renovated in 1998. A time capsule was found in the cornerstone in 2017. That 2018 bond issue would have replaced Davis and two other elementaries at one combined site.
I came across most of this information through reading an article originally at Grinnell College’s student newspaper and then reprinted at the Iowa Capital Dispatch about Grinnell-Newburg’s struggles with finances and morale.