School Consolidation: State Pushed for a Single Dadeville, Everton District in 1932

Among the proposals not implemented from the 1932 rural school consolidation studies was a strong recommendation from the state department of education that the Dadeville C-2 and Everton districts be consolidated into one larger district spanning the entire eastern third of Dade County.

“There should be 1 school center in the Eastern part of Dade County. At the present time there are 2 such centers, Everton and Dadeville,” stated the Everton section of the study report. “The population in this section, as has been shown, has decreased rapidly. Everton is less than 7 miles from a first-class high school at Ash Grove, and approximately the same distance from Dadeville.”

The population decline mentioned had indeed been severe — from an all-time high population of 18,125 reported for the county as a whole in the census of 1900, the population had dropped to 11,764 by 1930, with declines of almost 14 percent in 1910, almost 10 percent in 1920, and 17 percent in 1930. This was a trend that was not reversed until 1980, when the population recovered slightly to 7,383 in that year’s census from a 120-year low of 6,850 reported in 1970. The population of Dade County in the 2010 census was 7,883, with the 2018 population estimate sitting at 7,569 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The declining population in eastern Dade County especially was enough to convince the state’s review staff that Dadeville and Everton were too small to maintain consolidated high schools on their own, and proposed that all eastern Dade County schools be consolidated into one district, maintaining grade schools at Dadeville and Everton, and building a new high school somewhere between both communities. An alternative plan was to maintain a grade school at Everton and transport high school students to Ash Grove or Dadeville if it were to maintain its own high school.

“Only 132 children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen inclusive were enumerated in the districts (including Everton) which could be combined with Everton to form an enlarged district. It would, therefore, not be wise to count on a high school enrollment of more than one hundred pupils,” read the state report. “As has been shown, a high school enrollment of one hundred is too small to enable the school to be operated with reasonable economy and efficiency. Everton is located within convenient distance of two other high school centers, Dadeville and Ash Grove. It would be perfectly practical to transport the senior high school students to another high school. The cost would be far less than that of maintaining a high school, and the high school students would have more courses from which to choose than a small high school can offer.”

“The Everton school building is badly in need of remodeling. By building a new high school building somewhere near the junction of highway No. 160 and the farm-to-market road leading north to Dadeville, the cost to each community would be greatly reduced,” continued the state report. “The present Dadeville high school building could be converted into a grade school which would serve the grade pupils of the northern part of the district. The rooms vacated by the Everton high school could be used for the grade children now housed in one-room schools of the southeast section of this county. The distance from Everton to the suggested new high school center would be approximately one-half as great as to either Ash Grove or to Dadeville.

“The Dadeville community would profit by the new center through reduced school costs and improved high school facilities. The principal objection would be that the high school students from Dadeville and further north would have a few miles farther to travel. The additional travel in properly constructed school buses would be no hardship on these high school students.”

The possibility of retaining the Bona school for lower grades in that area was also discussed as a possibility, if enough students could be found to maintain a three-teacher, six-grade school. At the time, the Bona district maintained a two-year, third class high school, and took in a portion of southern Cedar County that is now mostly under Stockton Lake.

“For a number of years Bona has maintained a Job high school which has rendered excellent service; but no one-teacher high school can adequately meet the needs of the children. It may be possible to enlarge the Bona building to accommodate a three-teacher, six-grade elementary school. Whether or not this proposal will be found advisable will depend on the results of a further study, to locate the homes of the children and the possible bus routes and similar detailed information which the survey staff could not secure in the limited time available. If there are not enough children from six to twelve years of age in the Bona territory to justify the maintenance of an elementary school, all of the children should be transported to Dadeville; otherwise, the children in the lower six grades may be kept at Bona and the children in the upper six grades be transported to Dadeville.”

The King school district from Polk County, which also maintained a two-year “Job” high school, was also included in this proposal, but no facilities of that district were to be retained. Also included in this proposal was the Flint Hill common district, on the Dade County side of Cane Hill, which reorganized with the Stockton R-I School District of Cedar County in the early 1950s.

Dadeville C-2 did eventually reorganize with Bona, King, and another Polk County common district (Edgewood) to form Dadeville R-II, but no consolidation with Everton ever occurred, and both the Dadeville R-II and Everton R-III districts have maintained their independence, and their small high schools, to the present day.

As the state predicted, both districts have some of the highest tax rates of any school district in the area — though as long as the communities continue to approve such measures to retain their own local schools, it is still their choice to make.