CLAYBORN, IA — The 47 members of Clayborn County High School’s Class of 2025 will cross the stage Friday evening at American Legion Post 114, after the high school gymnasium’s central air unit gave out during Tuesday’s processional rehearsal at a temperature that maintenance superintendent Dale Vorhees described as “the kind of hot that makes a folding chair feel personal.”
Principal Janelle Aud made the call Wednesday morning, after the gym registered 94 degrees by 10 a.m. and the unit — a 1998 Trane the district has been “monitoring” for nine years — produced a sound recorded in the emergency report as “a long sigh, then nothing.”
“We considered the parking lot,” Aud said, “but the asphalt is 116 degrees and Mrs. Peterson reminded us that two of our seniors wear corrective footwear. The Legion was generous, and the Legion was air-conditioned, and at this point those are the only two qualities I am screening for.”
The Legion’s main hall seats 138, which has forced the district to cap each graduate at two adult guests — a limit Brittany Hollencamp’s mother is currently appealing to the school board on the grounds that her ex-husband and his new wife both expect to be in photographs and cannot, under any circumstances, be in the same photograph. Graduates will process past the bar, the coin-op pool table, and a backlit Hamm’s sign that Post Commander Wendell Britt has agreed to “try to unplug, no promises.”
Mrs. Peterson, who has attended every Clayborn County High graduation since 1981, said the Legion had “real character” and that she had last been inside in 1994 for a wedding reception that she said “did not take.” Senior class president Tyler Boemecke, reached at the Casey’s where he was buying ice for the ceremony, said the venue itself was fine but he had concerns about the lectern. “There’s a stuffed walleye over my head,” Tyler said. “I have to give a speech under a fish.”
Salutatorian Maddie Voll has reportedly cut a passage from her remarks that began “In this gymnasium, where so many of us first…” and replaced it with a shorter passage that does not. Voll declined to share the new opening but confirmed it makes no reference to either the gymnasium or the walleye, which she said she had been advised against acknowledging.
The Friday evening start time, pushed back from 2 p.m., is itself a concession to the heat dome that has parked over the eastern half of the state and which the National Weather Service in Davenport has been describing in increasingly resigned language. Forecaster Lyle Kremke on Thursday called the pattern “persistent,” “stubborn,” and finally, in the 5 p.m. update, “just kind of how it is now.”
Vorhees, the maintenance superintendent, said the Trane could likely be repaired by August, in time for the start of the next school year, and added that the district was already “deep into conversations” about a long-term replacement, the most serious of which, as of Thursday afternoon, involved a ceiling fan.