Center of Social Life Lost : Closing Schools Spell Sad Day for Small Iowa Towns

Little towns like this are supposed to be quiet, but lately it’s been too quiet. It’s the same kind of queasy silence that grips harried parents when the kids stop making that awful racket in the next room.

LaVonne Kraft first noticed it a few months ago, when the teen-agers quit cruising Main Street in their souped-up Trans Ams on the way to and from school.

Teammates on the Boone Valley Bobcats used to gather after football practice at Jan Thompson’s Crossroads Inn over on Highway 17 to munch fries, drink Cokes, play video games and listen to the Top 40 on KKEZ, out of Fort Dodge. But not this year. And the basketball hoop that Rich Sawyer, the local grocer, put in behind his house for some of the boys to use after school now sits idle and rusting.

Plagued by plunging enrollment and mounting costs, tiny Renwick closed its junior high and high schools this fall and shipped the kids 20 miles down the road to Humboldt for classes.

Sometime in February (the exact date is still to be set), the town plans a referendum on whether to shut down the rest of the school system, dissolve the school board and parcel the remaining pupils out to five surrounding school districts.

There is little doubt that the issue will pass, but people here say it will be the most significant and emotionally wrenching vote they have ever cast, one that far eclipses in importance the presidential preference caucuses that will also take place in February.

“Presidents come and go,” said Bob Oppedahl, a corn farmer who doubles as mayor of Renwick, “but school reorganization is forever.”

Some of those presidential candidates, particularly the Republicans, brag that federal supports have put an end to the farm crisis that devastated rural communities throughout America’s heartland. But if the worst is over, many small towns have suffered economic and social wounds from which they probably will never recover fully.

Renwick, about 90 miles north of Des Moines, is already a shadow of what it was a decade ago. Population has dwindled from 480 in the 1970 census to about 350 today. The hardware store, the creamery, the cheese factory and the full-service bank all have shut their doors in the last few years.

Not long ago, Michelle Thompson closed her hair salon in the back of the plumbing shop. And Jim Nelson, the realtor, said 28 of the 128 homes in town are on the market and virtually all the rest would be up for sale too, if the owners thought they could get more than a fraction of what they originally paid.

Town’s Heart and Soul

As in many a farm community, the public school was the heart and soul of Renwick, the center of social life and community spirit for adults as well as children. The residents fear that its passing will only hasten the town’s decline.

“Piece by piece, the town is going,” the Rev. Palmer Wold, pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, said sadly.

Bustling was never a word to describe Renwick, but thriving once seemed to fit it just fine. When Wes Carlson was school superintendent 25 years ago, the town had a bank, five grocery stores, two hardware stores, two cafes, Ford and Chevrolet dealers, a drugstore, two doctors, a dentist--even a movie theater.

The Boone Valley School District, which took in several surrounding communities, had about 425 pupils back then, so many that in 1963, it added a wing to the old red-brick schoolhouse built in 1916. Last year, before the secondary schools were closed, there were 109 students in all.

“They just ran out of kids over there,” Carlson said. “That’s a pretty essential ingredient if you want to have a school.”

Carlson left in 1964 and eventually took over the much larger school system of Humboldt, the county seat, where enrollment also has shrunk, from more than 2,000 students to fewer than 1,300. He returned to Renwick as part-time superintendent this fall, when the Boone Valley school board, anticipating its own demise, chose to rent administrative services from Humboldt rather than fill a vacancy in the superintendent’s office.

Renwick’s plight is by no means unique, in Iowa or the Midwest. More than half of the 956 towns in Iowa have fewer than 500 people, and only 52 now have more than 5,000. Ken Stone, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University in Ames, said that most of the communities in the state sprang up late in the last century to support the farms around them. Now they find themselves withering not only in size, but in purpose.

“As people became more mobile, small towns lost their reason for being,” Stone said.

The economic crisis that plunged many farmers and their families into bankruptcy and pushed them off the land only accelerated the process. So, in a town like Renwick, the only supermarket left is Sawyer’s, and his sales have fallen by more than half in recent years as customers flock to the new, much larger Hy-Vee chain store in Humboldt.

The movie theater is long gone, replaced by television or the four-screen theater in Fort Dodge, 35 miles to the south. Only one of the three full-service gasoline and farm fuel stations operating just a few years ago is still around. The car dealers are gone too, except for some service work Renwick Ford still does in its garage.

The one thing that was constant, the glue that seemed to keep the community together and give it identity, was the school. “Everything in Renwick was centered around the schools,” said Everett Kraft, LaVonne Kraft’s husband and the father of two teen-age boys now going to Humboldt. “You could have two or three nights a week taken up by school activities--band or sports or parents’ programs.”

Almost everybody in town, not just the parents, was in the stands to root for the Bobcats at Friday night football games in the fall and at varsity basketball contests on Tuesdays and Fridays in the winter. Late September saw the homecoming parade, with floats and bands (some borrowed from neighboring towns) marching down Main Street. In December, the town turned out for the school Christmas concert.

The turnout was not bad for business, either. Before games, both home and visiting team fans would stop by the Countryside Inn or Charlie’s on Main Street for a hamburger. Afterward, some of the adults would adjourn to The DTs Bar and others would stop off at the W & H Co-op or Mona Hansen’s Block Stop convenience store to fill up on gas and munchies.

Those days are gone for good. “Now you go down Main Street and you don’t see anyone there,” Jan Thompson said. “There just isn’t any business. There aren’t any kids. Those that can drive stay in Humboldt after school. Eventually, you’ll see nothing here.”

Harold Trask, a hog farmer who is chairing the school board’s dissolution commission, is as disappointed as anyone else in town about having to shut the school where he played guard on the basketball team, third base and shortstop in baseball and trombone in the band. But Trask said nostalgia should not blind his neighbors to the fact that the school has just gotten too small to offer the remaining children a top-notch education.

Small Rolls, High Cost

The remaining elementary school has only four full-time teachers, as well as some part-timers and others who split their time among several small schools in the region. Third and fourth grades have been merged, as have the fifth and sixth grades. Still, the district spends $7,300 a year for each student, more than twice the $3,200 statewide average.

“You hear a lot of comments that we’re giving up, but I feel we’re controlling our destinies,” said Trask, whose 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son will be affected by the shutdown. “Sure it bothers me, but the betterment of my kids’ education is more important. . . . We’ve got to deal with it. I’m just looking at reality.”

Oppedahl, the mayor, said that the school closing is bound to ripple through the town’s already limping economy. Some families may decide to move, he said, to be closer to whatever schools the youngsters end up attending.

Ann Hefty, who shut her hardware store in August after losing $35,000 over the last three years, said her son, Fred, plans to leave the house next to hers so that his two young children can be near their school. Already, Mona Hansen, who has four daughters, has left town for Kanawha, 16 miles to the east.

Hansen’s departure cost Sawyer a regular customer at the grocery store but he has lost the business of many who remain in town as well, because they now stock up at the Hy-Vee when they go down to Humboldt to pick up their kids after school. Sawyer, 56, said he figures that he can stay afloat maybe two more years, three tops. “I’m losing about 20% of my business a year,” he said. “I’m going down fast.”

Not everything in town is in a slump. The soybean processing plant recently expanded and added six employees. But that hardly will make up for the 15 people who will lose full-time or part-time paychecks when the school goes under next year. And over at the Lutheran Church, they are building a new wing. That is because Pastor Wold is expecting some of the smaller churches in the countryside to fold soon, and their members to join his house of worship.

Renwick has seen one big growth industry of late--cable television. In a referendum several years ago, the voters overwhelmingly rejected the bid of a cable operator who wanted to wire up the town. On Oct. 6, with the school closed and little else to provide entertainment, a second referendum passed overwhelmingly. Cables already have been hooked up and 80% of the households in town have subscribed.

Meg Odenbrett, the bookkeeper at the grain elevator, said she used to spend her nights watching her three sons play sports or sing in the school chorus or play in the band. Now she watches television beamed in from Atlanta, Chicago and New York.

“The town’s always going to be here, but its just going to fold up at 8 o’clock at night,” Odenbrett declared wistfully. “We all can just go home and watch dirty movies on the cable.”