(An unintended companion piece to yesterday’s blog post.)
During the 1980s, the Clear Creek school district was in dire straits. They couldn’t get money for nothin’.
In 1989, Clear Creek cancelled its football season a week before it began, leaving the Eastern Iowa Hawkeye Conference in the lurch. The Cedar Rapids Gazette said there were 141 students in the entire high school.
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.
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.
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 Gazette, “We found that the only school interested in sending students back to Amana was Clear Creek.”
Clear Creek and Amana began sharing in 1990, with a combined enrollment a shade under 1000 students. The school in Cosgrove closed.
About five years later, word came that a giant mall was being proposed for the outskirts of Coralville. The western third of the mall fell inside the recently reorganized Clear Creek Amana School District.
Clear Creek Amana has a different bond issue problem now: Voters can’t approve them fast enough. The most recent is for $36 million, 45 times the amount that scraped through in Clear Creek 30-plus years ago. Another planned for 2022 is for replacement of the high school built in 2009, which then would be used for lower grades. An additional 1040 students (80 kids x 13 grades), as are expected over the next five years, would itself constitute the 110th-largest district in the state, enough for a Class 2A football team.
By percentage, Tiffin is the fastest-growing city in Iowa.