{"id":10677,"date":"2019-03-20T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=10677"},"modified":"2019-03-15T00:59:35","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T05:59:35","slug":"when-clear-creek-was-rural","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/when-clear-creek-was-rural\/","title":{"rendered":"When Clear Creek was rural"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>(An unintended companion piece to yesterday&#8217;s blog post.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>During the 1980s, the Clear Creek school district was in dire straits. They couldn&#8217;t get money for nothin&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>In 1989, Clear Creek cancelled its football season a week before it began, leaving the Eastern Iowa Hawkeye Conference in the lurch. The <em>Cedar Rapids Gazette<\/em> said there were 141 students in the entire high school.<\/p>\n<p>The district stretching from the west edge of Iowa City, and Jones Boulevard in North Liberty, over to the Johnson\/Iowa county line had aging facilities in Oxford, Tiffin, and even Cosgrove, a map dot 11 miles due west of Kinnick Stadium.<\/p>\n<p>Voters shot down four bond issue proposals in three years. A stripped-down, $800,000 addition in Oxford that did not close the existing school finally made it across the finish line in 1985.<\/p>\n<p>A bit later in time, the Amana school district was looking for a partner. Geographically, Williamsburg would have been a better fit. But Amana Superintendent Gary Pittman told the <em>Gazette<\/em>, &#8220;We found that the only school interested in sending students back to Amana was Clear Creek.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Clear Creek and Amana began sharing in 1990, with a combined enrollment a shade under 1000 students. The school in Cosgrove closed.<\/p>\n<p>About five years later, word came that a giant mall was being proposed for the outskirts of Coralville. <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/mall-between-two-school-districts\/\">The western third of the mall<\/a> fell inside the recently reorganized Clear Creek Amana School District.<\/p>\n<p>Clear Creek Amana has a different bond issue problem now: Voters can&#8217;t approve them fast enough. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.press-citizen.com\/story\/news\/2017\/09\/12\/clear-creek-amana-bond-measure-approved-voters\/653792001\/\">The most recent is for $36 million<\/a>, 45 times the amount that scraped through in Clear Creek 30-plus years ago. Another planned for 2022 is for <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2017\/08\/clear-creek-amana-plans-for-a-new-high-school-again\/\">replacement of the high school built in 2009<\/a>, which then would be used for lower grades. An additional 1040 students (80 kids x 13 grades), <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thegazette.com\/subject\/news\/education\/growing-clear-creek-amana-district-hunts-for-new-high-school-site-growing-enrollment-1000-tiffin-20190226\">as are expected over the next five years<\/a>, would itself constitute the 110th-largest district in the state, enough for a Class 2A football team.<\/p>\n<p>By percentage, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thegazette.com\/subject\/news\/business\/tiffin-is-iowas-fastest-growing-city-20180524\">Tiffin is the fastest-growing city in Iowa.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(An unintended companion piece to yesterday&#8217;s blog post.) During the 1980s, the Clear Creek school district was in dire straits. They couldn&#8217;t get money for nothin&#8217;. In 1989, Clear Creek cancelled its football season a week before it began, leaving &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/when-clear-creek-was-rural\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10677"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10778,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10677\/revisions\/10778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}