Pleasant Valley High School (Iowa) - History

History

The Pleasant Valley Township School District had formed in 1957, and two elementary schools in the tiny school district—Riverview and Pleasant View—were deemed too small to house a high school program. Construction on a $1.36 million junior-senior high school building, on a 40-acre site along Belmont Road at Bettendorf's northeast city limits, began in 1959, and the first day of class was September 12, 1960. The first graduating class was in 1962, with 24 seniors (there was no 1961 graduating class). Richard Klahn was the first principal, and oversaw a teaching staff that was quickly regarded as one of the finest in Iowa. (The first teaching staff had to have master's degrees or were currently working on one.)

"The original Pleasant Valley High School boasted many modern features," a history of the school, published in the 1986 Valenian (the high school yearbook), stated of then state-of-the-art features. "All rooms and coidors were acoustically engineered. Each room had thermostatically controlled heat with an automatically controlled fresh-filtered air supply. Colors (blue, green, gold, olive and chartreuse) were scientifically selected for balanced brightness ration and light reflectance. A two-way public address system in every room provided for paging, announcements, radio and recorded programs. A master time-keeping system automatically corrected all clocks throughout the building. Swanson and Maiwald (the Moline, Illinois-based architectural firm that designed the school) even made provisions in the gym for futre additons of permanent and folding bleachers and for an electronically operated folding partiction to divide the gym area into two practice courts. Also included was a roof-top telescope over the library."

In 1966, the Pleasant Valley School district merged with the LeClaire and Cody school districts, meaning high school students from those districts (they had previously gone to Bettendorf) were now attending Pleasant Valley. Junior-senior high school enrollment shot past 600 (it had been less than half that previously), and a three-phase building program was startred, with additions completed in 1967, 1971 and 1974. Junior high students were moved from the high school building to the new Blackhawk Junior High in LeClaire (now Pleasant Valley Junior High) in 1970. During the mid-1970s, a proposal to renovate and move high school students to Blackhawk Junior High and repurpose the high school building as a junior high, failed. In 1984, the high school, along with the district's other four schools, were honored with the "Excellence in Education" award, in recognition of the district's high academic standards and fine teaching staff.

In 1985, voters passed a $10 million bond proposal to renovate the high school. Highlights included a new gymnasium with seating for 3,000 people, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a new athletic lobby, a library, enlarged auditorium, new administrative offices and other renovations. In addition, the school's facade was changed from a brick to white.