Mason City schools looking at reducing number of elementary schools

MASON CITY — Declining enrollment and dwindling state financial support means the Mason City Community School District is exploring options on reducing the number of elementary schools and repurposing buildings to better fit the needs of the district.

A tentative plan is to repurpose the Harding Elementary building to serve as a new district office as well as house the alternative learning center and the Pinecrest Center.

Two options would be: dividing kindergarten through fourth grade students into the Jefferson, Hoover, and Roosevelt buildings, with all pre-kindergarten students at Hoover; or to have first through fourth grades attend Jefferson and Roosevelt with Hoover becoming an early childhood learning center for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten.

Superintendent Pat Hamilton says the school district is looking at having to spend nearly $1.2 million for updates to the administration and alternative school buildings, increased costs with Four Oaks moving out of Pinecrest, and that the projected capacity of the four elementaries would be at 64% by the 2029-30 school year.

He says with the repurposing, there will be impacts to staff.   “When you repurpose a facility, close a facility, those kind of things, there’s people, it affects people. That’s the hard part about all this is there are going to be people that are affected. If it wasn’t people, this wouldn’t be hard to do, but there’s people that are affected by it when you do it. We’re going to have some staff that are not going to be retained when we repurpose a building. Some will be through attrition, which we’ve been able to do.”

Hamilton says the school board faces a tough decision in the face of the legislature not approving more funding for school districts. “I want to make it clear for everybody in the room, there’s no perfect option. The perfect option is increased enrollment every year. Even districts that had an increase in enrollment with 0-to-1%, they’re going to struggle next year. It just doesn’t work. You have to find places to reduce costs.”

The Mason City School Board held a work session earlier this week to review the results of a study done about repurposing buildings. You can watch that meeting, see the study, and other materials regarding the proposal via the links below

Watch meeting here

Click here to access a copy of the study as well as other materials related to the proposal