Monday, March 8, 1938 – the county schoolhouse

Ash Wednesday had been March 2, just before my father's diary began, but the family went to mass every day that week before school.

The diary entry for March 8, following "went to mass":   

The two Heble children, Bernard and Billie, start to school. They and us were the only ones in school.

First, the correct spelling is Hebl, and that family lived on the north-south gravel road that ran along the west edge of the school.The road, now named Hebl Avenue SW, runs south to the landfill. The Hebls had 10 children.

That one-room country school was officially West Lucas No. 1 and unofficially the "Hebl School." Helen M. Cole was the primary schoolteacher who taught at the West Lucas Township country schoolhouse during the late 1930s. It was under the jurisdiction of the Johnson County Superintendent of Schools. The system of township schools eventually ended in the 1950s when West Lucas No. 1 was included in the Iowa City Community School District. 

The Iowa School Law of 1858 mandated and structured public education throughout the state. The goal was for these one-room schoolhouses to be about two miles apart, putting them within walking distance for children living on farms.

Cole was an Iowa City resident and student at the University of Iowa, and it was common for rural schoolteachers obtaining their teaching certificates from the university's education program to take such positions as they began their careers. 

As the teacher, Miss Cole was responsible not only for the daily curriculum (reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography) but also for maintaining the schoolhouse woodstove, organizing the annual Christmas pageant, and prepping the older students for the mandatory county-wide 8th-grade examinations held in Iowa City.

Frank J. Snider served as the Johnson County Superintendent of Schools from 1937-1964. He initially managed over 60 independent, local rural school districts and oversaw the professional certification of teachers.

He led the major legislative shift toward school district consolidation in the 1950s, drastically reducing the number of small country schools to form larger, more resource-rich community school systems. In 1959, he established Johnson County's first daily special education classes for children. Believing public school settings should accommodate everyone, he urged the County Board to transition a former one-room country schoolhouse, the Blackstrap School, into a dedicated daily classroom.

The Blackstrap School (also called Black Strap) was located near Highway 218 just south of the Iowa City airport.

Final thought: Miss Cole must have needed to be extremely flexible with her approach to each day as she seemed to regularly welcome then-11 year old Dorothy and my father for lessons. But the Hebls and several others from nearby farms might show up or might not. I assume many farm children were pressed into needed farm work. Dad mostly referred to others in school by their first names. He never mentioned questioning how many were in school on a particular day, but he did often "take attendance" in his diary entries. 

There were never more than eight in school. 

The school was permanently closed at the end of the 1962–1963 school year due to mandatory statewide school consolidation. In the fall of 1963, students from West Lucas No. 1 and other nearby rural country schools were absorbed into the newly constructed Lucas Elementary School in Iowa City, which was named in honor of Iowa's first territorial governor, Robert Lucas.

Our daughters Lesley and Sara attended Lucas in the 1980s and were able to walk there from our home. Buses would have been required to get West Lucas township students to the school (though later Irving Weber Elementary opened, which was much closer... but not walking distance).