Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The school district that Iowa girls’ basketball phenom Lynne Lorenzen led to a state six-on-six title in 1987, Ventura, will expire next year.

The Garner-Hayfield and Ventura school districts voted overwhelmingly for consolidation after three years of whole-grade sharing.

This year between Clear Lake and Algona on US 18 there were four school districts on the way: Ventura, Garner-Hayfield, West Hancock, and Corwith-Wesley. Next fall there will officially be three: GHV, West Hancock, and Lu Verne, which will receive the dissolved C-W’s land as explained Monday.*

In other news, Springville rejected a bond issue to replace its 53-year-old elementary school. That is a relatively young building in Iowa terms, but it has the additional burden of “open-concept” classrooms that were briefly in vogue in the 1960s.

*I wrote the headline for this blog post before looking at the Garner Leader‘s Twitter feed, which also said “it’s a go” in regards to GHV. Great minds think alike?

On Tuesday, residents of the Corwith-Wesley school district in northern Iowa will vote on whether it should cease to exist. There’s not much of a choice, really. It’s a merger with Lu Verne in all but name, but it’s a likely stopgap measure of a two-step process.

Next fall, all junior high and high school students in the “new” Lu Verne district, which will include the vast majority of what is currently C-W, will go to Algona. Lu Verne will keep its elementary and send 7-12 students to Algona for at least three years, but no students will be educated in Corwith. The question then becomes how long Lu Verne can remain semi-independent.

Of the 100.6 square miles in C-W right now, 87.1% will go to Lu Verne, according to the Algona Upper Des Moines story linked above. A couple edge pieces will go to Algona (would have been Titonka) and West Hancock, and the tiny sliver in Wright County will go to Clarion-Goldfield-Dows. The map (PDF) is so low-tech it’s charming.

The attendance area for Algona High School in 2015-16, having absorbed the Titonka district and then counting the new Lu Verne, will comprise somewhere around 550 square miles. That’s just a hair under Western Dubuque, and surpasses the brand-new Southeast Valley (Prairie Valley/Southeast Webster-Grand) and Davis County as the largest area with one high school. (Also, it’s 45 percent of the land area of Rhode Island, if you’d like to use that measurement.)

After all that, the Algona district will retain its name. “South Kossuth” would have been a nice bone to throw to the towns involved, but the Lu Verne deal is not a grade-sharing program between equals. (Also, such a change costs money.) It is possible the “new” Lu Verne could incorporate the Corwith-Wesley name but that would be up to Lu Verne’s board.

For more information about recent changes in the area, read my long piece about Kossuth County-area schools and the rural population collapse.