I thought the decision to turn the curve for IA 150 west of Urbana (the end of old IA 363) into an intersection was a done deal, but I guess I was wrong. There’s going to be a meeting Sept. 26 in Urbana with two options for construction next year. One is the regular intersection with through traffic going east-west (since it’s a cutoff from Vinton to I-380), but the other is … the devil’s circle.
Yuck. Please, please do not put a roundabout there.
The Big Ten released its 2020 and 2021 conference football schedules last week, and a significant pattern emerged that takes the edge off for Iowa.
A quick check of Iowa’s opponents reveals that the 2019-20-21 crossovers are the exact home/away flip side of the 2016-17-18 crossovers. Despite the Big Ten claiming in the 2016-17 and 2018-19 schedules that the only protected division crossover game is Indiana-Purdue, Penn State is on Iowa’s schedule every year. A Wisconsin fan on Reddit noticed the non-protected “parity” crossovers a while ago, before the most recent release.
This means the Hawkeyes play the rest of the teams in the Big Ten East once every three years — and never play Michigan and Ohio State in the same season. This is a big change from when both were on the schedule every year 2003 to 2006 and then 2009-10-13. As it is, the 2013 season will be the last time Michigan and Ohio State are on Iowa’s schedule in the same year until at least 2022.
Iowa’s last win in Columbus was 1991 (an emotional game after the Gang Lu shooting); its next game there is in 2020. That will be Iowa’s eighth appearance in the Horseshoe in the 30 years following the end of the Soviet Union. In the same time frame, Indiana will have played in Columbus 13 times.
There is one upside to Chairman Jim’s Greater Rutgers Co-Prosperity Sphere: Nebraska’s “parity crossover” is Ohio State. This is what you wanted, Husker fans. This is what you wanted.
March 25, 2010: I-35 at US 30, with one of the few pull-through signs in Iowa. Exit 111A is closed starting today.
The exit from from northbound I-35 to eastbound US 30 closed earlier today for a month and a half of construction, the Iowa DOT said in a news release. The closure is necessary to build a new ramp farther out to accommodate a flyover from NB 35 to WB 30.
This affects traffic to Nevada, not Ames, so it’s not as bad as it could be during football season (but then, there’s only one game in Ames for the next month, the Texas game).
The eighth-ranked North Tama volleyball team goes to Baxter tomorrow night for the first meetup of the Redhawks and the Bolts. This, of course, is because Baxter broke off its athletics relationship with Collins-Maxwell. Both schools then joined the Iowa Star Conference.
One week after that, the NT volleyball team hosts the CAL Cadets. This is CAL’s last year as a high school. Every Iowa Star school that plays both this year will have a combination of opponents that’s never been seen before and will never be seen again.
To follow up with the directions booklet I’ve maintained to the schools North Tama travels to, I’ve made a supplement page with both Baxter and Collins-Maxwell. Football, meanwhile, has North Tama in the same district with Colfax-Mingo, creating a lovely little spot of confusion.
Sept. 30, 2013: InfoCision Stadium in Akron, Ohio.
Iowa State football’s occasional tour of the Mid-American Conference (NOT as an audition for membership, God willing) adds a never-before-visited location: Akron, Ohio. This is the tenth current MAC school ISU will play against, and the nice thing is it’s not Ohio or Kent State again. If ISU is going to do home-and-homes like this, it’s good to go to other places.
ISU’s last appearance in the Buckeye State (4-2 all time) ended in an overtime loss through a missed field goal at Toledo in 2015. ISU and Toledo both beat two power-conference teams that year — Toledo beat ISU and Arkansas, ISU beat Kansas and Texas. It was the beginning of the end for Paul Rhoads.
At the end of that season, in at least the second case of “if you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em” among power-conference teams this decade (Jerry Kill), ISU hired Toledo coach Matt Campbell.
Saturday’s game is also the first for ISU football on CBS Sports Network.
North Tama senior Cory Kennedy did basic training at Fort Sill in the summer to become a member of the National Guard. The Des Moines Register has a profile on him.
North Tama plays at Hudson tonight, the back end of a 1-2 punch of district favorites after getting shut out at Gladbrook last week.
Over the past school year, the Mid-Prairie School District (Kalona, Wellman, and West Chester) was trying to figure out what to do with unbalanced class sizes in geography-based elementary attendance centers.
In April, the school board decided to divide by grades instead of geography. According to KCII Radio, Kalona will be kindergarten, first, and second grade; Wellman will be kindergarten, third, and fourth grade; fifth-graders will go to the middle school in Kalona (5-8); and the elementary buildings have been renamed.
Left out of the reconfiguration was Washington Township school, which is in southwest Johnson County on Angle Road at County Road F67. This is a rare 1960s-era rural school, although it’s not totally so; on the state map, it’s very near Joetown, which is the location of Iowa Mennonite School. Washington Township will be used for Mid-Prairie’s “Home School Assistance Program” but won’t have students anymore.
Washington Township might have been the last active school built for a township. It’s not the last one named for a township, because the district right next door is named for Highland Township in Washington County when Ainsworth and Riverside consolidated in 1963 and built a school between the towns in 1965. (Plus, the Dysart-Geneseo name lives on in the elementary in Dysart.) See also this 2016 blog post that lists other names that still include a township component. The official name for Cedar Rapids Prairie is the College Community School District, after College Township, which used to be about a regular square running up to 29th Avenue Southwest but now only officially includes parts not absorbed into the city of Cedar Rapids.
(Half-hat tip: This Gazette article about increased enrollment in urban areas, which has a map at the bottom of “public schools opened and closed in 2017-18”. This is from state data, but the labels can be misleading. For example, Laurens-Marathon and Charter Oak-Ute are marked because they lost their high schools, but they still have elementary grades. And it goes by high school location, so the marker over Fairfield is for Libertyville Elementary.)
UPDATE 9/24: Link to blog post with other names, and some information about C.R. Prairie.
Today will be the last time that school board elections and school-related votes will take place in September. In spring the Iowa Legislature approved combining city and school elections into November of odd-numbered years (bill text here) along with a tweaking of acceptable other dates throughout the year for special elections. This is probably ill-advised because of the jurisdictional issues — school and city ballots will have to be separate or else multiple versions will be necessary — but that’s what’s going to happen.
Much of the attention this cycle is on the Iowa City bond issue, the largest by dollar amount in Iowa history. The opening of Liberty High is only a part of what the Iowa City school district is dealing with, because of the growth and population shifts. The bond issue would also put air conditioning in all the schools. There is a semi-organized movement against it, and there’s at least some fear there’s a stealth plan to close the school in Hills.
But of equal or maybe greater importance, in terms of the message it carries and the lasting impact, is the decision on whether to dissolve the Gladbrook-Reinbeck school district. It has finally reached a vote after a false start, because if at first you don’t secede, try, try again.
Stories: KCRG (which I am not embedding because it autoplays), KWWL, Grundy Register, Marshalltown Times-Republican. As I have gone over before, having a vote at all is a catastrophically bad idea, yet also fits perfectly with the way of things in 2017. GR could really use a few crumbs of the umpteen million dollars Apple is going to drop on Waukee, whose school district added GR’s entire enrollment last year.
In the GR election, a “No” is to keep the district as it is, and thus keep a school in Reinbeck; a “Yes” is to dissolve Gladbrook-Reinbeck.
PRE-POST UPDATE: The pro-dissolution side made a TV commercial. Former GR school board member Michael Bearden — who according to Radio Iowa is “spearheading the movement” speaks: “The consolidation of the Gladbrook-Reinbeck school was a great partnership. That partnership ended with the closing of the Gladbrook campus. … Voting YES to dissolve the GR district is a win-win situation for all students.”
That’s not just burning bridges; that’s napalming them.
RESULTS UPDATE: Resolution fails by 69%-31% margin.
When I saw the copies at the Alumni Center, I thought what was there was either an insert or a mistake. But then I looked closer.
An eight-page paper the same physical size as a Farm Bureau Spokesman, with four news articles (two of which were mostly graphics), one sports article, an editorial and an opinion column, carried the masthead of the Iowa State Daily. The issue the day before the UNI game was 12 pages.
“So, over the summer, our staff worked to vastly redesign our paper to better fit the feedback we’ve received from our readers during the last few years,” the Daily’s editor in chief wrote Aug. 20, on a website that has had a definite mobile-first mindset for years. “The new design includes three main changes: size, style and type of content.”
Size: Smaller. Style: Lots of white space. Type of content: Well, there is some, with big graphics.
The Iowa State Daily has whacked the print product down to a shell of its former self. This carries some emotional heft for me, because it is there that I started a professional journalism career 16 years ago today. (Yes, that day.) To see a newspaper from the first week of classes, when I would have scrambled for wire articles to fill the extra-large ad-filled sections, reduced to a pamphlet was very sobering.
Or, to put it another way, as someone whose income depends on the existence of a physical medium: eep.
Kirk Ferentz, who became the longest consecutively tenured head coach in college football this season, has yet to have a winning record against what is now the fourth-worst power-conference team in history.
