Homelessness and Shelter: Part Two
Read Part One The old Black Hawk Mini Park on the Iowa City pedestrian mall was the distribution point, the place for the drop. It was mid-November and a mild autumn was giving way to winter. About a dozen men milled around waiting to get a bag. There were a lot of sweatshirts, flannel and...
Renovating Lives
The official ribbon cutting was still a few weeks out, but activity swirled around Shelter House Executive Director Chrissi Canganelli on this mid-November morning. We sat at a table in the common area, then made a “walk through” as she enumerated the assets of this new facility on Southgate Avenue. Staff was busy on the...
Roosevelt Part 3: The Shuttering
Despite months of public protest, the Iowa City School Board voted unanimously during their June 9 meeting to close Roosevelt Elementary and build a new school on the west edge of town. But many in the community never accepted the administration’s premise, much less conclusion, if that meant ignoring the “how” and “why” questions behind...
Closing Arguments
Superintendent Lane Plugge’s office on Dubuque Street is in the three-story brick building that used to be Henry Sabin Elementary School. The elementary school closed in 1979. Now it’s the Iowa City Community School District’s administration building, and site of increasingly fractious school board meetings on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. Plugge...
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