Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 1, 2015: The Pisgah school building, now a community center, was once part of the West Harrison district.

Besides newspaper archives, there is another, more time-consuming method to find closures. The Iowa Department of Education has a yearly breakdown of enrollment by buildings, which tells us exactly how many students were in each grade level at each site. This method is not foolproof; you have to kind of have an idea of what to look for. The same location may be broken up into different lines, and older datasets don’t include the city unless it’s part of the school name. North Tama, for example, is broken into “North Tama High School” and “Traer Elementary,” suggesting that the data went far enough back there was once a line for Clutier Elementary. Through this method I found out:

• Minden’s school closed in 1992, as it is not on Tri-Center’s 1992-93 building list.
• Allison had two entries for elementaries until 1994, when they were condensed into “Elementary Wing High School Building.” This jibes with the original school site on the north side of the present school being torn down in the 1990s.
• Arispe (grades 3-6) and Lorimor (K-6), despite initial expectations they would close in 1993 (Winterset Madisonian, 3/24/93), did not until the following year, because they still have entries in 1993-94.
• West Harrison went from two elementary entries to one in 1995, which has to mean the closure of Pisgah’s school. Also confirmed by ad in Onawa Sentinel, 7/6/95.
• Yarmouth’s school (4-6) closed in 1996, because the entries for Mediapolis have “Yarmouth Elementary” in 1995-96 but not 1996-97. I received further confirmation of this via e-mail.
• My long speculation that Parnell (4-6) closed in 1997 was half-upended by surrounding areas having junior high basketball games there later (Belle Plaine Union, 12/24/97; Keota Eagle, 1/20/99). Now, I know I was wrong, because based on the spreadsheets, Parnell’s school closed in 1999.
• Northwood “West Elementary” (of two buildings next to each other) was active until 1998-99, and in an extremely quick turnaround, was demolished that June (Northwood Anchor, 6/17/09).
• “Different lines but actually the same site” caught me with WACO’s mystery building. Records had two lines for elementary schools, K-1 and 2-6, and in 1999-00 the K-1 line was blank yet had 68 students. It turns out there was a “K-1 pod” of four rooms in Wayland built after the school in Olds closed and used until 2000 (Mt. Pleasant News, 12/29/89; Winfield Beacon and Wayland News, 5/4/00).
• Otho’s last appearance was in 2002, matching what I originally had.
• Central Decatur had an elementary in Decatur City (grades 5-6) until 2003. Then “North Elementary” was built, and aerial photos show an addition to the Central Decatur JH-HS site in Leon. The old one was torn down the following school year.
• Ferguson’s school closed in 2007. In this case, East Marshall went from having “Elementary” and “Primary” to just “Elementary”.
  • The Marshall County Assessor’s Office shows the land was given to the city July 31, 2008 — after the original school had been demolished.
• The databases may not be completely error-proof, but I will call them authoritative unless I get direct contradiction. Such a situation happens with the former Wapsie Valley Junior High in Oran. Waterloo Courier coverage from 2000 (2/3/00, 3/8/00) and the inevitable Iowa Department of Education hearing show it definitely closed that year, despite having a line in the 2000-01 building list.
  • The second link goes to the Wayback Machine because a number of links that Google says exist on the IDOE’s site don’t anymore. It’s not quite as bad as the IHSAA … yet.

In the early 1960s, my school timeline categories show some cracks. Here is the world of donut-hole schools and rump districts. Reorganization proposals get cobbled together, advanced or shot down by county boards of education (sometimes up to four of them, if the new district reached into that many), ratified or shot down by voters, re-proposed in different configurations if the latter occurred, repeat as necessary. Rural “Consolidated” districts that formed in the first third of the 20th century get carved up and shut down, often leaving their fine buildings behind.

I’m looking these up as I go, but I have to say, it’s a lot. Most of the reorganizations will just be placed in the timeline itself. Among those in this group: North Tama itself, in 1964, a merger of a Traer-Clutier district that had only been around for three years and about two-thirds of the Dinsdale district. Even this far back, we can’t escape losses of buildings: Adding Dinsdale closed Buckingham.

Below are selected items from what I have learned for this time period.

• I have attempted to integrate two years of lists from A Review of School District Reorganization in Iowa, July 1, 1960 through June 30, 1962, available as a PDF from the State Library of Iowa.
• The Hartwick-Ladora-Victor school district formed in 1958 — without Hartwick, because there had been too many objections filed. Hartwick didn’t join HLV until 1960. (Belle Plaine Union, 11/20/57 and 5/18/60)
• Four districts plus surrounding rural areas formed Nishna Valley in 1960 (Red Oak Express, 4/17/60). The high school was at Emerson until 1963, when the new school opened on US 34 (ROE, 10/17/63). That building is closer to Hastings. The Emerson building was gone before the end of the 1963-64 school year (ROE, 4/23/64).
  • Nishna Valley, now merged with Malvern to form East Mills, is going to consolidate all grades at Malvern following an addition to the high school, according to a bond issue approved in September 2021 (KJAN; KMA). The building on US 34 is to be turned into a “Regional Center for Career Technical Education”.
• Regarding the Locust School (Pleasant Twp. No. 3) in Winneshiek County: The Decorah school district was formed in 1960 (Decorah Journal, 5/26/60 and 6/16/60). A letter to the editor of the Des Moines Register, reprinted in the Journal 10/3/63, said Locust was used by “the reorganized school districts” in 1959-60, which does not make sense given the known reorganization date, and then the Iowa Department of Public Instruction ordered all students to Decorah. In my view, it is most likely that Locust closed upon consolidation in 1960, not 1962, making 106 years of continuous use.
• West Monona and East Monona were both born by votes on February 5, 1962 (Onawa Sentinel, 2/8/62)
• The school in Fernald, an unincorporated village 4 miles northeast of Nevada, closed in 1962 (Nevada Journal, 4/14/62)
• I noticed references to “Okoboji school” in the Milford Mail and Terril Record dropped to near zero in mid-1963, five years after that town’s school merged with Milford. A search for “parent teacher conferences” showed they included Okoboji in 1962, but not the following two years (11/1/62, 11/7/63, 10/29/64). I am pegging the closure to 1963.
  • Much later, the Arnolds Park-Milford merger took Okoboji as its new district name, and as of last year, all classes are in Milford.
• South Clay formed in 1963 (Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune, 11/22/62)
• Coralville merged with Iowa City in 1964 (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 2/14/64) after Iowa City said it would block students “tuitioning in” and a rapid attempt to get a high school was too little, too late (CRG, 1/14/64; Coralville Weekly Courier, 12/1/83)
• 1964 is also the year of unification in the Waterloo district and the end of Orange Township as an independent district.
• Bouton’s school lasted one year as part of Perry before closing in 1965 (Perry Daily Chief, 8/11/64, 7/15/65). This is the only one I have found for that year, and it holds together an uninterrupted chain of closures that starts in 1960 and was not broken until 2021.

Finally, some odds and ends about Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom, which formed in 1960:

• On Page 3 of Section 2 of the September 10, 1961, Cedar Rapids Gazette, photo captions of the Guernsey and Brooklyn schools were reversed. The former was identified as the latter and vice versa.
• As for the Guernsey school itself, it closed within four years of BGM’s consolidation (CRG, 7/22/84). A wire story about the “false arrest” of a 6-year-old mentions the building (CRG, 1/20/63), so it must have closed when the new BGM school opened on the north side of Brooklyn.
• The present BGM school was dedicated Sunday, November 17, 1963 (CRG) and, safe to say, it wasn’t students’ most memorable event of the week.