Riceville to drop wrestling

[matref]

The Ricevville school board is voting tonight to drop their wrestling program in an effort to cut costs. PLEASE drop an email to the school board to help change this decision. The schools phone number is 641-985-2288 if you would like to call the Superintendent. Here is a link to the school board member emails.
This post was edited on 4/16 12:43 PM by matref

Save Riceville Wrestling.

 

[eyecy]

Holy Crap! Riceville won the State Team Title as recently as 1994.

Has Riceville's student enrollment dropped that much? I know they've always been a 1-A school.

 

[se xc1]

72 students listed on the BEDS report for next year's classification. That is pretty low. Yes, too bad with the history they have had, but I am sad to say this is the future. I thought they had been sharing with another school.

 

[Iron Doc]

Is there some reason they can't share with St. Ansgar again?

 

[matref]

It was all set up again to share with STA. They are making more cuts than wrestling. Golf is being cut as well as not filling teaching positions due to retirements, cutting the band teacher to 1/2 time and eliminating a music teacher. I dont understand why when schools need to save money they always start by taking things away from the kids instead of trimming the fat at the top. (Administration) They are just forcing parents to send their kids someplace where they will have the opportunities thus making the schools problem even worse.

 

[Iron Doc]

Losing wrestling programs is depressing.

 

[Herky the Uruk-hai]

Originally posted by Iron Doc:
Losing wrestling programs is depressing.

In this case Doc I think it is the herd losing a weak one. It is not like a healthy size school is cutting. The best possible situation would expose maybe 15 to 20 kids to the sport - while some small schools pull it off it is more likely that programs would suffer and slowly go away.

Always sorry to see it happen but I think the lions are going to get this one.

 

[SPOONER]

Originally posted by matref:
It was all set up again to share with STA. They are making more cuts than wrestling. Golf is being cut as well as not filling teaching positions due to retirements, cutting the band teacher to 1/2 time and eliminating a music teacher. I dont understand why when schools need to save money they always start by taking things away from the kids instead of trimming the fat at the top. (Administration) They are just forcing parents to send their kids someplace where they will have the opportunities thus making the schools problem even worse.

Who is to say they haven't cut considerably on the administration side already? I believe they already share superintendants with another school, for instance.

 

[MitchL]

Riceville is a neighboring school district to where I live. Here is their dilemma as near as I can determine. They have a number of issues that have only gotten worse in recent years. First... they have a very large number of residents in the county that are either Amish or Mennonite. Those kids are all taught in religious private settings. No State aid generated from them. Second... entirely rural district where farms are pretty large(fewer households) and many uninhabited farmsteads. Third... along the Minny border where mergers are nearly impossible and little chance for open enrollment entries. You obviously can't program share with a school in another state. And perhaps of equal importance... a fairly large group of residents that home-school.

It's the "perfect storm" where everything bad has happened at the same time. IMO, the handwriting is on the wall. This school district will not exist within the next five years. Cresco/Osage/St.Ansgar will absorb them in bits and pieces. Some families are already open enrolling out of the district.

As far as wrestling... I believe they had six kids involved in their previous program share with SA. Those kids will still have the chance to wrestle somewhere.

 

[eyecy]

Originally posted by matref:
I dont understand why when schools need to save money they always start by taking things away from the kids instead of trimming the fat at the top. (Administration) They are just forcing parents to send their kids someplace where they will have the opportunities thus making the schools problem even worse.

The only reason that deserves a laugh is because it is the Administration in these school districts (not just Riceville) that are making these decisions. I'm sure they wouldn't propose to decrease their own paychecks.

 

[hawkeyes08]

Good assessment MitchL. I have no idea on the statistics of the other rural, struggling school districts in the state, but the amount of large families that choose to home-school their children around the Riceville district is substantial. It's a continuous cycle from a couple of families over time, and the cycle continues in the newer generations of these families. The Mennonite population appears to only keep growing with little or no contributions to the school district.

How has St. Ansgar's enrollment been doing? Do you think St. Ansgar would ever even entertain the idea of possibly merging with Riceville? Either through dissolvement or a merger, as Mitch pointed to..students could easily open enroll to Cresco/Osage/New Hampton.

 

[Iron Doc]

So where will the Riceville wrestlers be competing next year?

 

[MitchL]

We're getting a bit off topic, but since you asked... SA is holding relatively steady in enrollment. I'm not sure that they would have program shared with Riceville if the head coach hadn't been born and raised in Riceville. I think he did agree as a favor to them. But he's getting pretty close to retiring as coach, imo. Sharing with Riceville didn't help SA at all because they only got a few kids and it bumped them up to 2a.
As far as a total program share... the SA school district is pretty large, geographically. Merging with Riceville creates several challenges. Transportation costs would be astronomical. And in mergers, Riceville would likely want to keep either elementary or middle school facilities. I can't see SA agreeing to that.

Riceville seems screwed to me. Riceville merging with ANYONE likely causes any neighboring school to be bumped up in athletic class. As someone else stated... academics are already suffering with no relief in sight.

 

[MitchL]

Iron Doc: They definitely won't be wrestling with Osage. And I base that on what happened several years ago when Nora Springs was looking for a destination before they merged with Manly.

My guess would be those those kids would have to drive to SA for competition.

 

[augvol]

Sure, the Mennonite families are there--just like they are in Johnson, or Davis, or Lee, or Black Hawk county, too--but their presence has nothing to do with any BEDS count, or state money, or anything else. It's like so many other rural counties throughout the midwest. Unless kids grow up, stay home, and raise their families there--or unless there is a larger nearby town with employment opportunities--rural school districts will just keep shrinking.

Have you talked to anyone who has grown up in, for example, western Nebraska? Those kids out there have ridiculously long bus rides each day just to GET to school. And what few extracurriculars they might be lucky enough to participate in usually involve long rides and overnight stays, simply because it's just too far to come back home when you're done. Can't imagine what they do in some areas of Wyoming or Nevada. Hopefully it doesn't get quite that bad here.

 

[MitchL]

I can't speak to any other area where the Mennonites have established residency, other than those around Riceville in Howard and Mitchell Counties. But I do know this... there is a lot of animosity from their neighbors and what has happened to the price of farmland since they arrived within the last decade and one half. Many, many farm families have left the district, sold their farms to the Mennonites, and moved to Cresco/Osage/Charles City.

And as I said in an earlier post, and this is where Riceville is unique to the other areas you have mentioned. They are bottle-necked by the Minnesota border. There are two Minnesota school districts that border Riceville that would geographically be good partners for consolidation.

But as you say, this is where rural America is trending.

 

[MitchL]

To follow up on a few of my previous posts... there was a segment today on local tv regarding their financial dilemma. A district wide fund drive as an attempt to sustain the school is being launched. One million dollars is the goal! Unless some rich ass old farmer dies and wills his assets to the district, that's a nearly impossible figure to achieve, imo.

I'm moving my prediction of the school district dissolving from five years up to two years. Very unfortunate but inevitable at this juncture.