Residents of Ocheyedan favor tearing down its baby-boom-era school building, the Worthington Daily Globe reports. The amount of money it would take to refurbish and remodel the building is more than the building would be assessed at afterwards, the article says.
An interesting part of the story, which applies to other towns facing the same issue, is that converting the school to a community center or town hall would leave the existing town hall in the lurch.
There are parts of an old routing of US 52 just east of its south junction with US 61/151 on the south side of Dubuque. One portion, Bellevue Heights Road, was bypassed in the 1930s and now has the E.B. Lyons Interpretive Center on it. The other is a little extension of that that wasn’t bypassed until the 1950s, and now looks out of place. It does not appear to be closed in the most recent aerial photo (below), but time and the Dubuque County supervisors* have caught up with it.
The bridge construction is a style common to the era, reinforced concrete with a little bit of shaping to the pillars lining each side. It still has a nice plaque in the middle. Now that the bridge has been closed, the question is if it will be torn down or left in place. Photos taken Sept. 16.
*The supervisors’ website requires enabling of pop-ups to view PDFs. Bad form.
On the last Saturday in September, everything in the school building in Corwith was up for sale, and that meant everything, from the lockers to the fencing around the football field.
Stories: Algona Upper Des Moines, Mason City Globe Gazette, Des Moines Register; photos: Des Moines Register.
The school building will be demolished in the near future.
On November 18, 2011, I got a discounted ticket for the Iowa State-Oklahoma State game, with no expectation of a close matchup. I was proven very, very wrong. It turned out to be the high point of the Paul Rhoads era. That ticket was in Section O of Jack Trice Stadium.
This year, ISU opened its long-muttered-about South End Zone expansion. As part of that, the entire east side of the stadium was re-numbered and re-lettered. These assignments had not changed since the stadium opened in 1975.
I do not think that should have happened, for continuity reasons just like my four-year-old (!) blog post has run into. The new addition does flow seamlessly around to connect the sides of the stadium — so well, in fact, that I hit the wrong stairwell a couple times. But the sections could have been numbered and lettered SA, SB, S1, S2, etc., and cleared up past and future confusion.
Now Section O is the south-east-side top section closest to the “End Zone Club”. Here’s what it looked like from a new camera when Iowa was pinned against its own end zone and C.J. Beathard was tackled to set up a third-and-21 from the 6. (The very next play was a 48-yard pass.)
If ISU loses to Kansas, or even while ISU is playing Kansas, let’s just say there may be plenty of room for people in that section to stretch their legs.
The Farragut school district could be forcibly dissolved because its locker rooms, showers, and weight room are not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
That is what the 200-student school in far southwestern Iowa is up against after the nine-vote failure of a PPEL the day after Labor Day. Granted, it’s a slight oversimplification because the district also got dinged for not having its nondiscrimination policies posted online, lacking a few required classes, and for teacher licensing/evaluation issues. (Oh, and the vo-ag space the district is using in Sidney after having to close its existing vo-ag space for ADA issues also has been judged non-ADA compliant.) But the crux of the matter is, Farragut is not engaged in a $1.2 million construction project right now, and that’s a problem. The school has since turned off the showers and locked up the weight room.
The issues individually may be small, but they’re stacked up with the school district’s negative unspent balance, which was a trigger for the potential loss of accreditation in the first place. And if Farragut overspends again, then don’t worry about the PPEL because you won’t have a school.
Anything that happens in (or to) Farragut will have direct effects on Hamburg, which is in whole-grade sharing with Farragut and already rejected consolidation once. Hamburg also got cited in the report for the lack of a nondiscrimination statement.
The Department of Education report from the September meeting is available as a PDF.
UPDATE: New vote scheduled for Feb. 3.
KCRG, the last locally owned TV station in Iowa, becomes part of Gray Communications tomorrow. The increased contentiousness of cable and satellite carriage rights, including one with DirectTV earlier this year, was a factor in the deal. The sale means I worked for one of the last(?) companies in the country with cross-media ownership for exactly one year.
The Cherokee Chronicle-Times ran a two-part series about Creighton economist Ernie Goss’ visit to Sheldon. Goss does the Mid-American Business Survey. Links: Part 1, Part 2
The first story dealt mainly with Northwest Iowa’s economic opportunities. The second was devoted to Goss’ “alarming concern for the dwindling rural population and the out-migration of young people to larger metropolitan areas such as Chicago and elsewhere.” That’s not hyperbole, as a bunch of facts on this website and elsewhere can attest. (If you need to be hit over the head with one: Two-thirds of Iowa counties lost population between 2000 and 2010, and another 10 had growth under 2 percent.)
It’s the throwaway line at the end of the Chronicle-Times’ story that I want to gently correct, though. “It kind a makes a person wonder when Iowa will see its first school system named after a highway as in the ‘Highway 3 Communities’ School District.'” Iowa already has a school system named after a highway: The Interstate 35 Community School District formed a few years after the interstate was built in Clarke and Decatur counties.
The Highway 3 Roadrunners? Hmm. It’s interesting enough it might work. Of course, Highway 3 goes all the way across the state, but on the other hand, it’s at least as specific as a river valley is. On the other other hand, I-35 has red, white, and blue for school colors, and the black and white of a state highway shield is a little blander. (Perhaps black and silver?)
Kyle Munson has written about the Hayward Round Barn near Dysart and the woman who restored it after years away from Iowa. The barn’s owner wrote more about it and its restoration last year, and that page has quite a few pictures.
The barn is open today as part of the Iowa Barn Foundation’s All-State Barn Tour. It’s featured at the top of the barn tour webpage.
(Correction to the column: The Geneseo school building has not been demolished. It’s still there.)
The Iowa DOT plans to close IA 38 through Stanwood in two phases for construction. The official detour (PDF) runs 15 miles longer than 38 itself between Stanwood and Monticello and goes through Mount Vernon.
The local enterprising driver (but not semi drivers) may look at this and see an obvious shortcut: Go through Mechanicsville and Morley on X40 and either go east to Olin or pick up US 151 by Anamosa.
Doctor, doctor, give me the news, I’ve got a bad case of loving you…
No banter here other than recognizing the use of Q in the middle position.
