Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The Farragut school district could be forcibly dissolved because its locker rooms, showers, and weight room are not compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

That is what the 200-student school in far southwestern Iowa is up against after the nine-vote failure of a PPEL the day after Labor Day. Granted, it’s a slight oversimplification because the district also got dinged for not having its nondiscrimination policies posted online, lacking a few required classes, and for teacher licensing/evaluation issues. (Oh, and the vo-ag space the district is using in Sidney after having to close its existing vo-ag space for ADA issues also has been judged non-ADA compliant.) But the crux of the matter is, Farragut is not engaged in a $1.2 million construction project right now, and that’s a problem. The school has since turned off the showers and locked up the weight room.

The issues individually may be small, but they’re stacked up with the school district’s negative unspent balance, which was a trigger for the potential loss of accreditation in the first place. And if Farragut overspends again, then don’t worry about the PPEL because you won’t have a school.

Anything that happens in (or to) Farragut will have direct effects on Hamburg, which is in whole-grade sharing with Farragut and already rejected consolidation once. Hamburg also got cited in the report for the lack of a nondiscrimination statement.

The Department of Education report from the September meeting is available as a PDF.

UPDATE: New vote scheduled for Feb. 3.

The Cherokee Chronicle-Times ran a two-part series about Creighton economist Ernie Goss’ visit to Sheldon. Goss does the Mid-American Business Survey. Links: Part 1, Part 2

The first story dealt mainly with Northwest Iowa’s economic opportunities. The second was devoted to Goss’ “alarming concern for the dwindling rural population and the out-migration of young people to larger metropolitan areas such as Chicago and elsewhere.” That’s not hyperbole, as a bunch of facts on this website and elsewhere can attest. (If you need to be hit over the head with one: Two-thirds of Iowa counties lost population between 2000 and 2010, and another 10 had growth under 2 percent.)

It’s the throwaway line at the end of the Chronicle-Times’ story that I want to gently correct, though. “It kind a makes a person wonder when Iowa will see its first school system named after a highway as in the ‘Highway 3 Communities’ School District.'” Iowa already has a school system named after a highway: The Interstate 35 Community School District formed a few years after the interstate was built in Clarke and Decatur counties.

The Highway 3 Roadrunners? Hmm. It’s interesting enough it might work. Of course, Highway 3 goes all the way across the state, but on the other hand, it’s at least as specific as a river valley is. On the other other hand, I-35 has red, white, and blue for school colors, and the black and white of a state highway shield is a little blander. (Perhaps black and silver?)

The Storm Lake school district wants to sell the old South Elementary building because it would cost too much to replace the boiler, KCAU and the AP report. (Of course, the new buyer would have to eat that $100,000 to make the building usable.) The building hasn’t been a school for a while; Storm Lake consolidated its three elementaries into one. The North Elementary site is now a McDonald’s.