July 5, 2013: Alphabetically, Ankeny and Arcadia are only separated by two towns. The demographic gulf between them, though, couldn’t be wider. Ar-We-Va closed its elementary schools in Arcadia and Vail in 2012 in favor of an addition at Westside.
Iowa politics blogger John Deeth did a “District of Day” series periodically between the 2011 redistricting and the 2012 election, where he evaluated the geography, political leanings, candidates, and horse-race status of each state House and Senate district. Because Ankeny had grown too large to be wholly contained in one House district, he dubbed House 37 “This is where your district went,” in reference to all the redone rural districts that paired up legislators because of declining population.
Ankeny Centennial High School opens today. It is the first new high school to open in Iowa since Davenport North in 1985-86. (Or, to be technical, the first that did not replace an already existing high school building.) West Des Moines should have split Valley 15 years ago, but didn’t, and is now building an 1100-seat auditorium, but that’s a subject for another time.
What do Deeth’s series and Centennial have in common? Much like Ankeny’s new House district came at the expense of rural Iowa, so too does Ankeny’s new high school. Iowa’s student population has been declining for years, and just as in state or national legislative allocation, that puts schools in a zero-sum game.
Today, there are precisely 90 fewer school districts than in 1985, a 20% decrease, running a reorganization gamut from AGWSR to West Fork. More than that, though, there are far fewer school buildings. Even among districts that have remained unchanged over the past three decades, small towns within those districts have lost what in many cases was the town’s biggest employer.
Here, then, is a list of those towns that I know have lost their only school building since 2000:
Arcadia, Callender, Chelsea, Crystal Lake, Cumberland, Denmark, Dumont, Elk Run Heights, Farrar, Goldfield, Hawkeye, Lineville, Lohrville, Lost Nation, Lytton, Menlo, Millersburg, Milton, Minburn, Montour, Moorhead, New Market, New Virginia, Onslow, Ridgeway, Ringsted, Rolfe, Rowley, Russell, Sabula, St. Charles, Shelby, Thornton, Titonka, Vail, Wesley, Woden.
For all the fancy, shiny things suburban districts have gained in the past decade, what’s happening elsewhere should not be overlooked.