November 15, 2013: “Hayesville Independent School, West Lancaster #9, Est. 1897, Closed 1966, Added to National Register of Historic Places 1990; Memorialized 2011.”
The modern school district era in Iowa began on July 1, 1966. Starting with the 1966-67 school year, the entire state was supposed to have been reorganized into K-12 districts — 455 officially, including the newest, Dysart-Geneseo in Tama County.
It didn’t quite work out as planned. There was a big dash to the finish, but sometimes voluntary reorganization didn’t work, and county boards of education had to make the final decisions. If the disputed area was involved in court proceedings, everything was frozen in place.
I am not chasing after the last one-room or two-room school in every county, although that’s an interesting idea. However, any active in 1966-67 or 1967-68 are somewhat noteworthy, because they were the last remnants of the old system.
- A smattering of unattached districts between St. Ansgar and the Minnesota border got assigned to St. Ansgar in 1966 (Mitchell County Press-News, 4/21/66). This resulted in the closure of the Otranto building.
- Holland was attached to Grundy Center in 1966 (Grundy Register, 4/7/66). The school building was sold to the town before the school year ended and the district leased it back until the end.
- Hayesville’s school closed in 1966, based on the monument placed at the site after its demolition in 2011 (see above).
- In the Howard-Winneshiek district, Chester’s school closed during the 1966-67 school year, per the Lime Springs Herald‘s extremely helpful breakdown of what grades were going where (8/18/66; 10/5/66). A new school in Lime Springs, which closed in 2015, opened to replace one that partially burned in 1960 (Cresco Times Plain Dealer, 4/6/60). A replacement school in Ridgeway opened in the second half of the 1966-67 school year, resulting in seventh-graders shifting towns three times, Chester to Lime Springs to Cresco (CTPD, 12/28/66).
- The school in Shipley, about 3 miles southwest of Nevada, was closed in spring 1967 before the year ended (Nevada Journal, 4/15/67). The building, old enough to have been a sight on the original alignment of the Jefferson Highway, and its later gymnasium remain intact and maintained.
- Owasa, in Hardin County, fought until the bitter end, when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state had the power to delegate final consolidations to county school boards (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 3/8/67). The district was divided 54.64% to Eldora, 31.55% to Iowa Falls and 13.81% to Hubbard (Waterloo Courier, 11/6/67).
- East Union, which formed in 1959, acted as a two-high-school district until closing Lorimor’s high school in 1965 (Winterset Madisonian, 3/24/65). It closed the Shannon City school in 1967 (Madisonian, 12/14/66).
- The school in Numa, which in the 1940s was one of the state’s girls’ basketball powerhouses, closed in 1967 (Centerville Iowegian, 1/25/67). So did the “Thirty” school, the last one-room school in Appanoose County.
- Despite plans to reorganize in 1965, the Carroll Community School District didn’t solidify until 1967 because of a court case, and parts of Carroll County were not figured out until weeks before the 1968-69 school year began (Carroll Daily Times Herald, 9/8/65, 8/31/66, 7/3/67, 5/4/68, 8/6/68). Among the consequences, Templeton’s area was split between Carroll and Manning, and Dedham’s area was split between Carroll and Coon Rapids. However, both were only maintaining kindergartens. Parochial schools, plentiful in the area, skew both enrollment statistics and my ability to track closures, so I’m going to pass. Sorry, towns in Carroll County.
- But I do know that Dedham’s school was torn down in the summer of 1972 (DTH, 5/2/72).
- The Carroll issue tied up a chunk of the 19 districts reported as being in non-high-school areas as late as spring 1968 (Cherokee Courier, 5/29/68). Another batch in Kossuth County, including the town of Bancroft, was assigned to Swea City (Swea City Herald, 3/21/68). Of the rest, Marion No. 4 in Marshall County was involved in litigation over being mostly assigned to Marshalltown instead of Green Mountain (Garwin Sun, 1/6/67).
- North Kossuth moved its middle school to Bancroft in 1993 following St. John’s elimination of grades 6-8 (Bancroft Register, 3/3/93; Algona Upper Des Moines, 8/26/93).