Town vs. township, school edition
A story from the reorganization files
At the end of 1959, the Sioux City Journal reported that 727 small school districts in Iowa had been eliminated during the 1958-59 school year. Most of these were one-room schools, which functioned as their own “district” under Iowa law. The article also said 79 high schools were wiped out, 62 through reorganization and 17 by surrendering their high schools.
The late 1950s were ripe for merging rural areas around a nucleus of a town that already had a high school. Here’s a story about a place it didn’t happen at the time — at least, not exactly. To maintain some sort of suspense, I’ll hold off on the name.
Seventeen rural schools in a township in Iowa united in 1946 and opened a centralized elementary school in 1948 to educate its students. It was the first postwar district to do this. Other, older consolidated districts had high schools, but Rural Independent “tuitioned out” its hundred-plus high school students to Town Independent.
In early 1958, a township district study committee looked at six options for the future. Three rounds of voting whittled down the options. Since only three of 34 members of the committee favored building their own high school, that was eliminated first. The top selection throughout was merging with the town district.
Then, in May 1958, the town district said that unless a merger was approved, the rural district’s high school students would not be allowed to go there in fall 1959. The town district was fully within its rights to do this. Its buildings were bursting at the seams with students and it needed to know what the future looked like before moving forward.
Each faction made its argument. “The desperate statements of those opposing merger confirm our position that the district cannot finance its own high school,” the chairman of a pro-merger committee wrote in a letter to the editor. “If they thought for a minute that it could be done, would they be discussing schemes such as the organization of a corporation to build and lease a high school building to the district?”
A half-page newspaper ad in opposition to the merger proclaimed, “The ‘have nots’ want what the ‘haves’ have!” It argued that the rural district had enough of a tax base to go it alone and stop the town from taking its “cream.”
Although town voters overwhelmingly favored the merger in June, rural voters were 2-to-1 against, so the consolidation failed. A month later, those rural voters again overwhelmingly voted in one direction — this time, to build their own high school. The option that had died of loneliness in committee six months earlier had become the voters’ preference. The rural school district, with blueprints newly in hand, had 12 months to bid out and finish a high school building — or make a last-minute deal to send those students somewhere else.
Local farmers leveled the ground for the new high school in October 1958. Construction was approved in February 1959. “[If] a series of events could click just right, it is possible that the building will be ready for the fall opening of school,” editorialized the town’s weekly newspaper, which had been pro-merger.
That fall, a brand new high school was up and running, and a week before the November open house it was officially named ... Linn-Mar. Sixty years later, in 2019, the once-rural school in Marion had 2,226 students in grades 9-12.
The phrase “Linn-Mar” first appears in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on October 24, 1955, as the name of a new girls’ 4-H club. (From the minutes: “Mrs. Burgstahler presented the leaders’ lesson on ‘How to Look Prettier.’”) The name “Linn-Mar” for the high school building came through a contest in 1959. Eighth-grader Sharon Oftedahl won a $25 savings bond for the name. Oftedahl was a member of the Marion’s Best 4-H club.
The school district as a whole changed its name to Linn-Mar Community in 1963. Before that it had been Marion Rural Independent and Marion Rural Community.
What’s happened since
In July 1989, Marion Independent and Linn-Mar voters were presented the choice of consolidating into “Indian Creek Community School District” or remaining separate. Battle lines from three decades earlier reappeared. Marion was just short of a supermajority in favor. Linn-Mar crushed it by nearly a 4-to-1 margin.
Marion Independent remains Iowa’s second-smallest school district by area. Only West Burlington Independent, which began in 1883, is smaller. A reprinted History of Marion Iowa 1838-1927 (1995) and Marion’s alumni foundation in 2018 both said the town school was separated from the township in 1860. The first appearance of the phrase “Marion Independent” in newspaper archives is 1889, when some land was transferred to the district. It pops up a lot in 1895, when a vote in a bordering district was reversed because women participated and a judge said that shouldn’t have been allowed.
In 2022-23, Linn-Mar was the 12th-largest district in Iowa by enrollment and 1.5 times the size it was in 2000-01, due to the city of Marion adding 15,000 people in two decades. Marion Independent was the 52nd-largest district in Iowa by enrollment last year, its size relatively unchanged in the same time span.
Postscript 1: On November 4, 1958, in the southwestern corner of the rural district, clearing began for a newfangled thing called a shopping center, with both a Sears and a Younkers, plus local department store Killian’s. Hello, future Lindale Mall property tax base. Sears and Younkers closed within months of each other in 2018.
Postscript 2: In summer 1958, the Linn County Board of Education issued its suggestion for reorganizing the county into four districts. Broadly described in present-day terms, they were: North Linn plus Central City and Alburnett; Cedar Rapids (minus Palo), Marion, and Linn-Mar; Lisbon, Mount Vernon, and Springville; and College Community (Prairie). Like pretty much every county plan in the state, the public thoroughly ignored it and did what they wanted instead.
Information for this piece comes from Cedar Rapids and Marion newspaper archives via Advantage Preservation.
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