A group that’s been planning to open a public charter school in the small western Iowa town of Crescent is still looking for a site.
The Iowa Board of Education originally granted a charter to the “Red Barn Schoolhouse” group, to start offering kindergarten through third grade classes this fall. This summer the board agreed to provide the group a one year extension. During a briefing for the board this afternoon, Sharon Oamek, a board member of the Red Barn Schoolhouse, said promising negotiations on a three-and-a-half-acre property in Crescent stalled when the owner died and his heirs set the sale price at $700,000.
“There is an existing building that we were hoping that we could use as an interim facility,” Oamek said, “but they want $700,000 and we don’t think it’s worth that given we have to still build a school.”
The group’s preferred option would be to buy the Crescent Elementary School that was closed two years ago by the Council Bluffs School District. “We still don’t feel like the Council Bluffs School District is willing to sell that building,” Oamek said, “but it has 4.5 acres with it and we want to exhaust the resource because it would be the most cost effective option and people in the area definitely would like to secure that school again.”
Their other alternative would be to spend $65,000 buying a site near the Crescent City Park that’s currently an alfalfa field alongside a wooded area that’s been left alone for 50 years. “We have just been hanging on to try to find out what the Council Bluffs School District elects to do,” Oamek said. “Our goal is to have a final purchase by October 1.”
The group’s construction plans indicate it will take a year and a half to build a new school on the open field. Oamek told the Iowa Board of Education the Red Barn Schoolhouse Charter School board hopes to sign a lease so they can start classes in January at the Hitchcock Nature Center, which is five miles north of Crescent. In 2023, there were fewer than 70 students in kindergarten through 5th grade when the Council Bluffs School District closed the Crescent Elementary school.