Orient-Macksburg dissolution takes a turn
Calendar runs out before school can answer other districts' objections to map
ORIENT — “We’re just running out of kids.”
Ryan Frederick is chairman of the Orient-Macksburg Community School District dissolution committee. That means he’s leading the group that decides how the land area in the district will be divided among neighboring districts when the school shuts down.
Frederick graduated in 2004 from the building just down Iowa Highway 25 from his house. His parents did so in 1978-79. Grandparents graduated from Richland Township and Zion, 6 miles west and east of Orient respectively. “Practically the entire family tree walked the stage.”
That walk is very short nowadays.
In 2023-24, according to state data, Orient-Macksburg was the only K-12 school in the state upside-down in enrollment: More students living within the district’s borders open-enrolled out than went to school in Orient. Students that are open-enroll out are included in yearly certified enrollments, but per-pupil funding goes with them elsewhere. (Iowa’s new Education Savings Accounts are not a direct factor here, as only two students used ESAs.) Three other districts were also upside-down but don’t operate high schools. Even with 33 students open-enrolling in, O-M barely cleared the hundred mark for students in the building.
Kindergarten teacher Renee Sammons lives kitty-corner from the school block. She graduated from O-M in 1992, and her children followed. “It’s a close-knit family at the school.” Her favorite part of the job is “watching kids’ faces light up when the learn stuff.”
“We knew it was coming,” she said of the dissolution, but she was determined to give the kids the best she could in the final year.
Orient-Macksburg’s dissolution plan has been on an extremely compressed timeline. The school board’s vote to proceed with dissolution was in June, and a map had to be finalized by Aug. 1 for a vote Sept. 10. Because 2024 is an even-numbered year, a November vote isn’t an option. A delay until March would mean the district could not legally end until June 30, 2026.
Despite the constraints, Frederick’s committee got a lot of input. A proposed map was made in the nick of time — and then things went sideways.
Previous examples: Grand Valley and Clearfield
Grand Valley was a very thin district, geography-wise, along the Ringgold/Decatur county line. Five years after shrinking to a K-6 school, it began the dissolution process.
Grand Valley offered three maps over six months in 1997, which were printed in the Mount Ayr Record-News. The first proposal came before landowner input. The second received objections from Mount Ayr for not having access to the town of Grand River and from Lamoni for not having access to the town of Kellerton. The third map was the one passed, with a thin strip of Mount Ayr land snaking up toward Grand River.
In 2014, on the opposite side of Ringgold County, the Clearfield district dissolved. The resulting map there is best described as “bonkers.” It’s a crazy quilt that involves the Diagonal district using a gravel road right-of-way to reach the town of Clearfield, which is split three different ways.
The key in both of those final maps was that the people of the dissolving district agreed to accommodate bordering districts in a way that matched residents’ wishes and allowed bus pickup points. This past legislative session, the law was changed slightly to allow buses to go two miles into an open-enrolled pupil’s home district. A single pickup point is allowed farther in if both districts agree.
‘We are not a roast to be sliced up and eaten’
Under Iowa Code, districts that border a dissolving district are asked to offer input, first specifying if they are willing to accept any land and to what extent, then to accept or object to what the dissolving district is offering. “The commission may consider the objections and may modify the dissolution proposal [emphasis added].”
Creston’s initial proposal was to receive around 40% of Orient-Macksburg’s area — everything south of the Adair County line, plus the southernmost three miles of Adair County. That would separate the very southern part of the town of Orient and the school building from the rest, but also offer a bus pickup point for students in Orient open-enrolling to Creston. Winterset wanted the entire Madison County portion, including Macksburg. Nodaway Valley of Greenfield, which O-M has had sharing agreements with on academics and some athletics since 2021, was interested in at least the entire Adair County portion and more if possible.
During the dissolution process in July, residents of Orient and Macksburg expressed a deep desire to stay together. In addition, in a letter posted on O-M’s Facebook page, the commission noted that it “spoke to almost every resident in the Adams and Union County portions of the district,” i.e. the southernmost part.
In the resulting map, Nodaway Valley receives an overwhelming portion of the district, with the east edge clipped off to Winterset and only a few parcels on the south to Creston. Both Creston and Winterset are being offered much less than they wanted, and those school boards made their displeasure known.
In a letter dated July 24, the Creston school board issued a formal objection, arguing that the dissolution map “is in fact a reorganization between OM and Nodaway Valley, and not a dissolution.” That’s technically incorrect. Reorganization rules are different and require cooperation by all the school boards involved. By Iowa Code, a dissolving district is allowed to attach up to 95% of its “taxable valuation” to a single neighboring district. As long as that rule is met, a dissolving district can do whatever it wants if its voters approve. This happened in Iowa’s last dissolution, in 2015. Corwith-Wesley voted to attach 87.1% of itself to LuVerne, a neighbor it had been engaged with in whole-grade sharing for decades.
Creston’s letter continued: “When other districts in the state consider boundary changes that will have future impacts on communities and they commonly employ experts to help them determine boundaries based on data and future enrollment.” That sentence made Frederick “pretty irate,” he said in a phone interview Friday. He said the committee did a lot of work asking people what they wanted.
“We are not a roast to be sliced up and eaten,” Frederick said. “If you ask me, I think Winterset and particularly Creston have done themselves no favors here. They haven’t made themselves very popular.”
If there had been months to go through the plan, as was the case with Grand Valley, there would have been time to address the objections. However, with the map approval deadline hours away, and with no flexibility to schedule a vote later in 2024, the O-M board could not move forward.
“They have objected things they are not able to object. They objected to what they didn’t receive. That is not allowed,” Frederick said at the July 29 meeting, as reported by the Creston News-Advertiser.
The way the wind is blowing
Orient-Macksburg isn’t just distributing students. It’s distributing land — land that happens to have dozens of wind turbines on it — and the property tax revenue that comes with that.
Winterset’s objection letter from July 26 references “keeping Madison County taxes in Madison County” and “would urge you to reconsider the division of boundaries.” Macksburg has a 51-turbine wind farm. Winterset is paying off a $19.95 million bond issue approved in 2018.
In March 2022, Creston fell just short of a supermajority in favor of a $24.9 million bond issue for a new gymnasium and additions to the elementary school. In September 2022, the bond value went up to $29.4 million, and failed again, this time missing a simple majority. A look at a third attempt was scuttled as inflation outpaced the proposed bond amount.
Also lurking in the background is the severance of the long-time sharing of services between Creston and Orient-Macksburg in 2021. Creston school board president Galen Zumbach said July 29 that O-M had ended that relationship. While that is accurate, the change followed an August 2020 meeting where Zumbach himself said “If … they don’t want to become part of our district then maybe it’s time that we sever that relationship because the benefit to us is not that great.” Another Creston school board member, Don Gee, said at that 2020 meeting, “The sharing agreement’s gone on long enough.”
Before the July 29 meeting, Frederick said he was proud of the fact that O-M would not be passing liabilities on to other districts. However, now that O-M has to exist in some form for the 2025-26 school year, it will likely run a negative balance.
Orient-Macksburg now has options. It can retain the existing map for a vote in 2025, change the proposed borders, or plan full consolidation with Nodaway Valley, which could result in Creston and Winterset receiving nothing.
“We’ve been 40 years getting here,” Frederick said July 23, when it seemed like there would be one year more.
Now there’s two, but how they turn out is anyone’s guess.
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Very interesting reporting! I know a teacher who has been commuting there the past few years. Seems like the big schools of Creston and Winterset are simply trying to throw their weight around. Maybe they will be the losers after all, when this all shakes out?