Financial Woes Take Toll on Ambition : Future Farmers Getting Hard to Find at Traditional Iowa High School

Four years ago, most of the 125 students at Radcliffe High School looked forward to running a family farm after graduation. This year’s 85 students dream of getting out of the rural community to do anything but farm.

“When I was young, I wanted to farm because all my relatives were doing it,” said Radcliffe senior Eric Friest, whose parents leased out their land last year and took jobs off the farm. “The way I look at it, there’s no future in it.”

Ona Mae Lettow, one of 12 Radcliffe teachers whose jobs are in jeopardy because of dwindling enrollment, said she surveyed the 20 seniors and found that 17 of them plan to do something other than farm after they finish school in June. The other three said that they may be farmers someday, but only if the agricultural economy improves.

Most still plan to go to college and study liberal arts or business administration, with the hope of finding jobs in cities. They have lived through the economic turmoil that has devastated rural areas in the last four years, and want no part of it.

‘It’s Not Fair’

“It’s not fair that farmers spend their whole lives working and enjoying it, and when they reach middle age, they have to go back and get an education to get a job somewhere else,” said student Angie Coburn, who plans to study liberal arts in college next fall.

“I want a job that if it doesn’t work out, I can have a backup,” she said.

Carol Balvanz, another Radcliffe teacher, said most of this year’s seniors are relying on federal and state grants and student loans to cover their college expenses because their parents have little or no money with which to help them.

She said many of them will attend inexpensive, two-year vocational schools because their families’ land holdings make them ineligible for grants.

A 1986 Radcliffe graduate who asked not to be identified said she was able to attend a private college in northwest Iowa because she had put away some of her part-time earnings in a bank account in another town, and later persuaded the bank to give her a student loan.

She said her family’s hometown banker knew too much about their financial situation and would have denied her a loan.

Crying at School

“About two years ago, the kids were coming to school crying. We don’t have the turmoil anymore. All (the students) want to do is run away from it, which is another form of grief. Anything to do with a small town they want to give up,” said Lettow, who has traveled throughout Hardin County counseling farm children.

She said the financial problems of farm families have changed a longstanding way of life in the community and have triggered problems among rural children that used to be found primarily in the cities.

“One of my kids had an eating disorder, and it was all due to her father’s farming and working a second job at night. He also started drinking, and her mother was working all day. There was nobody home,” Lettow said.

“This kind of thing is not uncommon for kids in a city, but it’s not common for a rural kid,” she said.

Coburn said that her mother drives 120 miles each day to and from Des Moines, where she took a job last year to help support the family farm. “She feels like she has to work to make ends meet, and Dad feels bad that she has to,” Coburn said.

Farmer Holds Two Jobs

Another student, Cara Handeland, said her father still operates the family farm, but he also has taken a job feeding another farmer’s hogs and is working part-time as a mail carrier. Her mother last spring went to work as a clerk at a local convenience store.

Robert Hoksch, director of social work for the Heartland Area Education Agency, which provides support services to school districts in 11 central Iowa counties, said confrontations between farmers and small businessmen and their creditors also have caused friction between students.

“Fights have broken out between the son of the banker and the farmer’s son,” Hoksch said. “And there’s the banker’s son who asked his dad, ‘Why can’t we move to a town where nobody knows where you work?’ There have been incidents like that.”

Hoksch said that rural schools increasingly serve as counseling centers, but many are in danger of closing because of the sharp population declines in their areas.

Rival Teams Combined

Radcliffe High School, where enrollment has dropped from 125 students to 85 in the last four years, will have to give up its own football team next fall and share its football program with arch-rival Hubbard High School, seven miles away.

Balvanz, who may lose the farm she and her husband own just outside of town, said she expects the school to close within the next two years. That would leave her and 15 other teachers without jobs.

“There’s a pretty good chance I’ll be gone,” Balvanz said. “We’ll go to Montana or someplace, I guess.”