Bettendorf needs a new school, spacious classrooms

Opinion: Bettendorf is right to close the oldest school in the district and open a new school with more spacious classrooms to benefit the students. It is inappropriate to make such decisions in secrecy.

Recent actions of the Bettendorf School Board to build a new elementary school and close the oldest school in the district landed on the front page of the Sunday newspaper.
Bettendorf has decided to move about 200 students, for four months, to the Ross College building on Kimberly Road. This is until the new Mark Twain Elementary School is built, according to a report in the March 3 Quad-City Times. The story explains that the school board came to its decisions in some secrecy, avoiding public input.
(Full disclosure: The newspaper is my former employer. That career ended a year ago so I'll offer opinions from a certain vantage point.)
To start, our daughter is an elementary school teacher in Ankeny, Iowa. She's in one of the oldest buildings in that fast-growing district in the central part of the state. Last summer, I helped her set up her classroom before a group of some 25 second-grade students began school.
This is a four section school, with four classes at each grade level. There was plenty of room in this Ankeny classroom for all the desks, backpacks, as well as various areas to read books and meet in small groups.
Secondly, I covered education for many years at the daily newspaper, and that involved in-depth reporting. In 2017 I spent several hours in a classroom at charming Jefferson Elementary School near downtown Bettendorf, writing a story on the "first day of school." That assignment required a close assessment of the classroom size. The children were squished in, with little space available, for, say, group activities.
The Bettendorf classroom was much more crowded than in Ankeny. Jefferson is the oldest in the Bettendorf district, and it is a school with much character as well as a dedicated teaching staff.
The district will close Jefferson and combine the student population with the Mark Twain Elementary. A new school is being built on the Mark Twain grounds. The district completed a similar project at Grant Wood Elementary School, but it did not involve closing a school.
Building a new school is the right course to take.
Unfortunately, the board has been unnecessarily secretive about the process, and parents are understandably quite upset. This could have been prevented or mitigated with a more open process as district leaders made the case for the new school.
The pace of progress continues, whatever our hearts say. The children in the Bettendorf district will be well served by a new, more spacious school, with lots of space for learning.