Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

This is the second part of my work on 2025 enrollment information. It’s a map of changes since 2000 for districts that haven’t substantially changed in size, and also the roundup of eye-popping Waukee statistics.

My number crunching for school enrollment has a new dimension: education savings accounts, or vouchers, and where students using them are from, and how much money the state could have given to public schools instead of private schools.

By the way, as of Monday night, the Senate STILL has not taken up the House’s call for 2.25% plus $10 per student in the supplemental aid bill. The Legislature was (cough) too busy before funnel week.

The Orient-Macksburg school district will dissolve after the 2025-26 school year. The vote wasn’t close, 203-18, with 10 of the no’s coming from Madison County. Most of the district’s land and students will become part of Nodaway Valley.

Orient-Macksburg’s speech club has posted a video of a performance of “The Last Letter Jacket,” which I wrote about last month on Substack.

The (vertical) video is at this Facebook link, at least for now.

A bill to synchronize Iowa Code on reorganizations and dissolutions, to make them all effective the July 1 of the subsequent calendar year, was passed by the Legislature but remains to be signed by the governor.

Apparently the governor was extremely busy last week, if you know what I mean.

A reader informed me that my school timeline page had the merger of Meservey-Thornton off by a year. I double-checked through the Mason City Globe Gazette archives, and the reader was right. M-T formed in 1962.

The thing is, the website for West Fork, the descendant of SCMT and Rockwell-Swaledale, also has the incorrect year, and doesn’t have any year for R-S. I hope, in a roundabout way, that wasn’t my fault.

R-S formed in 1959, based on articles also from the MCGG.