Category Archives: Schools

This is the second part of my work on 2025 enrollment information. It’s a map of changes since 2000 for districts that haven’t substantially changed in size, and also the roundup of eye-popping Waukee statistics.

My number crunching for school enrollment has a new dimension: education savings accounts, or vouchers, and where students using them are from, and how much money the state could have given to public schools instead of private schools. By the … Continue reading →

The Orient-Macksburg school district will dissolve after the 2025-26 school year. The vote wasn’t close, 203-18, with 10 of the no’s coming from Madison County. Most of the district’s land and students will become part of Nodaway Valley. Orient-Macksburg’s speech … Continue reading →

A reader informed me that my school timeline page had the merger of Meservey-Thornton off by a year. I double-checked through the Mason City Globe Gazette archives, and the reader was right. M-T formed in 1962. The thing is, the … Continue reading →

Previously, I explored how the northeast Iowa town of Fayette appeared to be the only town in the country that had a graduate degree program but not a high school. But as of last year, Fayette joined Peru, Nebraska, as … Continue reading →

There is a steadily decreasing number of rural school districts with three sites. East Marshall currently is one of those, but that status is the subject of this November’s bond issue vote. (Schools now can have bond issue votes on … Continue reading →

On my way to the Okoboji Writers’ Retreat I passed by Goldfield to check the status of the school’s demolition. Nothing looked changed on the outside save for the two pine trees out front being gone. Inside, the doors were … Continue reading →

July 2, 2024: Hills Elementary is just off US 218 … but not for long. Hills Elementary School, which was closed at the end of the 2023-24 school year, will be demolished after just short of 60 years in existence. … Continue reading →

The below is what happens when you sit on a post too long and it gets overtaken by events. — Ed. The dissolution (not “dissolvement”) of the Orient-Macksburg school district is proceeding mostly as I expected, with a catch that … Continue reading →