The issue of whether to keep Iola’s schools in their current locations or build a new site north of town has become the source of many arguments. While some believe that keeping neighborhood schools is crucial for the city, others argue appearances are deceiving and that the current schools can not be considered “neighborhood schools.”
Lori Maxwell, principal at McKinley Elementary, said that, in the past, no policy existed on who went to what school. A policy was created to take the guesswork out of enrollment, but problems arose, partly due to the layout of the town and the schools. Maxwell said they try to find a balance between keeping classroom sizes reasonable and not overwhelming teachers, while minimizing the separation of siblings.
“That’s what we’d like to do, but it doesn’t always work out that way,” she said.
McKinley has two sections of grades K-3, Jefferson has two sections of grades K-3 and three sections of grades 4-5, while Lincoln has two sections of grades K-5. Each school is assigned a geographic boundary. Parental requests create overcrowding in one school and under-utilization in another, Maxwell said.
Boundary issues got more complicated after the flood of 2007 destroyed houses in the south end of Iola, causing families to migrate to other parts of the city. Further complications arose with the Cedarbrook addition north of Miller Road. Currently, that part of town is assigned to Jefferson, an issue many families find inconvenient.
“It’s difficult to be the one to make those phone calls to parents who expect to enroll their children in a particular school,” Maxwell said. Maxwell called 16 parents this year to inform them that their child would have to attend a different school other than McKinley. Most parents were understanding, but a few got very upset. Maxwell said she averages a dozen calls a year.
Maxwell’s opinion is that one unified elementary school would solve a lot more logistical problems than it would create.
“It would alleviate the problems we are having with enrollment and allow every teacher to have access to the same resources,” she said.
Some Iolans, however, disagree with that assessment. Randy Rasa is one of a number of Iola residents who have voiced concerns on the Facebook page “Save Iola’s Neighborhood Schools.” Rasa believes the schools’ current locations are key to Iola’s survival as a community.
“I understand that the existing structures are far from perfect, but their current locations are pretty close to ideal,” he said.
One of the reasons Rasa chose to move to Iola earlier this year was because of the schools, he said. Although Rasa doesn not have children, he said schools make a big impact on the overall community and an impression on prospective residents.
“It made a huge impression for us to see people walking on the sidewalks and to see the bike racks full at each school,” Rasa said. “It told us that Iola was an active community, and that’s something we hadn’t seen very much at the other communities we visited.”
Building a new school outside of city limits, where the opportunities to walk or ride bikes to school could be lost, was something Rasa described as “troubling.”
Karla Ingroum, Iola resident, said one of the concerns she had about moving the schools to a new location was what should be done with the vacated buildings. School administrators plan to put the schools up for sale.
“I don’t think it would be a good move,” she said. “The longer a building sits empty, the worse it gets. We need to take care of priorities.”
Ingroum suggested that remodeling the schools might make a better solution, or perhaps even repurposing them into apartment buildings or other kinds of schools, such as vocational schools.
Superintendent Jack Koehn said remodeling the schools to keep students in town would be more expensive than building new, plus there’s also the issue of where to put the students while a school is being remodeled.
“The type of renovations needed could not be done over summer break,” he said. All of Iola’s schools date back to the early 1900s.
While Rasa, Ingroum and others have expressed concerns that eliminating the “neighborhood schools” would destroy local neighborhoods, Koehn said the idea of the “neighborhood school” is a myth, and it’s not just because of the boundary issues schools currently face; most children do not walk or ride bikes to school, but are given rides in the family car.
A survey taken last November at Jefferson found that only 18 percent of students walked or rode bikes to school regularly.
“This survey was not done for the bond issue, but for self-knowledge,” Koehn said.
Brad Crusinbery, principal at Jefferson, said 280 students were enrolled at Jefferson last year, which meant only about 50 of them were walking or riding bikes to class. Crusinbery and Maxwell both noted that a number of students were bussed in from locations outside of Iola, such as Gas and LaHarpe.
Crusinbery added that even though the poll was conducted in November, he was certain that they were clear to students that their answer should reflect what they normally do when the weather is nice. He said they plan to conduct the poll again this year, but he believed the numbers were fairly accurate the first time.
“It’s amazing to me how many people drop their kids off and pick them up, because the car traffic is just terrible,” Crusinbery said.
Koehn agreed that safety was a big issue with so many people already driving their kids to school each day, and providing a new drop-off location from scratch would allow them to design something much safer and more efficient.
Furthermore, Koehn said, it’s important for Iolans to think about the future; the only direction for Iola to grow is north, toward the location of the proposed school. All other areas are either already developed, or in places that would not be advisable, such as the flood plain to the south.
Ingroum did not seem to agree with this sentiment.
“If we could keep kids in Iola, we might have a little more growth,” she said.
School boundary issues raise alarm
