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.