Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Six years ago, when the Council Bluffs school district proposed closing Crescent Elementary, a tremendous outcry from area parents resulted in the school being kept open.

It didn’t escape the ax this time.

The Council Bluffs school board approved new school boundaries at its meeting on March 28. Crescent is not part of them. Stories: KETV, WOWT, Daily Nonpareil.

According to information in the board’s agenda, barely more than 40% of K-5 students in the Crescent attendance area actually go to the school. In addition, “[t]he average regular educational cost per pupil at Crescent is $13,811 versus $9,386 average for district elementary buildings, a difference of 47% more per pupil at Crescent.” As I noted in 2017, much of the facility was built this century, and the resolution says the board will seek a solution for community use.

Outlying areas of Appanoose County, including the towns of Cincinnati, Exline, Mystic, Numa, and Rathbun, were involuntarily attached to the Centerville school district in the summer of 1966 as the modern district era in Iowa began. Not only did the little “Independent” schools lose their autonomy, some of the students — specifically, female students — lost a little more.

No shorts or slacks for girls at school
(Centerville Iowegian and Citizen, August 10, 1966)

At its regular August meeting the Board of Directors of the Centerville Community School District declined to change its ban on slacks or shorts for girls in school. The question arose due to the fact that such wearing apparel had been allowed in Mystic and Cincinnati schools which are now part of the Centerville system. This means the ban will apply to all schools in the new district.

There has been discussion of the issue in Centerville. However, the board feels that it is obviously wise to continue the ban.

There was one woman on the Centerville board at the time.

Buildings in Exline and Rathbun immediately closed upon the forced reorganization. Numa and “Thirty” followed the year after. Numa had 66 K-8 students in 1966-67. Thirty, with 23 K-6 students, was the last one-room school in Appanoose County. It was on what’s now IA 5 in the vicinity of the Orscheln Farm & Home store on the far south side of Centerville. I don’t know the origin of the name, which dates back at least as far as the 1915 county atlas.

This is the 20th anniversary of my first multi-day trip to photograph Iowa highway signs. I spent the first half of spring break cooped up to pump out an important class paper, then set out amid gray skies and brown ground. Because of the Second Great Decommissioning, many photos I took on this trip cannot be reproduced today. I have revisited many locations, but the signs are gone.

Mostly in 2016-17, but not wrapping up until recently, I posted a series of photos of closed Iowa schools. I went with one per county, in reverse alphabetical order, because that’s a particular idiom of mine. (Who are you calling an idiom? — Ed.) I cheated with Zero and Quarry, but here’s the rest:

Yarmouth, Exira (demolished), Wyman, Vincent (demolished), Ute, Thornton (demolished), Swan, Rake (demolished), Pilot Mound, Otranto, Numa, Moneta, Lovilia, Kellogg, Jamaica, Irwin, Hamburg, Gladbrook (demolished), Fenton, Eldora (demolished), (bonus Elma [demolished]), Dumont, Coburg, and Beaver.

Now, we end where it began. Sort of.

March 21, 2003/September 10, 1919: “The town of Ayrshire is putting itself on the map. A consolidated school building is to be built and they are thinking seriously of having an electric light plant in the town. The little burg also boasts of a resident lawyer and a dentist.” — Spencer Reporter

The IA 314 page has a collection of photos of the Ayrshire school building as it was in 2003 and 2016. To quote myself from the page, this stop made me realize that there were far more towns in Iowa with old schools than I was aware of. It also made me think that someone needs to be taking photos of them for history, and I could be that person, or at least one of them.

Since 2003, Dave and Barb Else have done a book on this. I’m sure the two guys from Nebraska have multiple school photos on their related Facebook pages. The Forgotten Iowa Facebook page went inside the Ayrshire building and extensively documented it. Note that the name over the doors is Silver Lake Township.

I have also turned this interest into a timeline of Iowa school changes, consolidations, and closures. A significant batch of information was released in a series of blog posts in 2021, originally working backward: 1960-65, 1960s multi-high-school rural districts, 1966-67, 1968-70 with compilations, 1971-74, 1975-79, 1980-84, 1985-89, 1990s, 21st century, and information gleaned from Iowa Department of Education building databases. I’ve put in many more updates since, traceable via the Schools category, and there could be a School History category in the future, although it might take a while.