Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The combined vote total in Farragut and Hamburg to merge their school districts would have formed a supermajority in favor, but each district must vote separately. Hamburg opposed reorganization by seven votes. Not quite 1000 votes were cast overall, but it’s the 271 “nays” in Iowa’s southwesternmost school district that dictated the outcome.

A slow process that began five years ago with sharing superintendents and got rocky earlier this calendar year when Hamburg didn’t renew that agreement just got very interesting. Not necessarily the good kind of interesting, either.

UPDATE: KMA asks the schools, now what?

In far southwest Iowa today, the Hamburg and Farragut school districts are voting on consolidation to become Nishnabotna. There have been plenty of meetings on the issue, with slightly higher stakes than a normal school merger because of the potential of both districts being dissolved if the vote fails. While both Hamburg and Farragut would have schools, the exact configuration going forward has not been agreed upon universally. From this announcement on the school’s website, it appears the old Hamburg High School building will close either way because of non-compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The combined district would cover about the southern third and eastern third of Fremont County. As it stands right now in the sharing agreement, middle school kids in Imogene in the northeast corner of the county are going to school in Hamburg, a mile from the Missouri state line.

It is very rare for an Iowa school building to close during the school year, but that’s what just happened at Ackley Elementary.

Students packed up their things and left the old building for the last time Tuesday. The elementary, as you can see in the Courier’s pictures, is your typical pre-WWII symmetrical three-story building with a gym that is not full-length. Eighty-five years later, Ackley’s K-5 students are getting a new building with quite a few near-completion construction pictures posted online. High schoolers and community members participated in the massive undertaking.

If the old building is demolished, I hope the “A-G” center court circle can be preserved.

July 6, 2011: Woden-Crystal Lake-Titonka High School in Crystal Lake.

First, the good news: The old WCLT school building in Crystal Lake was sold to a private owner after WCL merged with Forest City, and the owners want to have the building open for community events. The building, not including the gym, is only 20 years old, so it’s good to be reused. The Sioux City Journal has another success story in Sutherland.

Then, the bad news: The century-old building in Corwith is not likely to be as lucky. The building in Wesley was sold a while ago, but one CWL board member quoted in the Register article regrets not demolishing that one.

The piece I wrote in April 2013, “Kossuth County Area Schools and Rural Iowa’s Population Collapse“, still captures the situation pretty well. I haven’t decided whether to take subsequent developments into account or leave it as is.

The Creston News-Advertiser says that a consolidation vote with Prescott will be in April assuming petitions are gathered and the AEA approves. It’s a merger in name only, as the reality is the Prescott school will close and be a district without students in 2015-16 and the Creston district will continue.

These articles from the Le Mars Sentinel and Sioux City Journal point to the same difficulty: The Remsen-Union and Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn boards could not agree on which town would get (and who would lose) the high school. Both articles also say the MMC elementary in Cleghorn will close, which likely would have happened regardless. Both districts are facing steep and practically immediate budget cuts as a result.

The inability to come to a mutual decision is neither unexpected nor petty. Remsen doesn’t want to be one of the highest-population non-suburbs in Iowa without a high school, which was the way the wind was blowing. Cases like this, where each district has a decently-sized (for Iowa) population center, are bound to occur more and more often.