{"id":8319,"date":"2017-02-13T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=8319"},"modified":"2017-02-12T01:16:57","modified_gmt":"2017-02-12T07:16:57","slug":"laurens-marathon-losing-its-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2017\/02\/laurens-marathon-losing-its-high-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Laurens-Marathon losing its high school"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nJuly 23, 2009:<\/strong> Laurens-Marathon High School in Laurens. There are newer additions to the left.<\/em><\/p>\n

“The busiest little town in Iowa” is about to get less busy. Laurens-Marathon will not have a high school next year; it has agreed to send students in grades 9-12 to Pocahontas Area<\/a>. It is the third year in a row a school district in Iowa has entered a one-way sharing agreement \u2014 and that automatically becomes four since CAL will do the same thing next year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1989 Laurens-Marathon won the Class A football championship (someone has put the game\/season highlights on YouTube<\/a>); a quarter-century later, it didn’t have enough boys for a team.<\/a>\u00a0Laurens served as the rural side of a 2014 New York Times<\/em> feature<\/a> about the urban power shift in Iowa.<\/p>\n

A resident’s\u00a0rarely-updated blog has more background<\/a>\u00a0and a sharply written opinion<\/a>: “The only thing the Iowa legislature does for small schools is help them commit suicide, offering to pay for the morphine and the funeral.”\u00a0The 2016 election showed that rural areas can still flex their muscle, but a 1.11 percent funding increase<\/a> from the Legislature this year is not enough for schools to keep up.<\/p>\n

The sharing agreement will create Iowa’s fourth high school serving an area larger than 500 square miles (549), virtually tying Algona as the largest (officially, the difference is 1 square mile). Pocahontas will be the only town in Pocahontas County with a high school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 23, 2009: Laurens-Marathon High School in Laurens. There are newer additions to the left. “The busiest little town in Iowa” is about to get less busy. Laurens-Marathon will not have a high school next year; it has agreed to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8319","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=8319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8321,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8319\/revisions\/8321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}