Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The Omaha World-Herald’s Dirk Chatelain follows a team taking a 368-mile one-way trip to play a 6-man football game in its last season. There are some parts of this story also applicable to Iowa.

The scale is very different compared with what would happen in Iowa, but a Chicago NPR station found out that a couple old schools there are serving as equipment and textbook repositories for material from 43 buildings the city closed. Everything is sorted, cataloged, categorized, and stored for redistribution or disposal.

In the week since the story was posted, the cost to empty the buildings has risen to triple its initial estimate. (At least the city is doing it right, and isn’t leaving stuff to rot. The buildings themselves, we’ll have to see.)

A note from the bottom of the story: Chicago stopped giving the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in 2005.

When the Iowa Legislature last session passed a law to enable school districts to measure a year in 180 days or 1080 hours, instead of just days, it was supposed to create flexibility. Instead, by removing a long-standing provision, it will be forcing schools to move to the hour-based calendar almost unilaterally.

The change is the removal of a clause that, if you’re a kid in Iowa, is one of the most relevant parts in the Iowa Code to your life (Section 256.7, subsection 19):

A school or school district may record a day of school with less than the minimum instructional hours as a minimum school day if any of the following apply: a. If emergency health or safety factors require the late arrival or early dismissal of students on a specific day.

That above passage was ELIMINATED in the law, written in on Page 30 under “Instructional Hours” (PDF). Concurrently with the change in law, the Department of Education amended its rules to define a school day as lasting six hours instead of 5½, and ALSO eliminated another pertinent sentence (PDF, bottom of page 3):

If a classroom or attendance center is closed for emergency health or safety reasons but the remainder of the school or school district is in operation, the day may be counted as a day of school.

So what does this mean?

• If school is delayed 2 hours because of snow, and the district measures school in days, that day doesn’t count.
• If school gets out 2 hours early because of heat, and the district measures school in days, that day doesn’t count.
• If a water main break or other external factor closes an attendance center in one town but attendance centers in other towns remain open, that day doesn’t count. The rule likely applies regardless of how the year is measured. (This scenario happened in August 2012 at Roland-Story Middle School.)

School districts are just beginning to grapple with this; read this article about Indianola planning its calendar for next year. Measuring in hours is the only way to have delayed starts and early dismissals and still add up time.

One big thing wasn’t changed in all that: School can still start in mid-August with little difficulty.