Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Part of a series.

In my previous posts about my creation of a school directions booklet and the issues I have encountered updating it, I’ve danced around the elephant in the room. And that is the fact that in the late 2010s, nearly anyone over the age of 13 can bypass years of work and map-reading in seconds — not just from their home, but on the way to the game.

From Pew: Roughly three-quarters of Americans (77%) now own a smartphone, with lower-income Americans and those ages 50 and older exhibiting a sharp uptick in ownership over the past year, according a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2016. … Smartphones are nearly ubiquitous among younger adults, with 92% of 18- to 29-year-olds owning one.

Barring a robot uprising or China launching an EMP, how do I go up against “Hey, Siri”? (Cell phones upended The Baby-Sitters’ Club, but Encyclopedia Brown didn’t emerge unscathed either.) The ubiquity of the Internet, above all else, is what has made me rethink the future of this project.

Now, is that a perfect replacement? No. There are still places where athletic facilities are not where the schools are, and I consider that a strong point of the booklet. But on the other hand, now that the websites of many schools and/or their conferences have calendars that say where the event is, it’s a simple step to enter that in a search field or look at the town on satellite view.

Am I overstating my obsolescence in this situation? Maybe. Over the course of writing this, some assertions changed into softer statements.

So I’m back at the choices I had at the start of this musing: Continue things as-is as long as what I have keeps working, retool the whole thing, or bow to the flow of time. At least, until someone goes looking for Colo-NESCO’s softball diamond and ends up in the wrong town.

Part of a series.

In the booklet of directions to schools from North Tama (the PDF, as always, is downloadable in the sidebar on this blog), I made it a point to include the names of school officials — superintendent, principal, and athletic director — at the top of each listing. But in the nearly two decades since I started, those positions have turned into a game of musical chairs.

This is where the booklet overlaps with another interest of mine — charting the transitions of rural Iowa schools in an era of declining enrollment and state funding challenges.

There is, at least in my perception, more turnover in the ranks. It wasn’t unheard of for a name I had with one school to move to another as people changed jobs. But then, as schools started sharing superintendents, a name would be in two places and not be wrong. Moreover, a replacement for one two-year period might not even last that long.

The most recent example is also an interesting story — The superintendent at Johnston, one of Iowa’s largest districts, quit that job, only to get right back into education as principal at Collins-Maxwell. But he doesn’t know if he’ll be back for the 2019-20 school year.

Complicating things further, the increase in turnover has resulted in positions not being finalized until weeks before the school year begins. AGWSR hired its new superintendent at the end of June. That means that even relying on the directory for a just-completed school year runs the risk of sending an e-mail to someone who isn’t there anymore. While the administrators’ names can be considered the least essential component, there’s value in knowing who’s there.

Whatever the reason, the response rate for e-mails I’ve sent athletic directors asking for updates hasn’t been great. I resort to finding what I need online (despite the clunkiness of some schools’ websites). And that issue is where this monologue is going next.

Part of a series.

An Eagle Scout project is not an individual endeavor. It requires leadership and delegation, coordination and compromise. Making a booklet of directions to area schools was going to take a lot of time — and I happened to have a computer lab of Power Macintosh 5400s at my disposal.

It’s the winter of 1998-99. We’re mailing letters out to schools, asking them to fill out a form with information about administrators, phone numbers, and just exactly how and where people should get to their buildings.

The information returned formed the core of the maps used to this day, with an assist from a pioneering Web service … MapQuest. Type in a location. Get a map centered there. Click to zoom in or out, click to load a new page to move over a “tile”. With that information, move on to the next step: ClarisWorks.

A history of the program from one of its creators can be found here. The program offers modules for word processing, drawing, painting, databases, and spreadsheets. The first two were key to this project. The drawing module was used to draw lines for streets and boxes representing the school, football field, etc. Those maps were then copied and pasted into the word processing module, where information about the school and written directions were kept.

Once the Scouts and parents participating in the project finished their page assignment, the file was double-checked. Then, at a Scout meeting, everyone went through a line, grabbed a printed page, and stapled the booklet together.

I. Save. Everything. (Except the original Traer quasquicentennial webpages. Sigh.)

After the project was done, I retained the files. In subsequent updates, they were converted to AppleWorks 5, then AppleWorks 6. Apple cared about AppleWorks enough that it was the first application to be “Carbonized” — that is, work in both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. The last version was released in 2003. It worked excellently, although I recall that after some map hiccups I decided I’d be better off doing the work on my iBook. Later, an AppleScript enabled me to create a single PDF that could be distributed online.

Then, in mid-2007, Apple unceremoniously wrote the program off. The program’s most important modules were split off into different applications, and not necessarily better ones either. Because of the legacy PowerPC code, Mac OS 10.6.8 is the last version that runs AW. The legacy of individual files, and the by-now awkwardness of the draw module, make re-alphabetizing with new schools a taller task than it otherwise could be. The Draw module, and thus the maps, cannot be duplicated through AW document translators.

In short, I’m working with files created in an application old enough to attend college whose format has been unsupported for six years. My modern map production methods are different, too. If I reverse my decision and continue doing this, I’ll need to seriously consider rebuilding it from the ground up.

This map, working off the 2005-06 Iowa Dept. of Ed. districts map, shows all the public schools covered by the directions booklet in white. Previously included but now removed districts are in gray.

First in a series.

At the end of the 20th century, I led an Eagle Scout project that combined my interest in maps with technology of the time. New football districts were placing North Tama with teams the Redhawks had never played. I thought that making a booklet of directions to dozens of schools, informing parents and fans of exactly how to get to events, would provide a great community service.

In small-school Iowa, not everything is in one place. The high school and junior high can be in different towns, and not all sports may be played at the high school. Gladbrook-Reinbeck, whose high school is in Reinbeck, plays varsity football by the Tama County Fairgrounds in Gladbrook, and continues to do so even after closure of the Gladbrook school. One especially oddball example is that Colo-NESCO plays softball, and only softball, at McCallsburg.

I didn’t necessarily expect that I would continue updating that booklet for the next two decades. I definitely didn’t expect that it would outlast the existence of the Boy Scouts of America.*

But while thinking about the latest version, I have also been considering if it should be the last. In an upcoming series of blog posts, I will explain more about this thought process.

*The future “Scouts BSA” has been sued by the Girl Scouts of America for its decision to admit girls … after being pressured by the National Organization for Women for its position of not admitting girls.

August 10, 2008: Cornerstone of the Albion school, Marshall County.

I couldn’t tell you how many times I passed by the Albion school building on the way to/from Ames or Des Moines and beyond. It was such a fixture that I dawdled a bit on photographing it (but as you can see I got one day).

It was demolished earlier this month. (Story and photos: Marshalltown Times-Republican)

Albion was one of the towns that fought futile fights to keep their school open. But the Marshalltown School District’s vote in March 1981 “was merely the last event in a long process during which the problems of declining enrollments, budgetary constraints and the prospect of closing attendance centers were studied, discussed and debated … .”