School timeline mega-update: Multi-high-school rural districts

For forward-moving history, it’s “and then the Sixties happened.” For this timeline, it’s “but first, the Sixties happened.”

These notes mostly, but not exclusively, relate to the middle of the 1960s as Iowa’s era of one-room schools ended and consolidated districts, many of which had formed over the previous decade, dealt with uniting under one roof — metaphorically and literally.

• Despite an official deadline that required all non-high-school areas to be attached to a K-12 district by April 1, 1966, some stragglers hung around. These aren’t part of the Iowa Department of Education’s post-1965 reorganization timeline, but I think I’ve stumbled upon nearly all of them.
  • There was also the Amish school issue, and for that I’ll refer you to this Des Moines Register article from 2015.
  • Atkins wasn’t officially part of Benton Community until 1968 because there was an intense tug-of-war over whether to join Benton or Cedar Rapids (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 6/30/67, 3/7/68, 5/11/68).
  • On March 20, 1966, the Gazette had a compilation of area merger actions, which I have used to populate the 1966 section. On the same page was an interview with the UI Writer’s Workshop’s newest lecturer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
  • Future consolidations didn’t always take the whole district with them. A mile-wide strip of the Garrison district was moved to Dysart-Geneseo when the latter merged with Vinton in 1970 (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 2/5/69). Pocahontas Area lost 8.6% of Havelock-Plover (Pocahontas Record Democrat, 6/14/89).
  • It only takes a hint of imagination and extrapolation of actual events to come up with some alternate histories. Imagine, for example, 2021 with a combined North Tama/Dysart-Geneseo (with or without Garrison), a Shellsburg/Center Point/Urbana system (with or without Palo), and Allison-Bristow/Clarksville as the ABC School District (though it likely would’ve merged with Greene by now, like A-B actually did).
• This period includes the rush of new high schools in Iowa’s largest cities — as many as the next five decades combined.
• North Linn (Coggon, Troy Mills, and Walker) started in 1965 as, technically, a three-high-school district! All high school students were moved to Coggon in 1967 (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 3/8/67 and 8/14/67) before the present site just east of Troy Mills opened January 8, 1969 (CRG, 5/5/69). Construction got held up over whether the Linn County building code applied to schools outside incorporated places (CRG, 8/3/67).
  • North Linn’s superintendent and a rural Walker resident gently asked the Gazette sports section not to call the teams “Coggon” in articles (7/17/66).
  • Not to be outdone, South Hamilton had FOUR high schools for three years until centralizing at Jewell (Webster City Daily Freeman-Journal, 8/14/62), even maintaining separate basketball teams (DFJ, 1/20/62).
  • So did Benton Community for one year, 1964-65 (Blairstown Press, 11/19/64). Ironically, a full-page advertisement strongly opposing the reorganization (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 3/5/64) favored a larger area that is pretty much the present district.
• Districts that are still around today were beginning to build centralized facilities. See North Linn, above. West Lyon closed all its town schools in 1967 for the place along IA 182 (Lyon County Reporter, 7/27/67). Tri-County in Thornburg opened its present building while using the old one as a junior high (CRG 8/28/66), but Gibson’s school was still around for some time.
• While working on my April schools post, I learned that in 1987, the director of the Department of Education proposed mandating a minimum district size of 1000 students. It turns out the same man, Robert Benton, as Superintendent of Public Instruction, also made the same suggestion a decade earlier (DFJ, 2/3/77). Let’s just say that torches and pitchforks weren’t allowed in the Statehouse back then, either.
  • A syndicated Iowa Press Association press release in late May 1968 (Red Oak Express, 5/30/68) reported on a four-state project called the Great Plains project. Iowa’s representative proposed requiring a district minimum of 3500 students (!!!) with boundaries to be drawn by a commission by 1971. The Iowa Association of School Boards “soundly rejected” the idea (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 11/15/1968) and it died with a whimper in the first half of 1969.
    • The closest enrollment to 3500 today is Mason City, which is down 1000 from two decades ago.
  • In the 2020-21 school year, 111 districts had a certified enrollment above 1000, and 100 had a certified enrollment below 500.