Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Essex, Iowa’s fourth-smallest district operating a high school, is telling parents it faces a “challenging dilemma.”

KMA reported on a Jan. 26 meeting where Superintendent Paul Croghan said it was time to start looking at whole-grade-sharing options with neighboring districts. All of them except Stanton (the second-smallest district operating a high school, and geographically not a great fit) are much larger. Croghan pointed out the area’s continued population decline:

“But, you just look–in the last 10 years, when we were competing for those banners, there was a Farragut banner, a Nishna Valley, a Villisca, a Malvern, and a Hamburg. That’s five schools in our conference alone, in 10 years, that no long graduate kids.”

The members of the Corner Conference know exactly what it means when the state comes knocking, after the Farragut district got nuked in 2015-16. Essex isn’t there right now, but the enrollment projections aren’t good.

Between 1958 and 1963, Essex tried repeatedly to consolidate with the even smaller town of Coburg just to the north, only for plans to be torpedoed by either a court or the state. A reorganization without Coburg was approved in 1964. Coburg was attached to Red Oak three years later, according to this court case, although it’s not on the official list of post-1965 changes.

October 3, 2016: It says “Royal Public School” but it’s now the elementary school for Clay Central-Everly. An addition and the main entrance are off to the right.

The Clay Central-Everly school district in northwest Iowa, where enrollment has dropped by one-third in a decade, is pondering its future.

KICD reported in August on a survey that covered options from building closure to dissolution, with no commitment or timetable. The district’s junior high/high school is in Everly and elementary in Royal.

The Spencer Daily Reporter had stories in December about the district meetings and looking at sharing options, although with the way it wraps around Spencer, that much larger district would be the most likely match.

The most recent story from the Reporter had an interesting quote from CCE’s superintendent saying that becoming a one-site school would need to be feasible as a long-term option.

CORRECTION: The original blog post reversed the locations of grade levels in Everly and Royal.

March 11, 2011: A dugout remains for an abandoned baseball diamond beside the abandoned Coin school. Coin is one of five tiny towns that formed the South Page Community School District in 1959.

At its January board meeting, the South Page school district — the 10th-smallest in Iowa — voted unanimously to end its independent athletics programs, KMA reports.

The district along the Missouri state line is two-thirds of what it was 15 years ago and has been hovering around the 200-student mark. The KMA story says it was down to girls’ basketball, volleyball, and boys’ and girls’ track. Some programs were being shared with Essex, but the districts are not contiguous.

2017 photo via Iowa Geographic Map Server

The Mallard City Council doesn’t want the largest building in town.

The West Bend-Mallard school district had a work session with the Mallard City Council on October 16 to discuss the fate of the Mallard school, which will close at the end of this year because of continued decline in enrollment. According to the minutes, council members were not interested in taking possession of the building and said “they don’t want the property to become an eye soar” [sic].

The core building is from 1917, but the additions were built with the same color bricks to create a unified appearance. All of it will come down in a time frame to be determined. There’s nothing we can do but sigh.

The as-yet-unnamed second Waukee high school is 2½ years from opening, and before that time, school officials will have to plot out a feeder system. First, though, it has to cope with an entire district’s worth of students pouring in each year.

When Waukee opened its eighth elementary in 2016, it resulted in the seventh adjustment of school boundaries in 22 years, the Des Moines Register reported. Now it’s time for elementary number nine, Radiant, which the district says refers to a coal company that operated in the area in the early 20th century. In five years, Radiant is projected to have more students in kindergarten through fifth grade than the K-12 enrollments of more than half the districts in Iowa.

No word on whether elementary number ten will be named Terrific or Some Pig.

Here’s the map approved last week (PDF), which marks out the prime farmland that will be plowed under for an Apple data center on the district’s western edge.