At a meeting last week, the Gladbrook-Reinbeck Dissolution Committee unveiled a first draft of the way the school district would be divided up should a vote pass. The district’s PDF is here (Google Docs) and I have replicated it below.
Surrounding districts have until the end of this week (“within 10 days of receipt of the proposal”) to make an objection. Then there will be another hearing for landowners inside the district to make an objection, and another notification to contiguous districts. The process is spelled out in this PDF (Google Docs).
It doesn’t get any simpler than that. Hudson could get all of the district that’s in Black Hawk County (approx. 16½ square miles). North Tama could get everything in Tama County east of T55 (approx. 33½ square miles but possibly as few as 20 students). The north line for GMG would be 150th Street, a mile north of the township line. Grundy Center would make a major advance into Tama County with 32¾ square miles and the town of Lincoln, and then also the town of Morrison in Grundy County. The remainder, including Reinbeck, would be assigned to Dike-New Hartford. DNH had left open the possibility of keeping the Reinbeck building open — but it could be at the expense of New Hartford, which currently has the junior high.
If the dissolution passes, the boundaries of Grundy Center, Hudson, and North Tama would change for the first time in the modern era of Iowa school districts (post-1965). It would be the first major change in the surrounding area since 1992, when BCLUW and GMG officially consolidated and Dike-New Hartford began sharing. (GR merged later but was sharing earlier.) There would be a buffer of sorts separating Gladbrook from Reinbeck, and I’m not just talking about Grundy Center’s new border with North Tama. With GMG in the Iowa Star Conference and Class A football, and DNH in the North Iowa Cedar League and generally on the 1A/2A football cusp (2A next fall), the two towns would be in separate activity spheres except for large-area fine arts events.
The lines are clean and simple, but have one side effect. Because they are drawn on the section line instead of the half-section, students on the borders would go to different districts depending on which side of the road they live on. (The Iowa Department of Education’s lines for Farragut got caught in this trap when the few houses in Farragut on the west side of M16 were assigned to Sidney instead of Shenandoah.)
Judging solely on the basis of attendance at the meeting at the end of March, this proposed dissolution is not likely to pass, in which case nothing changes. But as with any election, it’s the side opposed to the status quo that is usually the most energized.
Oh, and by the way…next school year David Hill will be the shared superintendent for North Tama and Gladbrook-Reinbeck. I wish him luck, because he’s going to need it.
UPDATE 5/31/21: Corrected Dinsdale lines to 1964.
