Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The easternmost school building in Iowa is on a collision course with the wrecking ball. The Easton Valley school district earlier this month in May approved demolition of the school in Sabula, reports the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald.

After demolition in Sabula, the easternmost existing school building in Iowa will be in Clinton. It’s the old Lyons High School on Main Avenue (Lincoln Highway/Old US 30A before the present Lyons-Fulton Bridge was built), which has been abandoned for decades.

But what about active buildings? Time to go exploring, and by exploring I mean spend an hour on Google Maps and use up my entire allotment of Clinton Herald articles…

Both Buell Elementary and Horace Mann Elementary on Clinton’s north side closed in 2007. The St. Irenaeus parochial school (if the school part is still there) is to the east of the latter two but isn’t active either.

Until six months ago, Lyons Middle School was the easternmost active one, but it closed over Thanksgiving break when Clinton merged its two middle schools into one new building. After that we move south into the main part of Clinton, but the Kirkwood building now hosts the Head Start program.

The easternmost active school building in Iowa overall is Trinity Elementary, on US 67 near the Clinton County Courthouse, and Prince of Peace High School is the second-easternmost. (SEE UPDATE.) The latter (Prince of Peace) is on Fourth Street two blocks north of the 1888 Roosevelt school, which was used as the Clinton school district’s administration building for a few years.

The easternmost active public school building in Iowa is Eagle Heights Elementary, back on the north side of Clinton, which opened in 2007 as the replacement for the two schools mentioned three paragraphs ago.

(TL;DR Clinton has lots of old school buildings as the result of an aggressive construction campaign and declining enrollment.)

(EDIT: Fixed date element.)

UPDATE 9/18/17: A reader told me Trinity is no longer open. That makes Clinton Prince of Peace the easternmost active school building in Iowa. It’s also the easternmost active private school and K-12 site in Iowa. Clinton’s Eagle Heights Elementary remains the easternmost active public school building in Iowa.

The Corwith-Wesley school district, chronicled for the past year in The Des Moines Register, dismissed classes for the last time at the time of this post. A baker’s dozen of students graduated from Corwith-Wesley-LuVerne May 17. The Mason City Globe-Gazette also had a feature on the graduates.

CWL was already sharing sports with Algona, so there will be no baseball/softball teams carrying the flag into July. One of the world’s homeliest school websites, recently augmented with a trophy spreadsheet (XLS) that reads like an estate auction (which is exactly what happened), will go dark in midsummer.

Corwith-Wesley is the state’s fourth district to dissolve in the past 11 years. Elementary students will go to Lu Verne (as they have been), but grades 7-12 all go to Algona.

Next school year, the oldest active sharing agreement (1986) is a tie between Delwood and Stratford, which send all 7-12 students to Maquoketa and Webster City respectively. The oldest active two-way whole-grade sharing agreement moves, believe it or not, all the way to 2004, when Alden gave up its high school and now receives sixth-graders (and only sixth-graders) from Iowa Falls.

January 27, 2011: Prescott school building.

Prescott Elementary in southwest Iowa dismisses its last students today, after a century of educating students in a stately brick building on the north side of town. Next school year, everyone will be “tuitioned in” to Creston. The districts cannot consolidate this calendar year because the election was held this calendar year. (This Creston News-Advertiser article is a year off.)

This means Prescott will be a zombie district in 2015-16. It exists, yet for all intents and purposes it is dead. It will educate no students. Titonka was a zombie district in 2013-14 when it sent all students to Algona rather than keep kindergarten through fourth grade.

(If no one has used the phrase “zombie district” before, I am claiming coinage.)

The Facebook post from the Prescott school (it’s from the superintendent, so I’ll count it as a valid source), emphasizes that Creston’s full name is Creston Community School District. This use of the word “Community” is intended to encompass a greater area (i.e. be a bone thrown to the towns losing out). The most prominent example beyond the city level is Benton Community (instead of Benton County or South Benton), a multiple-district merger that went all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court in the 1960s.