Just in time for the start of football season (stupid Week 0), I have finished making updates and corrections to the newest edition of the North Tama directory.
This booklet has maps for 50 different school districts, including high schools, junior highs, and athletic facilities. Directions are given from Traer, but the maps are useful to anyone who plays in these towns.
July 6, 2011: School was already out forever for WCLT
High school to zero in fifteen months. There aren’t enough kids to justify even a preschool.
“We all hoped we could go another year, but the numbers just weren’t there,” said Bruce Kluver, chairman of the Woden-Crystal Lake School Board.
Woden-Crystal Lake elementary students went to Forest City starting last August. In all likelihood they will be going there permanently after the merger vote next month.
(The juxtaposition of this post and the one below is entirely intentional.)
Waukee shows us what a district can do with an ever-growing tax base and a town population that is six times what it was in 1990 — not counting the other suburbs’ spillover. (Des Moines Register)
West Des Moines beats Cedar Rapids to the punch with the second standalone Chick-fil-A in Iowa.
Sinclair Broadcasting is about to yank its TV stations off a cable/satellite lineup again. This time, it’s Dish Network.
It’s been five years since Mediacom actually lost the channels for a month, and that was from the middle of the BCS games to just before the Super Bowl. With football season ramping up again, how long might the standoff be this time?
November 29, 2002
When I was taking pictures of the George Preston Station in Belle Plaine in late 2002, George’s son Ron happened to be there. I hadn’t expected that, but I explained that I was taking pictures of the station for a photo project about the Lincoln Highway. We talked for a while. He let me inside and showed me some of the accumulated memorabilia. Finally, he graciously allowed to let me take a couple pictures of him in front of his dad’s famous landmark.
Ron died last year. Last week, that memorabilia was sold off.
Other roadtrip gallery links are here (and sorely need to be added to).
Iowa TV markets rank Nos. 4, 6, and 7 for political ad saturation.
On a semi-related note, President Obama’s cross-state trip this week will get him coverage in four of Iowa’s seven media markets (five if KTVO covers him in Oskaloosa).
When Iowa State was on the verge of falling into athletics oblivion a year ago (again), I wrote in The Des Moines Register about external factors working against the teams, the university, and the state as a whole: population shifts and media markets. I’m going to expound more on that here. See also Andy Staples’ article earlier this week about TV and college football.
There’s a reason besides those six consecutive crystal footballs that the SEC can look at everyone else and say, “Scoreboard.” Its teams aren’t only winning with skill, its states are winning with numbers. (Well, skill and the Big 12 circular firing squad.)
(Additional census information here [Flash] and here [text].)
This analysis starts with the U.S. House congressional apportionment from the 1970s. It’s a good place to start, as it’s just after the Texas national championship of 1969 — the last won by an all-white football team — and the 1971 Nebraska-Oklahoma Game of the Century. It concentrates on the predecessor and existing versions of the top four football conferences in the country. Continue reading
Polly wants a cracker — or Polly will use his hook!
The Hudson school district has RSS and Twitter feeds. (Technically, the Twitter feed is the superintendent’s.)
That’s one of many school districts that redirect from or don’t use the standard “.k12.ia.us” Web address, more than even a few years ago.
