Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

South Page will be sending students in grades 7-12 to Clarinda in the fall.

According to both an article on KMA and Clarinda’s report of a March 19 work session, South Page will “tuition out” its upper grades to Clarinda. True whole-grade sharing could come in the 2025-26 school year. The two districts will share a superintendent who will spend four days a week in Clarinda and one in College Springs.

South Page had partial-day sharing with Clarinda until 2022, when the latter abruptly ended the agreement. South Page then entered a partial-day sharing agreement with Bedford for 2022-23, then tuitioned out grades 9-12 for the whole day in the school year just concluded.

South Page had a certified enrollment of 197.3 for 2023-24.

At South Page’s April meeting, a reference in the minutes is made to the Page County Fair Board and the football bleachers. Presumably this would be about selling them.

Iowa’s next school dissolution could happen next year.

The Creston News-Advertiser reported in mid-May that Orient-Macksburg students did a presentation on the possibilities for the tiny district and recommended whole-grade sharing with Nodaway Valley. KSIB radio reported that at a May 20 meeting would provide a chance for the public to weigh in.

At that meeting, dissolution appears to have replaced sharing as a very likely option. Iowa Starting Line reported that, with more than half of its student body open-enrolled out, state funding was taking a massive hit. Fundraisers would not plug the $500,000 minimum budget hole (per year, before inflation).

Contrary to the Iowa Starting Line story, a dissolution vote would only take place in the dissolving district. Surrounding districts will have a say in what areas they would be willing to take before that vote happens. If a district’s board is disinclined to take territory, the remaining space would be orphaned and the state education director would involuntarily attach land to a bordering district. See, most recently, the Gladbrook-Reinbeck saga.

Orient-Macksburg athletics have been in flux this decade. A longtime sharing agreement with Creston was ended by O-M in 2021 and the district switched to Nodaway Valley.

The Orient school building, from 1913, is one of the 10 oldest active school buildings in the state.

Should the district dissolve, I believe the cleanest solution would be to send the Adair County portion to Nodaway Valley, the Madison County portion to Winterset, and the Union County portion to Creston. Just don’t do what Clearfield did.

Speaking of Clearfield: Hi, Ringgold County IAGenWeb, that’s a swell picture of the Clearfield school! Do you know who took it?

I went to open houses for two elementary schools in Cedar Rapids that are closing at the end of the school year. The Gazette ended up interviewing some of the same people, but I ran into someone no one else got: Iowa basketball player Hannah Stuelke’s mother.

KWWL also had a story about the open houses, and I think my hat made it on TV.

Grinnell-Newburg is the most lopsided school district name in terms of population disparity: one near 10,000, and the other unincorporated. Newburg, just east of the intersection of F17 and T38 in Jasper County, is typically ignored in the sports team names.

Newburg has been a part of the district since 1958, and it had a school. However, nailing down the year the building was shut down has been hard. The gymnasium was destroyed in a fire in July 1978. Voters did not approve a sale of the building, which dates to 1925, until September 1982. The school was the subject of a Des Moines Register article in July 1992, when the new owners were restoring the building. Or I should say were attempting to restore, because it … isn’t.

A concrete answer on the closure comes from an unattributed history of the Grinnell-Newburg district that was compiled around the turn of the century and resurfaced while the school district was seeking a bond issue two separate times in 2018 (it failed both times).

This history also reveals that the oldest school currently in use in Grinnell is Davis Elementary, from 1917, and it was completely renovated in 1998. A time capsule was found in the cornerstone in 2017. That 2018 bond issue would have replaced Davis and two other elementaries at one combined site.

I came across most of this information through reading an article originally at Grinnell College’s student newspaper and then reprinted at the Iowa Capital Dispatch about Grinnell-Newburg’s struggles with finances and morale.