More facts to consider before closing Hills school

Framed former students' artwork lines the halls of Hills Elementary school; hallway babble quickly quiets as first- and second-graders finish filing in to lunch.

“Jayden, show me how you walk down the hall,” a secretary tells one straggler. “No running.”

Hills is far and away the smallest Iowa City district school, with fewer than 100 K-6 students. And although enrollment is growing elsewhere, Hills keeps getting smaller - a decade ago, twice as many students filled the classrooms.

That's got school board members - rethinking a long-held district preference for smaller, neighborhood elementary schools - talking about closing Hills. They've asked Superintendent Stephen Murley to bring them facts to help them decide.

I collected a few myself on a trip down to Hills on Tuesday. I asked Principal Pat James to describe her school's personality. She thought for a moment, then said: “Community-centered. We're very open and accepting.”

That shows in events like Grandparents' Day, when family members of all kinds join kids at school, and in extra programs like Family and Schools Together, a yearlong course designed to build parent-school relationships and strengthen family skills and bonds.

Among Hills students, 56 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Learning Center and Family Resource Center Director Kris Mowatt told me she's in touch with all the school's families in some way: through free after-school programming or family visits; helping out with school supplies or clothes - even driving some to appointments or the doctor.

Researchers say it can be easier for school staff, students and parents to connect in smaller schools, and that seems to be the case at Hills, where a towheaded preschooler felt free on Tuesday to wander in to James' office to borrow a book.

“You know where they are,” James said, and the boy selected a few to read before toddling back out of the office.

The school's 20 preschoolers nap under homemade quilts. Kids in the free after-school program plant and tend a school garden and volunteer in the community. Multi-age school “families” of students support each other and learn.

James said it's not unusual to see older kids helping younger ones off the bus in the morning.

“It's always been our goal,” James says, “to help our kids grow up to be just awesome citizens.”

A not unusual goal, maybe, but one they're pursuing in a way that's uniquely Hills.

School board members should throw that in with the data when deciding the school's fate.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net