There were plenty, and I mean plenty, of slams on Ames and Iowa State as a whole last summer during the Big 12 Missile Crisis. I may put those up in the future, but right now, the list starts here.
You’re going to love coming to Madison, until kickoff. Put it this way, a weekend in Madison is going to beat the bejesus out of going to Ames, Manhattan or Stillwater.
Purdue blog Hammer and Rails didn’t particularly like any part of the column and spent time dissecting it.
The headline: Small-Town Doctors Made in a Small Kansas Town
Yes, rural areas of this country desperately need doctors. But where are they going?
SALINA, Kan. — This state, so sparsely populated in parts that five counties have no doctors at all, has struggled for years to encourage young doctors to relocate to rural communities, where health problems are often exacerbated by a lack of even the most basic care.
On Friday, a new medical school campus opened here to provide a novel solution to the persistent problem: an inaugural class of eight aspiring doctors who will receive all their training in exactly the kind of small community where officials hope they will remain to practice medicine.
…and stop right there.
Salina, with a 2010 population of 47,707, is the tenth-largest city in Kansas, and sixth-largest outside of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The Census Bureau classifies it as the center of a micropolitan area.
Small for a medical school, I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s NOT a small town. This small insight into terminology could go a long way in explaining the rural-urban chasm that exists in this country.
While double-checking the years of some entries, it became evident that more schools than I thought became a K-6 or K-8 while sending everyone else to one or more other districts, but not receiving any students in return.
In light of that, I added a new category in the timeline: “Last year for high school”. In these cases, the district did not dissolve or merge or enter a grade-sharing agreement, but did graduate its last class. For example, Andrew fell into this category in 2010-11.
I also got a bunch of semi-detailed information about the past 25 years in a report posted online (PDF) related to the merger of Pocahontas Area and Pomeroy-Palmer. I say “semi-detailed” because it appears more statistics were in the appendixes – which aren’t included online. It also resulted in a correction to the status of the building in Rolfe – it was a middle school until 2004, when it was closed in March because bricks were falling off the 1917 building.
From the report, I also learned answers to some long-standing questions:
Finally, I’ve filled in the official-reorganization lines going back to 1985-86. Many details from the late ’80s and early ’90s, however, have yet to be filled in.
[Taylor Keeney] wasn’t just closing the gate for the night or on the season — which ended with the loss in the district semifinal — or on his high school career. The gate was closing on East Central baseball, East Central sports, in general, and East Central High School.
Before the gate clanged shut, the gates holding back his emotions swung wide open.
“When you’ve started varsity here for five years — I’ve put in at least three or four hours on the field making it look the best in eastern Iowa every single day — it’s just hard to let go,” Keeney said as tears streamed from his eyes and choked his voice.
East Central will be in whole-grade sharing with Northeast of Goose Lake next year after a potential deal with Preston got tangled up in the courts.
Cause of death: Progress. This is only 10 months after the US 30 bypass/bisection of Tama/Toledo opened.
The King Tower was on the easternmost part of 30 that was bypassed, part of the original Lincoln Highway, near the bridge.
The Woden-Crystal Lake-Titonka softball team lost Wednesday night to North Sentral Kossuth/Armstrong-Ringsted, closing the door on the last part of that school district.
NSK/AR is, itself, a shared program of two schools, which were three only a decade ago. (Talk about acronym overload.)
Technically, it’s called a “derecho.”
As the system passed through the northern Des Moines metro area at 3:30am, it rapidly intensified and accelerated eastward. Over the next hour and a half the storm plowed eastward through Story, Marshall, and Tama Counties, blasting the area with winds of up to 105 mph, the equivalent of an EF1 tornado.
There was widespread damage in Tama and Marshall counties and beyond. Part of the Traer Manufacturing building got ripped apart, potentially having long-term implications for attempts to get something there in the future.
Delayed many years by budget troubles and one more year by rainy weather, US 30 is now four lanes from State Center to IA 330 – and, by extension, from Ogden to the casino in Tama County. It happened last week.
Meanwhile, heavy winds rolled across Marshall and Tama counties Sunday night. The Waterloo Courier has a slideshow of damage in Clutier and Dysart.
Now they’ll be even harder to tell apart from Minnesota’s.
The color of the print on newly issued Iowa license plates will change from blue to black starting next week.
Now at YMC, the standard plates have about a thousand permutations left. Actually, less, assuming that U and V are inexplicably skipped in second and third positions again.
Sometime between July(ish) 2010 (lower left)…
(Iowa Geo Info Server)…and Wednesday, when I drove by and found stairs leading to an expanse of dirt.
The Algona Upper Des Moines recently had an article about reunions in nearby Ottosen. Livermore, Ottosen, and Bode joined up to form Twin Rivers in 1956, and then much later did whole-grade sharing with Gilmore City-Bradgate as Twin River Valley. But that came to an end in May, with the two districts going in separate directions.
