Jun 17

North Winneshiek wants to keep plugging along as K-6 district

Posted on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

From Decorah Newspapers:

The North Winneshiek School Board approved a resolution Monday afternoon that will make its school a preschool through sixth grade facility from July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2020.

That’s the news part of the story, but not the most interesting. That comes in this casual passage: North Winneshiek Superintendent/Principal Tim Dugger said the upcoming changes would also be discussed with members of the Mabel-Canton School Board.

Mabel-Canton, Minnesota. Is North Winneshiek considering a cross-state school format, either by open enrollment or whole-grade sharing? Is that even possible? (Ed: There must be something allowed open-enrollment-wise, given this case of parents from Lakota sending their child to Blue Earth.)

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Jun 16

Football playoffs back to 16 per class

Posted on Tuesday, June 16, 2015, at 10:24 AM by Jeff

Well, knock me over with a feather. The IHSAA is going back to 16 teams per class in the football postseason starting in 2016. There won’t be 2-7 teams in the playoffs anymore, and now the points start to matter again for 7-2 teams. There does not appear to be any plan to change the “as-you-go” bracketing, however.

It’s being framed as a player issue, to prevent playing four games in 15 days (F-W-M-F), but I believe the new hard start date for school was also a factor. I wholeheartedly support this reversal from a situation where more than half of teams qualified for the postseason.

If you want to see how things shook out last year, when 9-0 South Winneshiek squashing 3-6 Lake Mills was one of the matchups involving a team with a losing record, the all-classes-all-brackets PDF is linked in the sidebar and individual images are on this December blog post that also analyzed the brackets. If I do that again, I will try to make sure I capture the home/away splits.

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Jun 15

Luther will NOT be disincorporated

Posted on Monday, June 15, 2015, at 10:06 AM by Jeff

The state City Development Board last week rejected the town of Luther’s petition to disincorporate. Right now, the meeting minutes don’t appear to be online, but there was a post about it on the town’s Facebook page with a copy of a letter from one of the board members saying she thought the town could still make a go of it.

This is the second disincorporation petition to be rejected recently; Searsboro tried to do it in 2011. (NOTE: The Wikipedia entry for Searsboro is wrong. It is still an incorporated community, and on the complete list from the Secretary of State’s office.)

On a semi-related note, when the Iowa Department of Economic Development became the Iowa Economic Development Authority in late 2011, it dropped the eight-year slogan “Iowa Life Changing” and now the Web domain with that name has been taken over by something plugging e-cigarettes. The state really should have held on to that, because who knows how many web pages are out there with links to that domain, all of which are being redirected to something the state of Iowa doesn’t want to be associated with in the least.

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Jun 13

Summer 2014 photos added

Posted on Saturday, June 13, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Here’s an update notice from January and thereafter that I never got around to posting:

I have added at least one picture, and in most cases multiple pictures, to many highways in western Iowa from some trips last summer. New pictures can be found with IA 4, 45, 86, 110, 124, 148, 196, 328, 397, and 941. Business 20 pages for both Sioux City and Fort Dodge got new photos. Elsewhere, some photos were added to IA 281 and 297, and I updated the IA 926 page to include its decommissioning.

Many of photos to and from the Sioux City area came when I met US 20 advocate Bryan Farr. For now, I have kept single pages for routes, showing the all-new interchange format for US 77’s north end and significant sign replacements at the I-29/I-129 interchange interspersed with old photos.

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Jun 12

World-Herald looks back at Conferencepocalypse

Posted on Friday, June 12, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Five years ago this week, Benedict Herbie backstabbed a century of tradition in a fit of pique the University of Nebraska announced its intention to join the Big Ten Conference, setting into motion an existential crisis that reverberates throughout college athletics.

The Omaha World-Herald now looks back at the longest days in Big 12 history — at least, until it happened all over again a year later — mostly through its articles and columns written at the time.

There’s at least one “30 for 30” in all of this. If I could make one, I’d frame it much like “June 17, 1994” using news footage, interspersed with newspaper and website highlights.* (I might also have some narration from the observation point of Iowa State, bracketed with the 2009 eight-turnover special and the 2010 last-game-ever loss in overtime.)

Because some Web content management systems eliminate numbers and cut off the number of words in a title, the hyperlink for the OWH story reads: A look back at how Nebraska bucked the Big Texas. That, really, is the most honest description there is.

*A question: If you want to show a historical newspaper article, you go to the paper itself, or the microfilm, and see exactly how it was presented at the time. If you need to show something from a website, and its host has since undergone a massive redesign that either removes the piece entirely or presents it in a way that looks substantially different from the day it happened, how do you go about doing that?

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Jun 11

Beautiful land. All 8,883 miles of it.

Posted on Thursday, June 11, 2015, at 10:04 AM by Jeff


June 8, 2015, 6:49 PM: The end of a journey years in the making.

Between March 20, 2003, and June 8, 2015, I traveled every mile of every current state, US, and interstate highway in Iowa at least once. (Some of those I traveled many, many more times.) My final segments were the IA 92 reroute onto the Muscatine bypass and IA 1 from Mount Vernon to its north end. Below is a small distillation of those thousands of miles, but it’s not just about the signs. It’s also about the towns, the scenery, the people, and the history those highways connect.

The trip has been long, and it has been rewarding. It’s also not really over, because the Iowa highway system continues to change. (Jason Hancock accomplished this same task a year and two weeks ago.)

You ask what land I love the best? Iowa, ’tis Iowa.

(number referenced in headline from here)

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Jun 10

Five-year highway plan approved; US 20 completion scheduled

Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2015, at 10:05 AM by Jeff

Iowa highway construction took a record step Tuesday when the transportation commission approved a $3.2 billion five-year plan. If federal funding stays on track, this five-year plan includes the complete expansion of US 20 to four lanes in Iowa (except the Julien Dubuque Bridge).

There don’t appear to be any major changes from the draft plan, which was amended before release to include projects made possible by the increase in the state’s gas tax. Dubuque’s Southwest Arterial and taking US 61/IA 92 to four lanes down to Grandview would be the new-ish things (that is to say, not continuations of things that have been going on a while).

On the county level, Fremont County will be doing a major construction project on old IA 184, now J18, probably the first big work on that since decommissioning.

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Jun 09

Remsen-Union, Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn sharing back on

Posted on Tuesday, June 9, 2015, at 10:14 AM by Jeff

The Remsen-Union and Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn school districts were in talks for whole-grade sharing, but ended them over disagreement on which town would get the high school. Now, after a short period of finding out the alternatives aren’t very good, the districts came to an agreement for 2016, report Radio Iowa, the Sioux City Journal and KTIV.

Marcus, despite having the smaller population, won the debate and will serve grades 9-12. Remsen, with grades 5-8, will become the one of the ten largest non-suburbs in Iowa without a high school. (It’s difficult to rank exactly because the list has towns that aren’t quite suburbs but are near metro areas, and Toledo is a special case because South Tama High School is on its doorstep.) Each district will have K-4 sections (remember, MMC just closed Cleghorn).

The combined area of the two districts will result in the 12th single-high-school area in Iowa larger than 400 square miles, and the ninth that size created just since 2009, when Pocahontas Area and Pomeroy-Palmer began sharing.

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Jun 08

IA 58 will go under Viking Road

Posted on Monday, June 8, 2015, at 10:22 AM by Jeff


July 2, 2014: This Scheels store in the southeast quadrant of the IA 58/Viking Road intersection (the last quadrant developed) opened March 2, 2013. It replaced stores at both College Square and Crossroads malls and is one reason there is so much traffic at this intersection. (Also the Target next door, and the Wal-Mart and Farm & Fleet across the street.)

The newest plans for one of Iowa’s most dangerous urban intersections, revealed at the end of last month (Courier, KWWL), do something that is very rare in Iowa. An interchange will be constructed with modifications to the existing major road instead of having a bridge built for the cross-road.

There is very little space to maneuver for modifying IA 58 at Viking Road, as the diagrams show. Flipping the SPUI design to put Viking on top may result in less disruption for the businesses all around, but it will be interesting to see how IA 58 goes down into the ground while maintaining traffic.

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Jun 07

A horse to plague copy editors for all time

Posted on Sunday, June 7, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

I don’t think “Horse with misspelled name wins Triple Crown” was on the list of things to worry about giving copy editors and grammar Nazis such as myself fits, along with spell-check programs. But now “American Pharoah” is part of history, and everyone has to live with the consequences, including English teachers in Kentucky. (It could get worse if horse owners decide that misspelled names are key to great things.)

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