Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the initial news broke in December, Western Dubuque voted on Monday to close Bernard Elementary. Stories: KWWL, KCRG. In the KWWL interview, the district superintendent said it costs twice as much per child in Bernard than it does other locations.

Meanwhile, Clear Creek Amana is bursting at the seams and looking at building a new high school. AGAIN. That, and the news about L-M and COU high schools and Libertyville Elementary closing, makes the last three weeks chock-full of evidence for This Is Where Your School District Went. Rural Iowa got its teeth kicked in on all sides.

(A championship no one particularly wanted to gain. — Ed.)

For months I have been waiting to find out what would happen to Charter Oak-Ute. There were rumblings back in October that COU would enter into a one-way whole-grade-sharing agreement with Maple Valley-Anthon-Oto. Now, a column from Tim Gallagher at the Sioux City Journal confirms it. Next school year, 55 of COU’s 75 freshmen through seniors will to go high school in Mapleton. (The other 20 are open enrolling elsewhere.) COU is the fourth school district in three years to start a one-way sharing agreement.

The combined MVAO-COU will dethrone OA-BCIG as the state’s longest acronym, but stay behind BCLUW in number of towns in the name (counting “Maple Valley” as one). The high school in Mapleton will serve eight communities and cover 558 square miles, enough to push it over both Algona-plus-LuVerne and the new Pocahontas Area-plus-Laurens-Marathon. A future consolidation (something that could be years out, if at all) with no loss of area would create the largest school district in absolute size — larger than Western Dubuque.

But don’t tell the Legislature about any of that, because the attention is directed elsewhere for the time being.

July 23, 2009: Laurens-Marathon High School in Laurens. There are newer additions to the left.

“The busiest little town in Iowa” is about to get less busy. Laurens-Marathon will not have a high school next year; it has agreed to send students in grades 9-12 to Pocahontas Area. It is the third year in a row a school district in Iowa has entered a one-way sharing agreement — and that automatically becomes four since CAL will do the same thing next year.

In 1989 Laurens-Marathon won the Class A football championship (someone has put the game/season highlights on YouTube); a quarter-century later, it didn’t have enough boys for a team. Laurens served as the rural side of a 2014 New York Times feature about the urban power shift in Iowa.

A resident’s rarely-updated blog has more background and a sharply written opinion: “The only thing the Iowa legislature does for small schools is help them commit suicide, offering to pay for the morphine and the funeral.” The 2016 election showed that rural areas can still flex their muscle, but a 1.11 percent funding increase from the Legislature this year is not enough for schools to keep up.

The sharing agreement will create Iowa’s fourth high school serving an area larger than 500 square miles (549), virtually tying Algona as the largest (officially, the difference is 1 square mile). Pocahontas will be the only town in Pocahontas County with a high school.

September 26, 2016: Upper Iowa University football field in Fayette. Go Peacocks!

Fayette has a distinction: It is a “college town” — Upper Iowa University is the only Division II site in Iowa — that hasn’t had its own high school since 1984. Fayette High teams even started out as the “Little Peacocks” (cf. Little Panthers, Little Cyclones and Little Hawks). I thought about this with the news that the North Fayette and Valley districts were having a consolidation vote today. It is safe to say that this is one of a very few situations, but I didn’t know if it was the only.

After further investigation, the answer is yes-and-no. Peru (PEE-ru), home of Peru State College in the way way southeast corner of Nebraska, has a population under 1000 and no high school — or any K-12 school at all. But Peru State doesn’t have graduate programs, so the distinction may still be made that Fayette is the only town in the United States that has a university but not a high school.

Peru is the site of the first institution of higher education in Nebraska (1867); there was one founded in Lincoln two years later, but its story is clouded in obscurity and irrelevance.