29/04/2026
Yesterday the QCTimes reported that the Davenport school board approved the purchase of the Iron+Grain Coffee shop (former Wells Fargo Bank building) at 1618 N Main to add parking to JBYoung as they bring preschool back to the building. I'd like to add some context to the latest of DCSD's many recent bad decisions. Links to QCTimes articles about various parts of this will be in the comments. I'm going to start with a timeline.
𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟖: Hoover K-3 School closes, and is converted to Children's Village Hoover, a preschool.
𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟑: 3 new classrooms are constructed at Children's Village Hoover.
𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟔: JB Young Jr High closes, is converted to the JBYoung Opportunity Center. This includes a Children's Village preschool along with several community organizations on the first floor, and moving the DCSD admin headquarters to the upper 2 floors. As part of this, the district wanted to pave the entire north side of the building that had been used as an athletic field for the Junior High. The Hilltop Campus Village helped rightly convince the district that they didn't need that much parking, and they compromised by including a well-landscaped greenspace in addition to some new parking. As seen in the included photos, at no time as this parking been fully used.
𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟗-𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒: The district moved the Children's Village preschool at JBY to the nearby Madison Elementary School. The playground on the north side of JBY was removed, and most of the fenced playground on the south side of JBY was converted to additional parking. Again, satellite map images show the parking lot never full.
𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 The school board voted to move the Madison preschool back to JBYoung, move all of the preschool from Hoover to JBYoung, and spend $5.8M to renovate JBYoung to accommodate this. Even the normally rubber-stamp school board questioned this amount, because the first floor had been fairly recently used for preschool, daycare, and other early childhood offerings. Also mentioned around this time was was additional parking being needed. I'm not sure what the plan is for the Hoover building.
𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟐𝟖, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔 The QCTimes reports that the school approved the purchase of additional property for $300k to add parking and reconfigure the pickup-dropoff arrangement for the addition (re-addition) of preschool children to the building. This despite there being 40+ empty parking spaces documented that same day. (See photo)
So even though there are 2 dropoff-capable areas, and considerable spare parking, DCSD needs more. Even if you figure taking back the south lot for outdoor play, and moving those 20 cars into the other lots, and adding 20 preschool teachers, there is still already enough parking. Very few preschool students drive themselves to school and require parking, after all. If, say, there are going to be 30 preschool teachers, 10+ more spaces could be easily added in the area between Iron+Grain and the play area. This is just deja vu to 2016 when DCSD wanted to add tons of parking, and were correctly shown that they didn't need that much. Looking at these maps clearly shows a massive amount of concrete already for the size of the building, but DCSD can never have enough parking. Their need to demolish historic military buildings on Brady Street for parking will get its own post at some point.
The entire timeline just points to what we've seen from the District over the last decade or two, which is constantly shuffling students around and changing things with no progress in slowing Davenport's declining enrollment. In 5 more years they'll probably want to spend $25M to tear down Hoover and build a new preschool on that site to move them back out of JBYoung. I wish 10% of the effort people put into FOIAs and lawsuits towards the City of Davenport was directed towards the Davenport schools. It seems like no one is paying attention, which allows them to do stuff like say they need to close Smart Junior High in 2018 because of declining enrollment, and then a few years later say that they need to spend $54 million demolishing it to build a brand new Smart. Or move 6th graders back to the Elementary schools in 2020, and then BACK to the Middle schools in 2024. They are flailing around, constantly changing things for the sake of change, getting terrible results, and somehow the school board just keeps getting reelected.
