April 15, 2009: When Farragut and Hamburg became Nishnabotna, Iowa lost one of its unique team names, the Admirals and Admiralettes/Adettes. The Farragut girls won the state basketball title in 1971, and Steve Buttry wrote about it in 1996. (Part 2.) [“21th”? -ed.]
Two school districts in Fremont County are enduring one of the most contentious mergers in Iowa since the turn of the century. The fact things are very publicly not going smoothly makes it notable.
Farragut and Hamburg aren’t the best fit geographically. Hamburg, the southwesternmost district in the state, borders only Farragut and Sidney. Sidney and Hamburg did share sports in the early to mid-1990s, as “Southwest” — an early runner in the vague-names department. However, the process left a bad taste and broke down over football and the location of the high school, as this State Board of Education lawsuit shows. Sidney and Hamburg are nearly identical in population, but Sidney is both more centrally located and the county seat. Hamburg might have worried about losing the high school then but as it is, the current high school is in Farragut anyway.
Farragut, meanwhile, has watched its enrollment fall off a cliff, from around 300 in the early 2000s to around 200 today. To the east is only Shenandoah, and that would be a clear merger of unequals. Farragut would be lucky to hold on to an elementary in that scenario, and the district acknowledges as much:
Any potential partner district would be totally in the driver’s seat and would be able to demand that all students, at least the middle school and high school students attend their building centers and they would not send any students to Farragut or Hamburg-eventually all students would go to the neighboring district.
That’s from a FAQ on the Nishnabotna school district’s website (the name for the combined district) as it was pleading for signatures for a reorganization petition. Enough signatures were collected in Farragut and Hamburg by the beginning of this month for a December vote, as KMA reports.
The Hamburg district’s budget last year was $300,000 in the red, according to the Nebraska City News-Press. The state forces a “Corrective Action Plan” if there’s a shortfall for two years in a row. Farragut has had problems, too, the Omaha World-Herald said. The latter, and the FAQ linked above, posit a grim situation: Without full consolidation, both districts could be forcibly dissolved. That would be unprecedented.
