Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

I am breaking things up into five-year spans, which tells you how much information I’ve found, and how many schools were closing in the 1980s.

• Doon’s school closed in 1985 (Lyon County Reporter, 6/26/85)
  • The closure was a two-year-long issue that included a threat by Doon residents to petition for dissolving the Central Lyon school district. It became THE factor in the school board election that September. A 67½-cent levy was collateral damage; it would’ve reached simple-but-not-supermajority status had Doon not voted 350-12 against (LCR, 9/11/85).
  • Doon’s threat did not make it to a vote, which to my knowledge still makes Gladbrook the only town to go that far.
• St. Marys’ school closed in 1985 after an addition at Martensdale (Winterset Madisonian, 2/29/84)
• Ocheyedan’s high school was demolished in summer 1985 (Osceola County Gazette-Tribune, 5/23/85 and 8/29/85)
• Havelock-Plover shut down its high school in 1986 (Pocahontas Record Democrat, 12/11/85), three years before merging with Pocahontas. Its legacy is the black in Pocahontas Area’s school colors (PRD, 12/23/87). The Havelock school was closed upon reorganization and demolished before the 1989-90 school year began (PRD, 7/12/89).
• Newkirk’s school closed in 1986 (Sioux County Capital, 8/7/86)
• Nichols’ school escaped closure in 1986 (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 1/21/86) but got axed a year later (Columbus Gazette, 1/21/88).
• Sumner’s original school, a junior high at the end, closed in 1988 (Sumner Gazette, 9/1/88)
• Pulaski’s school closed in 1989 (Ottumwa Courier, 2/14/89)
• The Panora town square school building was torn down in spring 1989 (Guthrie Center Times, 4/12/89), but there’s more to the story:
  • It was built in 1897 as a “county” high school, but that system ended in 1930.
  • It replaced and was distinct from the older school in the town square, which was originally built as the Guthrie County Courthouse before Panora lost a fight with Guthrie Center. Iowa: A Guide to the Hawkeye State (1938, reprinted as The WPA Guide to 1930s Iowa, p.506) conflates the two, but this postcard featured on a school alumni page shows both.
  • It remained Panora’s high school until a new one was built in 1974 (Guthrie Center Times, 4/6/88).
  • The school year it was torn down was the first for the Panorama district, a combination of Panora-Linden and Yale-Jamaica-Bagley, each of which had formed in the early 1960s (Guthrian, 2/21/61 and 10/1/61).
• I could not find a year for Bradgate, only that it was still operating in 1973-74 (Pocahontas Record-Democrat, 1/3/74), but that led to other discoveries:
  • Talks between Gilmore City-Bradgate and Rolfe over sharing fell apart when GCB didn’t want to lose the high school (PRD, 12/21/88, 2/15/89). They shared athletics for one year but then Rolfe went with Pocahontas.
  • Newell-Providence and Fonda began sharing in 1989 (PRD, 1/18/89)
  • Rockwell City and Lytton began sharing in 1989 (PRD, 12/28/88)
  • Manson and Northwest Webster began sharing in 1990 (PRD, 3/28/90)
• Olds’ school closed over Christmas break in 1989 (Mt. Pleasant News, 12/13/89)

June 22, 2014: The Wayne school district’s midyear closure of the school in unincorporated Cambria in December 1995 is a crucial link in a discovery I explained weeks ago: It contributed to a streak of closures that predated the modern era and did not end until the 2020-21 school year.

Between the newspaper searches and the IDOE databases, I believe I have upwards of 95% of all small-town closures in the past 30 years.

• Clay Central-Everly sharing has been corrected to 1990 (Hartley Sentinel, 12/7/89)
• Milford Township school, 2.5 miles east of the I-35/E29 exit in Story County, was used by Nevada until 1991 (Nevada Journal, 5/30/91; Ames Tribune, 6/22/13)
• Pella closed Leighton and Otley in 1992 (Pella Chronicle, 4/17/92; IDOE database)
• Grandview’s school closed in 1993 (Wapello Republican, 4/15/95, via IAGenWeb), and I already had the building in Letts listed for this year. Big kudos to both the paper and IAGenWeb for doing and transcribing the series on Louisa County schools.
• Ryan’s school closed in 1993 (Manchester Press, 10/13/92)
  • The building was less than 20 years old at the time. It was a replacement for one that was destroyed in a tornado on August 12, 1974.
• The town of Bancroft gained public school students when St. John’s closed its middle school in 1993 (Bancroft Register, 3/3/93). The town only had kindergartners since its attachment to Swea City in 1968 (Swea City Herald, 3/21/68). North Kossuth would use the school for another quarter-century.
• I have received confirmation that Cambria’s school in Wayne County closed in December 1995.
• Elementaries in Elvira and Goose Lake closed in 1997 after an addition to Northeast High School in Goose Lake (De Witt Observer, 12/21/96)
• Keswick’s school closed in 1997 (Cedar Rapids Gazette, 6/26/96)
• Marcus’ original high school, by then only a third-grade building, closed in 1997 (Cherokee Daily Times, 4/24/97) and was demolished in February 1998 (Cherokee Chronicle, 2/26/98).
• Paton’s school closed in 1998 (Scranton Journal, 4/15/98)
• Hanlontown and Plymouth both lost their schools after an addition to North Central at Manly (Mason City Globe Gazette, 4/12/99 and 6/6/99)

June 24, 2017: The rear addition of the Arthur school building is close to the original’s style except for the color of the bricks.

Starting off with a bullet from earlier so the next one makes sense, and admitting a double-entry.

• Closure of Auburn’s school has been corrected to 1992 (Carroll Times Herald, 12/18/91). Previous entry was incorrect due to an error in a 2014 Times Herald article (lost to link rot).
• In light of the Auburn date issue, I went double-checking on Danbury. Its closure by the Maple Valley district in 2001 was confirmed through a school board member’s letter to the editor in the 5/24/01 Mapleton Press, as he promoted a bond issue that would result in Danbury getting a new K-5 building. The referendum got positive reaction in Danbury and nowhere else — crushed 3-to-1, with precisely one “yes” vote cast in neighboring Castana (Mapleton Press, 6/14/01)…
  • …which then lost its school in 2004, after a bond issue for a new high school building in Mapleton squeaked by with a nine-vote margin (Mapleton Press, 12/20/01).
• Earlville’s school was demolished in June 2000 to make way for a new Maquoketa Valley elementary, “but it did put up a fight, as during the demolition process, a hole was accidentally opened up in the gym of the new elementary, after a section of the building fell the wrong way.” (Manchester Press, 6/27/00)
• Luana’s school closed in 2001 (North Iowa Times, 1/2/02)
• Grand Mound’s school closed in 2002 (De Witt Observer, 4/24/02), three years after its oldest building was demolished (DWO, 5/12/99)
• Meriden’s school closed in 2002 (Cherokee Daily Times, 1/23/02) and was demolished in May 2003 (Cherokee Chronicle Times)
• Harris’ school closed in 2004 (Osceola County Gazette-Tribune, 1/21/04)
• Volga’s school closed in 2004 (Clayton County Register, 3/31/04)
• Arthur’s school closed in 2005 (Ida County Courier, 9/17/03)
• Welton’s school closed in 2005 (De Witt Observer, 6/11/05)
• West Monona’s Central Elementary, the original Onawa High School, closed in 2013 (Onawa Sentinel, 12/27/12)
• Mingo’s school closed in 2013 (Newton Daily News, 5/24/13). I believe this was the only one-site town I was missing from the past decade.

Someone took the last shot in an official basketball game in the gymnasium.

Someone was the last student out the door on the last day.

Someone was the last school district employee to lock the doors.

When I started my school closure timeline a decade ago, I settled on 1980-81 for a start date, as a nice round number, as the year Corwith-Wesley-LuVerne started sharing, and because I figured it would be hard to go back farther. Since then, lots of Iowa newspapers have been digitized through Advantage Preservation. Months of research can be condensed into seconds. There are briefs and tiny headlines I never would have seen in microfilm but rapidly appear with a text search.

A few months ago, I decided to start seeing how much I could find. Now, I have what I believe is the most comprehensive compilation of school district evolution in Iowa.

Most of this work, sadly and expectedly, is related to closures — the year a tiny community lost its only school building. (I freely admit I am less interested in closures of sites in large cities, and only note them when I happen across them.) Demolitions figure into it too; consider that someone who graduated from East Greene High School a decade ago now has only the Rippey gym to revisit, and the district name itself has faded into history. Forty years of schools in Iowa can be summed up, although wildly oversimplified, in three lines.

• 1953-73: The Boomers are coming! The Boomers are coming!
• 1973-83: The Boomers are going! The Boomers are going!
• 1983-93: The Boomers are gone! The Boomers are gone!

After looking at construction stories and the school timeline, one can see the pattern easily. A surplus of young children, plus the sweeping closures of one-room schools, bring about new one-story additions to hold them. By the mid-’60s and early ’70s, the wave flows into new high schools in Iowa’s largest cities and centralized sites for smaller districts. At nearly the same time, elementary schools noticed the first signs of a different complication: Generation X.

Decorah Supt. Wayne Burns said, “There’s no question but what the birth rate is down.” Central Community Supt. R.D. Buckner of Elkader, pointing to the pre-school census for Central, said, “Please note there is a distinct drop in 3-year-olds.”
— “Crowded classroom outlook varies in Iowa,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, October 15, 1967

Into the Carter-Reagan years, it was the farm crisis. Elementary-only sites in the 1980s closed by the truckload. The cascade of sharing and reorganizations in the last span was aided by state incentives, but mostly, so many schools just didn’t have the numbers anymore.

I’m going to share my findings in a series of blog posts, and then upload a new timeline page with all the new listings.

On a completely related note, Waukee Northwest High School opens next week. Waukee becomes the tenth city in Iowa to have two high schools, and the district will build at least four new schools in the next four years. If 700 new students show up there, as its superintendent speculates in the KCCI story, the new crop alone would be larger than more than half of Iowa’s 327 districts, rivaling Hudson or Panorama.