Winding down the two-lane road connecting Hills and Iowa City, a school bus full of elementary school students traveled over seven miles out of town to Alexander Elementary School. 

Behind them, early in the morning on Jan. 13, dust loomed in the air over their former school as construction workers started demolishing Hills Elementary. Loud sounds of breaking glass and falling brick filled quiet Main Street as the only school in the small town became a pile of drywall and insulation. 

The Iowa City Community School District Board of Directors voted unanimously in March 2024 to close Hills Elementary to save over $1 million in budget cuts. The district’s school board cited economic inefficiency as the mainreason for closing Hills. Based on districting, students in Hills began attending Alexander for the 2025-26 school year and are being bused in daily. 

Before the demolition, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department used the empty school to do active shooter or ALICE training. In an email to The Daily Iowan, Iowa City Community School District Director of Community Relations Kristin Pedersen said the district has no current plans for the land now that the building has been razed. 

Hills City Council Member Teresa Volk said the town is interested in buying the land back from the Iowa City school district to build a new fire station, but the district said it’s holding on to the land in case they ever want to build a new school there.

“The city would like to have that land to benefit the community instead of having an empty lot there for who knows how many years,” Volk said. “It’s right at the entrance of our town, so I’m hoping they will keep it mowed and look nice and maybe park-like instead of just the empty lot. [It] makes the town look bad.”

Volk also expressed her frustration with the Iowa City school district’s reason for holding onto the land, since, she said, the district claimed Hills was not a growing community when they decided to close the school.

“In the school board meetings, they were saying Hills is not a growing community, and so that’s why they decided to close it,” she said. “Now they’re saying that’s why they want the land, because Hills is a growing community. Some literally six months later, they changed their mind on what they’re saying. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Another frustration for Hills residents and Volk is the false promise of a total renovation of Hills Elementary before the vote to close it. Volk said several years ago, a bond referendum was passed to improve all schools in the district, and Hills ended up getting no aid or improvements. 

A few years later, people in Hills were encouraged to vote for another bond that would put Hills Elementary first on the list for a new school that they never got. Volk said everyone in Hills is still paying the taxes for the bond even though the school and building are now gone. 

“When the second bond came out and they knew they needed Hills voters to vote for it, that’s when they came out and said, ‘You’re at the top of the list. You’re the first project we’re going to do,’” Volk said. 

However, the loss of the building and the school has not had a dramatic impact on the community. Hills Mayor Tim Kemp said it was no surprise the district would tear the building down after it closed, and the town had no interest in keeping the building.

RELATED: Iowa City school district discusses plans for former Hills Elementary site

“Obviously, losing a school for a community or even a neighborhood is kind of a traumatic thing, but it hasn’t impacted the town,” Kemp said. “There’s not been a mass exodus of people, and I don’t anticipate there will be. [It’s] certainly a nice thing to have a neighborhood school in the community, but we have many other fine things in the community that people want to live here for.”

Kemp said the transition from Hills to Alexander Elementary has also been smooth from what he’s heard. 

“The kids were going to be bused starting in sixth grade to middle school anyway, so now they’re just getting bused a few years earlier,” he said. “[It’s] certainly nice that they all could transition together, so they had their existing friendships and certainly made friendships with students at Alexander since they’ve been there.”

Alexander Elementary Principal Katie Thompson said she and the other faculty have made many efforts to welcome the roughly 100 new students from Hills and help them through the transition. Last spring, before Hills closed, Thompson visited the school to provide kids a familiar face and to get to know her new students. Alexander also hosted a field trip for all the kids at Hills to tour their new school and meet their new classmates and teachers. 

“We really focused on community building this fall and honored a lot of the emotions that were there with this group of students and their families,” Thompson said. “We did some intentional work with our students and our staff this fall to prepare everyone to go back to the roots of a strong community because the reality is that we merged a really strong community with another strong community.”

Thompson also said Alexander has a different theme for every school year, and this school year’s theme is “Ignite Your Excellence,” with the school mascot, Archie the Falcon, holding up a lightning bolt as a nod to the former Hills Lightning Bolts. 

One of the main concerns expressed by Hills families when the district board was voting on closing the school was Hills’ large population of students in the district’s English Language Learners program. However, Thompson said Alexander now has seven ELL teachers — the highest number in the district — and the number of students in the program has increased by 7 percent since last school year.

Another concern for Hills parents was larger class sizes and the much larger building, but Thompson said with the transfer of many teachers and staff from Hills, the school has been able to maintain an average class size of 20 students. 

“It was really important to our Hills families to keep those small, impactful connections with all the students in our school, and I think that we’re still able to obtain that even with the larger number of students,” she said. “We work really hard to create those strong learning communities in each of our individual classrooms.”