Hills Elementary School may close

IOWA CITY - Iowa City school officials will explore whether the district's smallest school, Hills Elementary, should be closed.

School board members this week asked Superintendent Stephen Murley to collect information to help them determine the viability of the school. There is no timetable for making a decision, but board members want to act sooner than later.

“We want to be deliberate, and we want to deliberate quickly,” school board member Mike Cooper said.

The school is in the small town of Hills, home to an estimated 760 people about 10 miles south of Iowa City. The school was built in 1965.

Hills Elementary has just 98 students in kindergarten through sixth grade this school year, down from a general education enrollment of 231 a decade ago. The average enrollment of the district's 19 elementary schools is 347. Hills has half as many students as the next smallest school. (See related chart.)

Those numbers have led people to speculate on the future of the school, including Hills Mayor Russ Bailey.

“Obviously, a school in your community is a valuable asset. There's no doubt about it,” he said. “So I would fight to keep the school.”

He expressed some level of resignation given the school's shrinking number of students, saying, “The enrollment really speaks for itself.”

The school board and administrators faced a storm of criticism two years ago when the decision was made to close Roosevelt Elementary School in Iowa City, which will occur in one and a half years.

Roosevelt, however, is being replaced with a new school a few miles away. Simply closing a building would be different for the Iowa City school district, which has opened four new schools since 2005 and has more than 30 portable classrooms to deal with rapid overall enrollment growth.

"That's an anomalous situation and … it's kind of a head-scratcher,” Murley said of possibly closing Hills Elementary.

The decision to close Roosevelt was made because the school was in need of major repairs and school officials determined it would be more cost-effective to open a new building.

With Hills Elementary, administrators will collect data on things like staffing and operational costs per student for all the district's schools.

Cooper cautioned that same information could show another small school, like Twain or Shimek, is not as efficient as other buildings.

Board member Gayle Klouda said the difference is that the other schools could have their boundaries redrawn to boost enrollment. Hills is separated from the other communities the school district serves: Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty and University Heights.

With Hills, “changing boundaries means taking kids and busing them a great distance,” Klouda said.

Board members promised to be open in their discussions and involve the community, something some people said the district did not do in the Roosevelt debate. They understand that any talk about closing Hills Elementary likely will generate controversy.

“It's very difficult to talk about closing” a school, board member Toni Cilek said.