(Radio Iowa) – 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. Sharon Oamek, a board member of the Red Barn Schoolhouse, says 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-thousand dollars.

Oamek says their preferred option would be to buy the Crescent Elementary School that was closed two years ago by the Council Bluffs School District.

Their other alternative would be to spend 65-thousand dollars 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.

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.