Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The Northeast Hamilton school district has been the westernmost in my school directions booklet* since it and North Tama were put into the same football district in 2002-03. Next time, I’m going to have to remove it.

In May, Northeast Hamilton High School will graduate its last class. All junior high and high school students will then go to Webster City. Webster City is already taking students in those grade levels from Stratford, to the southwest, leaving South Hamilton in Jewell as the only other high school in the county.

Northeast Hamilton has lost one-third of its enrollment since 2000, barely breaking 200 last year. Four of the eight districts in 2002’s Class A District 2 will not have high schools in 2015. Stratford has been sending grades 7-12 to Webster City since 1987 (via Dayton Review archives).

The Webster City-Stratford-NEH high school (which will remain named Webster City) in 2015 will be the tenth place in Iowa where one high school serves an area of more than 400 square miles. There were only three such districts as recently as 2008. The complete rundown, based on the data I have available:

• Mount Ayr, which absorbed somewhere around 40% of Clearfield (I need assistance on the breakdown as four districts were affected in Clearfield’s dissolution; please e-mail me if you know specifics!)
• Pocahontas Area plus now-defunct Pomeroy-Palmer barely clears this threshold
• Corning and Villisca, now together as Southwest Valley in Corning
• South Central Calhoun in Lake City (Rockwell City-Lytton and Southern Cal)
• Webster City, which as a school district proper is about 200 square miles but with Stratford and NEH’s students will be the sole high school for a 422-square-mile area
• Allamakee, Howard-Winneshiek, and Davis County, the three pre-existing large districts
• the new Southeast Valley, Prairie Valley plus Southeast Webster-Grand, one high school in Gowrie for 500 (499.2) square miles of rural Iowa.
• Finally, also starting in 2015, Algona, which just absorbed the Titonka district and then will get nearly everyone currently in Lu Verne and Corwith-Wesley for grades 7-12, tops out at 549.4 square miles. That area as a whole is just under the size of Western Dubuque, the state’s largest school district by area (555.5), but which has two high schools (Western Dubuque HS in Epworth, and also Cascade HS).

Thanks to Austin Draude for the heads-up on the NEH story.

*Yes, I know. I’m working on updating this. Or trying to, anyway.

The former Nishna Valley school, two miles east of Hastings at the intersection of US 34 and old 34, has its own sewage lagoon. That makes it the third one I know of in Iowa. It came to my attention because the East Mills district, formed by a merger of Malvern and Nishna Valley, has pondered future plans that may eventually result in that building’s closure. (Naturally, I find out about this after driving through the area.)

First, the standalone elementary in Malvern was closed this summer. The Council Bluffs Nonpareil reported at the time that the building could reopen temporarily later if a PPEL was passed to build additions to the high school on the north side of Malvern that would house all K-12 students. That vote failed, but the elementary still closed.

Because all the students there were moved to the Nishna Valley school, and that increased attendance, the DNR got involved because of potential issues with lagoon capacity. The DNR told the district that it doesn’t have all the required permits on file. And because there are no permits, any certification requires meeting 2010s standards instead of 1960s.

Two weeks ago, the district looked into a new PPEL vote, although the KMA story does not make clear if this is to fix existing issues with the two locations or trying again on creating one location. The district itself may not have that figured out yet. It hired a lagoon engineer to sort that issue out. It would make little sense for the district to spend money on getting the lagoon up to current standards if the building is going to close in the near future. On the other hand, any future owner/user of the building would have the same problem. Its location, away from everything, could raise real concerns about abandonment.