Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

It has been my opinion that while nothing can easily soothe the feelings of a community that has lost its high school, winning a state championship in a major sport goes a long way toward healing rifts. But I’ve never had to apply that thought to the loss of a school building, and Gladbrook-Reinbeck is creating a very weird data point.

GR plays this afternoon for the Class A state football championship this afternoon against Akron-Westfield, the westernmost school in the state. However, many people in the town of Gladbrook and the surrounding area will have nothing to cheer for, because families have sent their students to GMG instead. The open-enrollment exodus is fallout from the closure of the Gladbrook elementary building.

Supporters of keeping a school in Gladbrook appealed to the State Board of Education, arguing (in part) that the threat of mass open enrollment should have been a sign the school district would not realize the savings it expected from closing the building.

However, the state is only allowed to consider whether a district engaged in “abuse of discretion”. The Barker guidelines were voided in 2009 (ironically, in an Iowa Supreme Court decision about Des Moines schools) — something that doesn’t help Gladbrook supporters and something I’d forgotten about in my July blog post, although schools generally continue to follow them anyway.

The state says the GR board “did not act in an arbitrary, unreasonable, irrational manner,” and so it will not reverse closure of the Gladbrook building. The decision document and appeal materials are available on the State Board of Education’s website (PDF, all scanned).

The potential unprecedented self-immolation of an Iowa school district has taken a step forward. A petition to dissolve Gladbrook-Reinbeck has the necessary number of signatures for a referendum, most of which came from the Gladbrook area, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports. The dissolution committee will meet tonight at 6:30 at the elementary school in Reinbeck.

The map above shows the least-complicated vision of a dissolution, split along pre-consolidation lines, with the former Gladbrook district going to GMG and the former Reinbeck district going to Grundy Center. Obviously, though, some parts would be better off parceled out to others — the Black Hawk County portion could go to Hudson and North Tama could get the rest of what used to be Dinsdale (all of which is closer to Traer than Grundy Center). That’s for the dissolution committee to map out.

As I said in July, this is a really really really horrifically bad idea. The chance of the Gladbrook school being reopened is next to nothing. A dissolution would not benefit current GR students. This matter shows the lengths a community will go to have its students at a school in town, and only time will tell if this is a one-off case or a sign of things to come.

(What a way to mark the football team’s second consecutive appearance in the state semifinals.)