Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

For forward-moving history, it’s “and then the Sixties happened.” For this timeline, it’s “but first, the Sixties happened.”

These notes mostly, but not exclusively, relate to the middle of the 1960s as Iowa’s era of one-room schools ended and consolidated districts, many of which had formed over the previous decade, dealt with uniting under one roof — metaphorically and literally.

• Despite an official deadline that required all non-high-school areas to be attached to a K-12 district by April 1, 1966, some stragglers hung around. These aren’t part of the Iowa Department of Education’s post-1965 reorganization timeline, but I think I’ve stumbled upon nearly all of them.
  • There was also the Amish school issue, and for that I’ll refer you to this Des Moines Register article from 2015.
  • Atkins wasn’t officially part of Benton Community until 1968 because there was an intense tug-of-war over whether to join Benton or Cedar Rapids (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 6/30/67, 3/7/68, 5/11/68).
  • On March 20, 1966, the Gazette had a compilation of area merger actions, which I have used to populate the 1966 section. On the same page was an interview with the UI Writer’s Workshop’s newest lecturer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
  • Future consolidations didn’t always take the whole district with them. A mile-wide strip of the Garrison district was moved to Dysart-Geneseo when the latter merged with Vinton in 1970 (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 2/5/69). Pocahontas Area lost 8.6% of Havelock-Plover (Pocahontas Record Democrat, 6/14/89).
  • It only takes a hint of imagination and extrapolation of actual events to come up with some alternate histories. Imagine, for example, 2021 with a combined North Tama/Dysart-Geneseo (with or without Garrison), a Shellsburg/Center Point/Urbana system (with or without Palo), and Allison-Bristow/Clarksville as the ABC School District (though it likely would’ve merged with Greene by now, like A-B actually did).
• This period includes the rush of new high schools in Iowa’s largest cities — as many as the next five decades combined.
• North Linn (Coggon, Troy Mills, and Walker) started in 1965 as, technically, a three-high-school district! All high school students were moved to Coggon in 1967 (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 3/8/67 and 8/14/67) before the present site just east of Troy Mills opened January 8, 1969 (CRG, 5/5/69). Construction got held up over whether the Linn County building code applied to schools outside incorporated places (CRG, 8/3/67).
  • North Linn’s superintendent and a rural Walker resident gently asked the Gazette sports section not to call the teams “Coggon” in articles (7/17/66).
  • Not to be outdone, South Hamilton had FOUR high schools for three years until centralizing at Jewell (Webster City Daily Freeman-Journal, 8/14/62), even maintaining separate basketball teams (DFJ, 1/20/62).
  • So did Benton Community for one year, 1964-65 (Blairstown Press, 11/19/64). Ironically, a full-page advertisement strongly opposing the reorganization (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 3/5/64) favored a larger area that is pretty much the present district.
• Districts that are still around today were beginning to build centralized facilities. See North Linn, above. West Lyon closed all its town schools in 1967 for the place along IA 182 (Lyon County Reporter, 7/27/67). Tri-County in Thornburg opened its present building while using the old one as a junior high (CRG 8/28/66), but Gibson’s school was still around for some time.
• While working on my April schools post, I learned that in 1987, the director of the Department of Education proposed mandating a minimum district size of 1000 students. It turns out the same man, Robert Benton, as Superintendent of Public Instruction, also made the same suggestion a decade earlier (DFJ, 2/3/77). Let’s just say that torches and pitchforks weren’t allowed in the Statehouse back then, either.
  • A syndicated Iowa Press Association press release in late May 1968 (Red Oak Express, 5/30/68) reported on a four-state project called the Great Plains project. Iowa’s representative proposed requiring a district minimum of 3500 students (!!!) with boundaries to be drawn by a commission by 1971. The Iowa Association of School Boards “soundly rejected” the idea (Cedar Valley Daily Times, 11/15/1968) and it died with a whimper in the first half of 1969.
    • The closest enrollment to 3500 today is Mason City, which is down 1000 from two decades ago.
  • In the 2020-21 school year, 111 districts had a certified enrollment above 1000, and 100 had a certified enrollment below 500.

November 15, 2013: “Hayesville Independent School, West Lancaster #9, Est. 1897, Closed 1966, Added to National Register of Historic Places 1990; Memorialized 2011.”

The modern school district era in Iowa began on July 1, 1966. Starting with the 1966-67 school year, the entire state was supposed to have been reorganized into K-12 districts — 455 officially, including the newest, Dysart-Geneseo in Tama County.

It didn’t quite work out as planned. There was a big dash to the finish, but sometimes voluntary reorganization didn’t work, and county boards of education had to make the final decisions. If the disputed area was involved in court proceedings, everything was frozen in place.

I am not chasing after the last one-room or two-room school in every county, although that’s an interesting idea. However, any active in 1966-67 or 1967-68 are somewhat noteworthy, because they were the last remnants of the old system.

• A smattering of unattached districts between St. Ansgar and the Minnesota border got assigned to St. Ansgar in 1966 (Mitchell County Press-News, 4/21/66). This resulted in the closure of the Otranto building.
• Holland was attached to Grundy Center in 1966 (Grundy Register, 4/7/66). The school building was sold to the town before the school year ended and the district leased it back until the end.
• Hayesville’s school closed in 1966, based on the monument placed at the site after its demolition in 2011 (see above).
• In the Howard-Winneshiek district, Chester’s school closed during the 1966-67 school year, per the Lime Springs Herald‘s extremely helpful breakdown of what grades were going where (8/18/66; 10/5/66). A new school in Lime Springs, which closed in 2015, opened to replace one that partially burned in 1960 (Cresco Times Plain Dealer, 4/6/60). A replacement school in Ridgeway opened in the second half of the 1966-67 school year, resulting in seventh-graders shifting towns three times, Chester to Lime Springs to Cresco (CTPD, 12/28/66).
• The school in Shipley, about 3 miles southwest of Nevada, was closed in spring 1967 before the year ended (Nevada Journal, 4/15/67). The building, old enough to have been a sight on the original alignment of the Jefferson Highway, and its later gymnasium remain intact and maintained.
• Owasa, in Hardin County, fought until the bitter end, when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the state had the power to delegate final consolidations to county school boards (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 3/8/67). The district was divided 54.64% to Eldora, 31.55% to Iowa Falls and 13.81% to Hubbard (Waterloo Courier, 11/6/67).
• East Union, which formed in 1959, acted as a two-high-school district until closing Lorimor’s high school in 1965 (Winterset Madisonian, 3/24/65). It closed the Shannon City school in 1967 (Madisonian, 12/14/66).
• The school in Numa, which in the 1940s was one of the state’s girls’ basketball powerhouses, closed in 1967 (Centerville Iowegian, 1/25/67). So did the “Thirty” school, the last one-room school in Appanoose County.
• Despite plans to reorganize in 1965, the Carroll Community School District didn’t solidify until 1967 because of a court case, and parts of Carroll County were not figured out until weeks before the 1968-69 school year began (Carroll Daily Times Herald, 9/8/65, 8/31/66, 7/3/67, 5/4/68, 8/6/68). Among the consequences, Templeton’s area was split between Carroll and Manning, and Dedham’s area was split between Carroll and Coon Rapids. However, both were only maintaining kindergartens. Parochial schools, plentiful in the area, skew both enrollment statistics and my ability to track closures, so I’m going to pass. Sorry, towns in Carroll County.
  • But I do know that Dedham’s school was torn down in the summer of 1972 (DTH, 5/2/72).
• The Carroll issue tied up a chunk of the 19 districts reported as being in non-high-school areas as late as spring 1968 (Cherokee Courier, 5/29/68). Another batch in Kossuth County, including the town of Bancroft, was assigned to Swea City (Swea City Herald, 3/21/68). Of the rest, Marion No. 4 in Marshall County was involved in litigation over being mostly assigned to Marshalltown instead of Green Mountain (Garwin Sun, 1/6/67).
  • North Kossuth moved its middle school to Bancroft in 1993 following St. John’s elimination of grades 6-8 (Bancroft Register, 3/3/93; Algona Upper Des Moines, 8/26/93).