While Iowa considers a proposal to combine smaller school districts into large ones, it should consider the education and life of Ron Olson.

Iowa is gearing up for that time-honored battle in rural communities — the threat of school consolidation. A Des Moines state senator (Matt McCoy) said there are millions of dollars to be saved by shrinking the number of school districts in the state from 362 to 144. McCoy has put his proposal into a bill and the fun started, according to The Des Moines Register's Staci Hupp and Jennifer Jacobs.

"A state legislator says we can't maintain this inefficiency anymore, and I want to know what that inefficiency is since our graduation rates in northwest Iowa are much higher than they are in Des Moines," said Sen. David Johnson, a Republican from Ocheyedan who took to the microphone in the Iowa Senate Tuesday morning. "Our student achievement scores are much higher than they are in Des Moines." The reporters said that education lobbyists are staying out of the school merger fray, but today's tight finances are forcing districts to consider mergers

In the mid-'60s, a state law forced school districts without high schools to merge. The state encouraged mergers but there have been few since the economic downturn of the early 1980s. "People are very reluctant to give up their schools," said Steffen Schmidt, an Iowa State University political science professor. "It means you lose your team, your community identity, everything that makes people happy to pay taxes because it's their school that gets lost."

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told the Daily Yonder's Douglas Burns that community colleges should factor heavily into the mix of federal stimulus money expected to emerge soon from Congress. President Obama has asked that lawmakers have an economic stimulus package on his desk by Feb. 16. The stimulus package is estimated at $850 billion — some of which will be tax cuts.

For his part, Harkin (above), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is using his influence to push for more than $100 billion in stimulus spending on schools — $79 billion for states and school districts, $16 billion for projects at schools that involve “green energy,” $3.5 billion for higher education, and $14 billion for Pell Grants or money to help college students pay for tuition. In all of that he said community colleges should be a priority. “It’s community colleges where workers are often trained for jobs,” Harkin said on a conference call with media.

If Harkin is successful in securing certain funding streams, he estimated that roughly $626 million would flow to Iowa for general education along with $79 million for K-12 school construction. Of the $46 million in higher education stimulus for Iowa, Harkin said about half of that would go to community colleges. Harkin, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, said rural areas should receive stimulus dollars as well. “We will be putting significant amounts of money into agriculture,” Harkin said.