September 30, 2015: The Doon school building has been a community center for about 35 years. This photo was taken during my first and so far only visit to Doon. (I recommend the pizza burger at the Corner Cafe.)
The Doon school was dedicated August 29, 1941. Two men told the Lyon County Reporter it was “one of the finest in the county, modern in every detail, and certainly an asset to the Doon community.” A year from now, it will be gone or in the process of being torn down.
KIWA radio reports that there’s an effort right now to raise $1.5 million to build a new community center where the school is. That’s about twice as much as the school’s cost 80 years ago, after adjusted for inflation.
By a vote of 172 to 56, Doon voters approved a bond issue in the sum of $21,350 for the purpose of building a new school house. …
There was an impromptu celebration when the result of the balloting was made known, and the big crowd, which was waiting at the polls to learn the result had a real jollification. …
Doon school men will ask the government for a PWA grant of approximately $18,000 to bring the available funds up to $40,000, which is considered the sum necessary to build a modern structure.
— Lyon County Reporter, October 6, 1938
The closure of the Doon school after the 1984-85 school year did not sit well with the town. In fact, residents went so far as to petition to dissolve the Central Lyon school district. The September 1985 Central Lyon school board election was effectively a referendum on whether this would proceed. The Doon faction failed, and a dissolution committee was never formed.
No other town would threaten to nuke its school district in retaliation for losing its school building for three decades — until Gladbrook did it in 2015. Please note that in my 2015 post I called Gladbrook’s petition unprecedented, only to be disproven on that years later when I did research on Doon. However, Doon’s case stopped at the petition stage, and Gladbrook’s went all the way to a sound defeat by voters. In both cases, the community losing the school accounted for a minority population in the district.